Solstice-aligned 5,000-year-old monument ‘once in a lifetime find’, say archaeologists

A 5,000-year-old monument that was aligned with the summer and winter solstices and may have served as a prototype for the later solar alignment at Stonehenge has been discovered close to the famous neolithic site, in what archaeologists have described as a “once in a lifetime” find. The structure at Bulford, 5km (3 miles) from the world heritage site in Wiltshire, has been carbon dated to around 3000BC, the same time as the earliest phase of construction at Stonehenge and 500 years before its huge trilithon stones were carefully placed to line up with the midsummer and midwinter sun. It is the earliest solstice-aligned structure in the Wiltshire landscape and one of the very first in Britain, according to experts. The archaeologist Phil Harding, who led the dig on behalf of Wessex Archaeology before the construction of new Ministry of Defence housing, said the discovery was “one of the greatest finds of my career”. Harding nearly didn’t spot it at all, however. Unlike Stonehenge, whose immense solstice-aligned sarsen boulders are still standing 4,500 years later, the Bulford monument consisted of two wooden poles 120 metres apart, which had left only two large post pits in the ground surrounded by a jumble of smaller rubbish pits. Harding, a former presenter on Channel 4’s Time Team, said at first, he and his colleagues had not recognised their discovery. …