The Mystery Hole At Stonehenge Nobody Can Explain

Less than a mile from Stonehenge there is a shallow dip in the grass, nine metres across and a third of a metre deep, that sat catalogued as an ordinary pond barrow for two centuries in the most studied archaeological landscape on Earth. In nineteen sixty somebody finally dug into it expecting a burial and found a shaft going a hundred feet straight down through solid chalk. In this one I go through what that took. Antler picks and a bronze axe, the marks still readable on the walls, the shaft cut in short controlled sections checked against a template and verified with a plumb line so it would not drift off vertical. Every basket of chalk hauled the height of a ten storey building through a tube six feet wide. And nobody knows how they got up and down, because no ladder, no footholds and no rope anchors survived. At the bottom, below the water table, the anaerobic conditions preserved things Salisbury Plain almost never preserves. Wooden vessels, rope with the twist still visible, seeds, leaves, insects, pollen. Then the part I find most interesting. The two archaeologists who spent three years excavating it walked away with irreconcilable readings. Ashbee said it was a well. Proudfoot said it was a ritual shaft reaching for the underworld. Sixty years on it is still unresolved. And in twenty twenty, remote sensing found twenty more shafts nearby, each ten metres wide, forming a circle over a mile across around Durrington Walls, sitting undetected in ground people have walked over for centuries
#archaeology #history