There's great variation in the kinds of locations that these monuments have placed him. And I would argue that the circularity is something to do with that, and that may be a shift in the religious beliefs. In other locations, the place is clearly positioned so as to be extremely conspicuous, so that the monument is to be seen. But you can turn that round and say that there are other monuments that are located to have commanding views of the coast or of rivers or of hills or of mountains. Other places, again, it's clear that they've been positioned so asto fall on natural routeways, so that you're going to encounter them as you move around the landscape. That suggests
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss megaliths - huge stones placed in the landscape, often visually striking and highly prominent.
Such stone monuments in Britain and Ireland mostly date from the Neolithic period, and the most ancient are up to 6,000 years old. In recent decades, scientific advances have enabled archaeologists to learn a large amount about megalithic structures and the people who built them, but much about these stones remains unknown and mysterious.
With
Vicki Cummings
Professor of Neolithic Archaeology at the University of Central Lancashire
Julian Thomas
Professor of Archaeology at the University of Manchester
and
Susan Greaney
Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Exeter.