Set in stone

• Stone circles are found on every continent. In Britain, most date from between about 3,000bc and 2,000bc. However, at Gobekli Tepe, in Anatolia, Turkey, there are circles built in about 9,000bc, making them more than twice as old as the pyramids

• Stonehenge began its life as a circular ditch and bank (known as a henge), dug in about 2,900bc. The first stones arrived in about 2,400bc and the site was rearranged several times over the next several hundred years

• Avebury (above right and right), Wiltshire, is the largest stone circle in the world, with a diameter of more than 1,000ft

• Stone circles are often close to burial sites. Half a mile from The Hurlers, a trio of circles on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, said to be the remains of men caught playing hurling on a Sunday, 19th-century treasure hunters excavated a barrow containing the Bronze Age gold Rillaton Cup. The cup, which is now on display in the British Museum, found its way into the royal household where, legend has it, it was used to store the collar studs of George V

• A popular attraction since the Victorian era, about 1.6 million people flock to Stonehenge (below left) in a normal year. The novelist Henry James was so moved by his visit that he wrote: ‘There is something in Stonehenge almost reassuring; and if you are disposed to feel that life is rather a superficial matter, and that we soon get to the bottom of things, the immemorial gray pillars may serve to remind you of the enormous background of time’

• Not all stone circles are quite what they seem. In 2018, archaeologists were alerted to the presence of an undiscovered, ancient stone circle on farmland in Leochel-cushnie in Aberdeenshire. They thought they had a major discovery on their hands—until the farm’s former owner confessed he had built the circle as a folly in the 1990s