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How weather conditions helped confirm Stonehenge was once a complete circle

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For a long time, archaeologists have suspected that the huge Neolithic stones of Stonehenge once formed a complete circle. Now, due to an unusually hot and dry summer, the mystery of Stonehenge appears to have been solved.

Although typically the site is kept watered, the dry summer of 2014, and a garden hose that wouldn’t quite reach, revealed several ghostly outlines in the parched grass where the huge stone megaliths once lay. Archaeological remnants which have been buried in the ground for extended periods are known to affect the rate of grass that grows above them, even long after they’ve been removed. In the aerial photos above, you can clearly see the outlines in the grass where the stones once stood.

Worker Tim Daw described how the discovery was made:

“I was standing on the public path looking at the grass near the stones and thinking that we needed to find a longer hosepipe to get the parched patches to green up. A sudden light-bulb moment in my head, and I remembered that the marks were where archaeologists had looked without success for signs that there had been stone holes.”

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