Archaeologists working for Wessex Archaeology uncovered a 5,000-year-old monument at Bulford, 5km from stonehenge in Wiltshire. The site, dug before new Ministry of Defence housing, turned out to be aligned with the summer and winter solstices.
Phil Harding, who led the excavation, called it "one of the greatest finds of my career" after recognizing the alignment from the site plan. Later analysis by Fabio Silva showed the two wooden poles once standing there lined up very accurately with the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset in 2950BC.
Bulford and Stonehenge
The monument was carbon dated to around 3000BC, placing it in the same broad period as the earliest phase of construction at Stonehenge. Harding said, "The thing that struck me as soon as I saw that was that [the line was] about 50 degrees off the direct north, which was pretty much the line of the midsummer sunrise. And so I got really, really excited about that."
The Bulford site is now described as the earliest solstice-aligned structure in the Wiltshire landscape and one of the very first in Britain. Unlike Stonehenge, it survived only as two large post pits and smaller rubbish pits in the ground, leaving archaeologists to reconstruct its shape from the marks it left behind.
Wessex Archaeology excavation
The two wooden poles were set 120 metres apart, with post pits 1 metre deep. The team believe the poles stood 3-4 metres high. A smaller pit aligned with the poles contained a rare disc-shaped flint knife that archaeologists say may have been shaped to represent the sun.
Matt Leivers, senior research manager at Wessex Archaeology, said, "What we’re seeing here is the religion of the stone age made manifest in the ground." He added that "it gives us an indication that this is religion" and that people were marking "substantial events" across the Stonehenge landscape over millennia.
Stonehenge landscape
Leivers said it is "inconceivable" that those commemorating the solstices at Bulford would have been unaware of those at Stonehenge. The find links a smaller monument to the wider ceremonial landscape around the famous site, and it gives archaeologists a rare glimpse of how solar alignment may have developed there long before the later stone circle took its final shape.
The next stage is in the interpretation itself: the excavation has already exposed the monument’s footprint, and the surviving pits, knife and alignment now carry the burden of explaining how early communities marked the sun in the Wiltshire landscape.
