The largest settlement of Neolithic Britain, inside the chalk ring of Durrington Walls, with its timber circles and avenue to the river Avon; and, down the river, the stone circle of Stonehenge with its own avenue: the land of the living and the land of the dead.
No one wrote down the rules of a Neolithic landscape; they are read from what the builders left. Around 2500 BC, while the sarsens of Stonehenge were being raised, several hundred small square houses stood at Durrington Walls, three kilometres to the north-east, beside the river Avon. Their floors were strewn with the bones of pigs killed at midwinter feasts. Here too stood great circles of timber posts: the Southern Circle, whose avenue of rammed flint runs down to the river, and, just outside, Woodhenge. Soon after, the whole settlement was enclosed by a vast henge: a chalk bank with its ditch inside, nearly half a kilometre across.
The two monuments mirror each other. Timber decays and stone endures; the Southern Circle faces the midwinter sunrise and Stonehenge the midwinter sunset; each has an avenue running to the Avon. One reading, Mike Parker Pearson’s, is that the living gathered at Durrington and carried their dead down the river and up the Stonehenge Avenue to the stones. Around Stonehenge, over the next centuries, the ridges filled with round barrows; to the north lies the Cursus, a long banked enclosure a thousand years older still.
The map shortens the distances: Stonehenge really lies about 3 km south-west of Durrington, and its avenue about 2.8 km long. The house positions are illustrative (only a handful have been excavated), and the heights of the timber posts are conjectural. Click a building for its rule and its evidence.