Where or why the first stone circle was built is unknown. At one time, because of the scraps of pottery discovered in rather unrepresentative circles like Avebury and Stonehenge, it was believed that all the megalithic rings had been constructed by Beaker people during the Bronze Age, but the evidence was incomplete. Many of the largest and most imposing circles were the work of native farming communities of the third millennium BC at a time in the neolithic or new stone age long before Beaker people entered the British Isles.

Stone circles were enclosures and their inspiration may have come from the the large round mounds covering bodies that already stood in the eastern parts of Britian. Some of them concealed huge circular ditches or rings of stones or posts surrounding a mortuary house where the dead wer laid. Before they were finally covered with a round barrow or a cairn these sacred rings resembled both the later henges with their earthen banks and the stone circles, and if they were shrines, in the modern sense of the word, rather than tombs, then in their open air state they could provide an origin for the spacious ceremonial circles of the late neolithic and early bronze age.

Next Issue, Paul Cook take a look at Victorian Farming Methods.