Archaeologists find ancient clues that may unlock a major Stonehenge mystery

A pair of ancient post holes near Bulford, 5 kilometres from Stonehenge, appear to line up with the midsummer sunrise around 2,950 BC. Were people in the Stonehenge landscape marking the summer solstice long before the monument’s famous stones were raised?

Archaeologist Phil Harding standing before the towering stones of Stonehenge under a cloudy sky, with one of the monument’s iconic megaliths rising behind him.

Published: June 18, 2026 at 12:00 AM

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The annual solstices were so important to ancient Britons that they intentionally arranged some of the enormous stones at Stonehenge to align with the rising midsummer sun – and its winter equivalent. But the famous megalithic monument might not have been the earliest solstice-aligned structure in the area.

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At a site near Bulford, 5 kilometres to the east of Stonehenge, archaeologists have found evidence of a precursor to Stonehenge’s famous solstice alignment: a simpler monument that may have served a similar purpose at least 450 years before the famous sarsen stones were raised.

“We’re talking a very precise alignment pointing at the sun, and it dates to about 2,950 BC,” says Matt Leivers at Wessex Archaeology, a UK company that provides archaeological and heritage services. “We don't have definite evidence of an alignment like that at Stonehenge until the massive sarsen stones were put in place, maybe about 2,500 BC.”

That distinction is important, because Stonehenge wasn’t built all at once. Its earliest earthwork enclosure predates the famous stone circle – erected centuries later – meaning the site’s history began long before the monument took on the form most visitors recognise today.

The discovery of the new site, which will be detailed in a forthcoming article in PAST, the newsletter of the Prehistoric Society, hints that we may need to revise the early history of Stonehenge.

A landscape crowded with ancient monuments

Stonehenge is just one of a number of ancient monuments scattered across Salisbury Plain and adjacent areas of southwest England. In the 1980s, two zones within this landscape – each more than 2,000 hectares in size – were collectively designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in recognition of this rich archaeology.

Bulford sits on the edge of the World Heritage Site, so when the UK’s Ministry of Defence announced plans to build accommodation and facilities there, they brought in a team from Wessex Archaeology to analyse the site ahead of the construction work.

“We already knew that there was archaeology there from aerial photographs,” says Leivers. “We had a reasonable supposition that some of it might be of the same age as Stonehenge, but until we actually got in and broke the ground, we didn't know precisely what age it would be.”

A site used for more than a thousand years

The resulting excavation revealed a rich history of activity at the site, says Phil Harding, also at Wessex Archaeology. “There’s an early Neolithic phase dating to about 3,400 BC, phases of late Neolithic activity at about 2,950 BC and about 2,500 BC, and there’s also a Bronze Age phase, which dates to about 1,900 BC.”

Artist’s reconstruction of Stonehenge during its earliest phase, showing crowds gathered around a circular earthwork enclosure with a broad chalk bank and ditch in the Wiltshire landscape.

A reconstruction of Stonehenge during its first phase of construction, around 3000 BC, when the monument consisted of a circular ditch and bank rather than the famous stone settings seen today. Built by Neolithic communities using simple tools and immense collective labour, Stonehenge reflects a wider prehistoric tradition of monument building in Britain, where ceremonial landscapes, burial sites and gathering places were created centuries before the rise of written history. (Photo by Getty Images)

It is the archaeology dating to 2,950 BC that most excites the researchers. “It’s precisely contemporary with the first phase of construction at Stonehenge,” says Leivers. That initial activity involved the construction of the henge itself – a circular enclosure roughly 100 metres in diameter surrounded by a bank and ditch.

“The people at Bulford, they are probably the builders of that first phase of Stonehenge,” says Leivers. “It's only five kilometres away.” But archaeologists know surprisingly little about those builders because almost none of the pottery and other material culture they used in their daily lives survives in the archaeological record. The archaeology at the Bulford site has helped plug this gap.

Clues about Stonehenge’s elusive builders

The team from Wessex Archaeology found about 50 ancient pits at the site, each about 50 centimetres deep and 60 centimetres wide, some of which were crammed with animal bones, flint tools and fragments of ancient pottery. “The contents of those pits would have been enough to get really excited about because they represent probably the largest collection of material of that date from southern England,” says Harding. “We really don't have a great deal of other material evidence of the sort of pots that they were making from that period. It’s telling us about the communities, the people who built Stonehenge.”

But two of the pits seemed to have served a different purpose.

They were about twice as wide as the other pits, and had an unusual cone-like shape, tapering down into the ground. They contained none of the ancient pottery or other refuse seen in the other pits. But they did contain plenty of chalk rubble, which is a type of infill often found in pits that once held large, vertical wooden posts.

“We are talking here about posts that were probably 50 centimetres in diameter and probably two to three, maybe even four metres high,” says Harding.

Archaeologists Phil Harding and Dr Matt Leivers standing among the stones of Stonehenge, with the monument’s massive megaliths visible behind them beneath a cloudy sky.

Archaeologists Phil Harding and Dr Matt Leivers at Stonehenge, the iconic Neolithic monument whose origins are still being explored. The pair contributed to research identifying a possible precursor to Stonehenge’s famous solar alignment at a site around 5 kilometres away, suggesting that the astronomical ideas embodied in the monument may have developed over generations as part of a wider ceremonial landscape across prehistoric Wiltshire. (Photo by Wessex Archaeology)

A line pointing to midsummer sunrise

Harding was intrigued by the fact that there were just two of these tall posts at the Bulford site, separated by a distance of about 120 metres. He marked both points on a map of the site and joined them with a line. “I compared that to the solstitial alignment with Stonehenge, and of course they were pretty much parallel,” he says. “Then I got excited.”

The archaeologists sought advice from astronomer and archaeologist Fabio Silva at the Skyscape Academy, a UK-based educational platform. The solstice shifts position slightly over a timescale of thousands of years, so they asked Silva to calculate exactly where on the horizon the sun rose on the summer solstice at the time the posts were in place at Bulford. This confirmed that the two wooden posts were indeed aligned with the rising sun. “He told us: if you were to look along the left side of the posts, it would be pretty much bang on,” says Harding.

The researchers then realised that a small cluster of the refuse pits also lay roughly on the same line as the two large post holes. In one of these, they found a rare circular – or discoidal – flint knife. “It is an amazing piece of flint working,” says Harding. Only a few hundred of these discoidal knives have ever been found in the British Isles. “You have to believe that this is something a bit special, and when you know it’s pretty much on the sightline with the solstice then you begin to theorise,” says Harding. “Is it a representation of the sun disc?”

An earlier solstice tradition at Stonehenge?

Collectively, the discoveries suggest that the culture of people who built Stonehenge were marking the precise location of the summer solstice centuries earlier than we had thought, and long before any of the iconic stones at Stonehenge were put in place.

The Bulford discovery would be less persuasive if it stood alone. But it fits a broader pattern of Neolithic communities across Britain and Ireland paying close attention to the annual movement of the sun.

Artist’s reconstruction of a prehistoric gathering at Bulford, showing crowds, tents and livestock assembled around two standing stones aligned with the midsummer sunrise across the rolling Wiltshire landscape.

A reconstruction of a summer solstice ceremony at Bulford, a newly identified prehistoric site around 5 kilometres from Stonehenge. Archaeological evidence suggests the site once featured two megaliths aligned with the midsummer sunrise, predating Stonehenge itself. The discovery raises the possibility that the famous monument’s solar orientation emerged from a longer local tradition of ritual gatherings and astronomical observation stretching back centuries before the first stones were raised on Salisbury Plain. (Credit: Marijane Porter, Wessex Archaeology)

We know that ancient Britons across the British Isles had begun to build enclosures roughly aligned with the solstice even as early as 3,800 BC. “You may have an entrance of a building that faces the sunrise,” says Leivers, as an example. But between about 3,200BC and 3,000 BC, ancient Britons modified this tradition, beginning to build monuments that were perfectly aligned with the rising solstice sun.

For instance, Newgrange, a spectacular passage grave in the east of Ireland that was built around 3,200 BC, is precisely aligned with the winter solstice. On that day, light from the rising sun briefly shines directly down the passageway and into the grave’s inner chamber. “They developed an interest in actually marking the solstice with precision,” says Leivers. The finds at Bulford suggest this same interest occurred in the Stonehenge landscape on Salisbury Plain at the same time.

How strong is the evidence?

There have been other claims of early structures in the Stonehenge landscape that have a solstitial alignment, says archaeologist Vincent Gaffney at the University of Bradford in the UK. About 15 years ago, Gaffney took part in an ambitious project to survey the landscape around Stonehenge using ground-penetrating radar and other non-invasive tools. The work revealed two enormous pits at either end of the Stonehenge cursus, a 3,000-metre-long rectangular enclosure that lies a few hundred metres to the north of Stonehenge and that was constructed around 3,500 BC. “We suggested they might have solstitial linkages, but we couldn’t prove it,” says Gaffney. “The critical point is they've got dates. We haven't got dates for the pits at the cursus because there’s not been an excavation.”

That being said, Gaffney points out that the claim of a solstitial alignment at the Burford site is made weaker by the limited evidence. “It is to a certain extent two points, and two points do make a line,” he says. Any two features can be connected geometrically; the challenge is showing that the line was intentional rather than coincidental. “That doesn’t mean it’s not significant, but proof of that is difficult.”

Why the Stonehenge landscape drew people together

It’s still unclear why ancient Britons developed an interest in marking the solstice so precisely between 3,200 and 3,000 BC. But Leivers thinks it’s less of a mystery why the Stonehenge landscape was among the places they chose to do so. Recent research in the area has suggested that the landscape there has been open and unwooded for millennia.

“The pollen evidence that we have now suggests that it was mostly turfed, with stands of trees here and there,” he says. “If you have a religion that focuses mainly on the sun, then being able to see it over a long distance is very attractive.”

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It’s also clear now that it was appealing enough to attract people from across the British Isles, including those living hundreds of kilometres away. Again, this makes sense in the context of the local environment, says Harding. “You have what I call a wheel where Salisbury Plain is the central hub and then the spokes are these chalk hills – the South Downs, the North Downs, the Chilterns, the Dorset Down – that all funnel in,” he says. “They're great natural ridgeways for communicating and they all come in to the Salisbury Plain.”

Authors

Colin BarrasFreelance journalist

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