Wessex Guided Tours

The Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project is an unprecedented initiative to survey a vast tract of land around the iconic stones. Now that the bulk of the practical work is complete, Carly Hilts spoke to Vince Gaffney and Chris Gaffney to find out more.

An ambitious programme of geophysical survey, covering 12 square kilometres around Stonehenge, has revealed a landscape scattered with previously-unknown features. Credit: All images courtesy of the University of Birmingham and LBI ArchPro

Stonehenge could confidently claim to be one of the most-studied, and certainly most hotly debated, prehistoric sites in Britain. However, much of the local landscape, so important to any interpretation or understanding of the site, was largely terra incognita – until the launch of The Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, the largest geophysical mapping survey of its kind yet undertaken.

Begun in July 2010, and headed by the University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for…