Durrington Walls

A Field Where Thousands Feasted

Drive north from Stonehenge on the A345, turn right at the roundabout, and within two minutes you will be standing at the edge of the largest henge enclosure in Britain. You will see a field. A large, unremarkable, gently sloping field, bordered by a road, a housing estate for military families, and the back gardens of Durrington village. A low grassy bank curves through the landscape. There is a small car park. There is a sign.

This is Durrington Walls — and beneath this unassuming field lies the settlement of the people who built Stonehenge.

The henge enclosure here measures approximately 500 metres across, with a circumference of roughly 1.6 kilometres. The enclosed area — nearly 12 hectares — is large enough to contain the entire stone circle of Avebury with room to spare. The ditch and bank that define it were dug around 2500 BCE and would originally have been vast: the ditch up to 5.5 metres deep and 7 metres wide, the external bank standing several metres high. Today, millennia of ploughing and erosion have reduced them to gentle undulations. You must look carefully to see the henge at all.

But what happened inside this enclosure — and what has been found beneath its turf in the last two decades — has transformed our understanding of Stonehenge, of Neolithic Britain, and of the people who raised the great stones on Salisbury Plain.

The Stonehenge Riverside Project

Between 2004 and 2009, a team led by Professor Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield (later University College London) conducted one of the most significant archaeological research programmes in British history: the Stonehenge Riverside Project.

Parker Pearson's hypothesis was bold. He proposed that Stonehenge could not be understood in isolation — that it was part of a connected landscape in which monuments of stone (Stonehenge) and monuments of timber (Durrington Walls) were linked by the River Avon in a grand cosmological scheme. Stone represented permanence, the ancestors, the dead. Timber represented impermanence, the living, the present. The river connected the two realms.

To test this theory, the team excavated at Durrington Walls — and what they found exceeded expectations.

The Neolithic Houses

Beneath the ploughsoil inside the henge, the team uncovered the remains of substantial Neolithic houses. These were not flimsy shelters or temporary camps. They were real dwellings: rectangular or sub-rectangular in plan, approximately 5 metres square, with central hearths, clay floors, chalk plaster walls, and furniture slots cut into the floor — grooves that once held wooden bed frames or storage units.

The houses were built from timber, with walls of wattle and daub (woven sticks plastered with clay). They had clearly defined entrances. Some showed evidence of repeated floor resurfacing, suggesting sustained occupation. The excavators estimated that the settlement may have contained hundreds of such houses at its peak, spread across the interior of the henge and beyond.

The Midwinter Feast

The most remarkable discovery at Durrington Walls was not the houses themselves but what was found in and around them: an extraordinary quantity of animal bones.

The excavations recovered tens of thousands of pig and cattle bone fragments. Analysis revealed a striking pattern. The pigs had been slaughtered at approximately nine months old — and since pigs in Neolithic Britain were typically born in spring, a nine-month-old pig would be killed in midwinter, around the time of the winter solstice.

The cattle bones showed a similar pattern: many animals had been driven to the site from far afield (isotopic analysis of their teeth revealed origins across Britain, from Wales to Scotland to the West Country), suggesting that communities from a wide region converged on Durrington Walls for large-scale midwinter feasting.

The scale of the feasting was enormous. The archaeologists estimated that the bone assemblage represented hundreds or thousands of individual animals, slaughtered and consumed over a relatively short period each year. These were not daily meals. These were events — communal gatherings at the darkest time of the year, accompanied by feasting, ritual, and almost certainly the construction work that was raising Stonehenge on the plain 3 kilometres to the southwest.

"The amount of food consumed at Durrington Walls is extraordinary. This was feasting on an industrial scale — thousands of people, gathering from across Britain, eating together at midwinter." — Mike Parker Pearson

The Domain of the Living

Parker Pearson's central argument — developed across years of fieldwork and refined in his 2012 book Stonehenge: Exploring the Greatest Stone Age Mystery — proposes that the Stonehenge landscape was organised around a fundamental duality:

• Durrington Walls was the domain of the living: a place of timber, feasting, gathering, warmth, noise, and community. The houses, the hearths, the vast quantities of food — all point to a settlement that was intensely, vividly alive.

• Stonehenge was the domain of the dead: a place of stone, permanence, silence, and ancestral presence. The cremated remains of at least 63 individuals were deposited in and around the Aubrey Holes. Stone endures; timber decays. The dead endure; the living pass.

The River Avon connected the two domains. A paved avenue led from the settlement at Durrington Walls south to the river. From there, the water flowed southwest and then north, passing close to the point where Stonehenge's own ceremonial avenue met the river at West Amesbury. Parker Pearson proposed that the journey from Durrington to Stonehenge — from life to death, from timber to stone — was made by water, following the river's course.

This is not merely an archaeological hypothesis. It is a story about how Neolithic people understood the world: as a landscape of complementary opposites, connected by flowing water, traversed by the living in honour of the dead.

The Durrington Avenue

The Stonehenge Riverside Project also excavated a paved avenue leading from the settlement area south toward the River Avon. This avenue — surfaced with compacted flint nodules — was approximately 30 metres wide and descended the slope to the riverbank. It is the Durrington equivalent of Stonehenge's own Avenue, and it reinforces the idea of a processional connection between the two sites via the water.

The Southern Circle

Within the Durrington Walls enclosure stood a massive timber circle known as the Southern Circle. Excavated first by Geoffrey Wainwright in 1966–1968 (during construction of the road that now runs through the site) and further investigated by the Riverside Project, the Southern Circle consisted of concentric rings of timber posts — the largest ring approximately 38 metres in diameter, with individual posts estimated to have stood 5–7 metres tall.

The Southern Circle was the timber equivalent of a stone circle. It was a gathering place, a ceremonial centre, a focal point for the community that lived at Durrington Walls. The postholes were enormous — some over a metre in diameter — indicating timbers of extraordinary size, probably entire oak trunks.

At the centre of the Southern Circle, the excavators found evidence of a large hearth or burning area, surrounded by deposits of Grooved Ware pottery, animal bone, and flint tools. This central space may have been the heart of the settlement's ritual life — the place where fire burned, food was shared, and the community gathered at midwinter.

Woodhenge

Immediately to the south of Durrington Walls, separated by the modern road, stands Woodhenge — a related but distinct timber monument.

Discovered by aerial photography in 1925 (the cropmarks of the postholes were visible from the air), Woodhenge was excavated by Maud Cunnington in 1926–1928. She found six concentric oval rings of postholes — 168 in total — enclosed within a ditch and bank. The outermost ring is approximately 44 metres in diameter.

Like The Sanctuary on Overton Hill, Woodhenge's postholes are now marked by concrete pillars. The site is small, stark, and exposed. But it holds one of the most unsettling discoveries in British prehistory.

At the centre of the concentric rings, Cunnington found the skeleton of a three-year-old child. The skull had been split — cleft by a heavy blow before burial. The child was placed with their head toward the southeast. Whether this represents sacrifice, dedicatory burial, or some other practice unknown to us, the image is stark: a child's death at the heart of a ceremonial monument.

The Shaft Ring: The 2020 Discovery

In 2020, a team of archaeologists led by Vincent Gaffney of the University of Bradford announced a discovery that stunned the archaeological world.

Using remote sensing and geophysical survey, the team identified a ring of at least 20 massive shafts encircling Durrington Walls. Each shaft measured approximately 10 metres in diameter and 5 metres deep — enormous pits, deliberately cut into the chalk subsoil. They were arranged in a rough circle with a radius of approximately 2 kilometres, centred on Durrington Walls.

The shaft ring is the largest prehistoric structure ever discovered in Britain. Its circumference is approximately 12 kilometres. The shafts appear to date to the Late Neolithic period, roughly contemporary with the henge itself.

The purpose of the shafts is unknown. They may have served as a boundary marker — a monumental demarcation of sacred space around the Durrington Walls complex. They may have held water, creating a ring of ritual pools. They may have had cosmological significance — a circle of darkness cut into the white chalk.

Whatever their purpose, the shaft ring demonstrates that the Durrington Walls complex was even larger and more significant than previously understood. This was not a minor settlement. This was the ceremonial heart of Neolithic southern Britain.

What You See Today

Let us be straightforward: Durrington Walls is not a visually dramatic site. Unlike Stonehenge (3 km to the southwest) or Avebury (35 km to the north), there are no standing stones, no dramatic earthworks visible to the casual eye, and no visitor centre.

What you see is:

• A large, open field sloping gently toward the southeast.
• A low, curving bank — the remains of the henge enclosure — visible mainly in low, raking light or when the grass is mown short.
• Woodhenge, immediately to the south across the road — concrete posts marking the postholes of the timber monument.
• The surrounding landscape of Salisbury Plain — rolling chalk downland, military training areas, and scattered clusters of Bronze Age barrows on the skyline.

The modern road (the A345/Countess Road) cuts directly through the henge enclosure, and much of the northern portion lies beneath the housing estate. The archaeology is almost entirely underground. This is a site that demands imagination — and rewards knowledge.

Visiting Durrington Walls

Getting There

Durrington Walls is located 3.2 km northeast of Stonehenge, on the northern edge of Durrington village.

• By car: From Stonehenge, head north on the A345 toward Amesbury. At the Countess Roundabout, take the exit toward Durrington/Larkhill. Woodhenge and Durrington Walls are on your right within 1 km.
• On foot from Stonehenge: The Greater Stonehenge Circuit walking route (9.7 km) passes through Durrington Walls and Woodhenge. This is the best way to understand the landscape connection between the two sites.

Practical Information

What to Look For

1. At Woodhenge: Walk among the concrete post markers. Note the concentric oval pattern. Stand at the centre — near where the child was buried — and look toward the northeast. The monument's long axis points toward the midsummer sunrise.

1. At Durrington Walls: Walk along the surviving henge bank (best seen in the southeastern section, where it curves through the field). Try to picture the scale of the enclosure — 500 metres across, large enough to hold several modern football pitches. The Southern Circle stood approximately in the centre of the enclosure, now beneath the ploughed surface.

1. The landscape connection: Look southwest toward Stonehenge. On a clear day, you can see the stone circle on the horizon, 3 kilometres away. Between you and the stones lies the valley of the River Avon — the water that connected the domain of the living to the domain of the dead.

The People Who Built Stonehenge

Durrington Walls matters because it is a place where people lived. Not gods, not mythical giants, not the inscrutable architects of popular imagination — but people. They built houses with hearths. They cooked meals. They ate enormous quantities of pork and beef. They made pottery. They chipped flint. They raised children.

And then they walked 3 kilometres across the plain and raised the largest, most precisely engineered stone monument in prehistoric Europe.

We do not know their names. We do not know their language. We do not know what they called themselves, or what they called the great stone circle they were building. But at Durrington Walls, we can stand in the places where they stood. We can see the hearths where they warmed themselves at midwinter, in the darkest days of the year, before walking out into the cold to move another 25-tonne sarsen stone into position.

That is what this field contains. Not stones. Not monuments. Something rarer and more valuable: the ordinary, daily, astonishing lives of the people who built Stonehenge.

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