Ever wondered what Britain looked like thousands of years ago? Well, if you know where to look, there are sites up and down the country where things haven’t changed as much as you might think.
Ancient peoples have left their mark on our landscape in some pretty unexpected ways. While Roman roads and Iron Age hill forts seem fairly explicable, other interventions seem out and out bizarre.
Why did the ancients lug 50-ton stones across the countryside and stand them in a circle in what seems like the middle of nowhere? Did they really have nothing better to do than carve a 100-metre long horse into a chalk hillside? And isn’t it rather strange to bury the dead together with an entire ship and whole load of valuables?
"It’s tempting to wonder," asks Dr Nick Snashall, archaeologist for Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site, "whether the communities who created and used the monuments here were engaged in some monumental game of Top Trumps."
And as well as the "why," spare a thought for the "how" question, too: "It would be a feat of organisation and engineering," explains Snashall, "to put these things in place with 21st century earth-moving equipment, but the people who built these monuments were subsistence farmers."
SEE ALSO:
And these are but a few of the countless mysteries that await modern-day time travellers exploring Britain’s ancient past. Indeed, as you drive through the countryside to the monuments included in the selection below, consider whether you are in fact travelling along the route of an ancient trackway or Roman road – for prehistoric folk also knew a thing or two about how to get from A to B.