Qualla: Stonehenge Cursus

Stonehenge Cursus: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Benutzer:Yak, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1723 the antiquary William Stukeley walked across Salisbury Plain, looked at two parallel earthen banks running for nearly two miles, and decided he was looking at a Roman chariot racing track. He named it cursus, the Latin word for racecourse. He was wrong. The Stonehenge Cursus has nothing to do with Romans or racing. It is a Neolithic earthwork at least six centuries older than the first phase of Stonehenge itself, and after nearly three hundred years of archaeology no one is still entirely sure what it was for.

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Image: Benutzer:Yak | CC BY-SA 3.0

Stonehenge Cursus: Older than the stones

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graham Horn, CC BY-SA 2.0. Excavations in 2007 by the Stonehenge Riverside Project recovered a red deer antler pick from the bottom of the western terminal ditch. Radiocarbon dating of the antler placed the construction of the cursus between 3630 and 3375 BCE. The earliest phase of Stonehenge, the ditched ...

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Image: Graham Horn | CC BY-SA 2.0

Stonehenge Cursus: What was it for

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Psychostevouk (talk), Public domain. Like every cursus in Britain, the Stonehenge Cursus has a function archaeologists can only guess at. The most popular theories are ceremonial. The structure runs across a dry chalk valley known as Stonehenge Bottom, which may have flowed as a winterbourne stream during the Neolit...

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Image: Psychostevouk (talk) | Public domain

Stonehenge Cursus: Stukeley's racecourse

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashley Columbus, CC BY-SA 3.0. When Stukeley first recorded the cursus, the early antiquarian movement was just beginning to grapple with what prehistoric Britain had actually contained. The default explanation for any large old structure was Roman, because Roman remains were the only ancient buildings most ed...

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Image: Ashley Columbus | CC BY-SA 3.0

Stonehenge Cursus: Barrows along the ridge

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. South of the western end of the Stonehenge Cursus runs a ridge crowned by the Cursus Barrows Group, a Bronze Age round barrow cemetery extending 1,200 metres east to west. It comprises the barrows recorded as Amesbury 43 to 56 and Winterbourne Stoke 28 to 30, plus a hengiform mon...

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Image: David Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0