As scorching weather stretches from weeks to months across much of the northern hemisphere, further ghosts are emanating from the land. A previously unknown henge has been revealed in Boyne Valley, in the Brú na Bóinne UNESCO world heritage site, in Ireland's County Meath. Stretching 200m in diameter, 750m from the famous Newgrange monument, drought-like conditions have been parching the earth to uncover deeper, moister grooves and rivulets beneath.

The henge is thought to date from the late Neolithic period, up to possibly the Bronze Age, from about 3,000 BCE. Anthony Murphy, a journalist and researcher responsible for Mythical Ireland, a blog about Ireland's ancient megalithic sites, is responsible for the new find, which is being hailed as a completely new and very significant discovery by archaeologists.

Last week, Murphy and fellow archaeological researcher Ken Williams flew a DJI Phantom Three Professional drone out over sites in the area to see if the hot weather might have revealed features in the landscape that hadn't been seen for a long time.


And they didn't expect to stumble upon anything of this enormity. Initially, doubting himself, Murphy thought "maybe a circus tent had been pitched down there or that farm machinery had driven round in a circle". But within moments, he could then see that there were two outer concentric rings of dots, which he now believe are rings of postholes. "I knew fairly quickly that this was something fairly substantial. I shouted out, 'What the hell is this?'," he recalls.

Murphy and Williams knew that no archeological site had ever been recorded in the field and realised quickly that the discovery of the henge was significant.

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"You probably will not see cropmarks as well-defined as that in a generation," says Stephen Davis, a professor of archaeology at University College Dublin. The new site is part of a cluster of henges and passage tombs in the Boyne Valley – working with with LiDAR scanning, Davis has roughly doubled the number of known monuments since 2010.


The landscape is known for passage tombs (like Newgrange, or Dowth, where a tomb has just been discovered) which were built from about 3,600 until 3,100 BCE during the middle Neolithic period.

The henge would have been made out of timber with two concentric circles, which would possibly have been 'linteled' with horizontal supports as well. "This is a time period where they're building particularly in timber and earth, as opposed to stone which went before," Davis says.

"We have this bizarre broken ditch, which we don't really necessarily understand yet and that's the most unusual thing about it," Davis says. This ditch is causewayed, broken into lots of little bits, forming a "permeable boundary" meaning it's not a form of defense. Although there are discernible entries and exits, you could in theory enter the structure at any point. "It makes it much more like a symbolic enclosure, rather than a real enclosure."


This all points to the idea that the structure was used for ritual ceremonies that involved feasting, gathering and trading together. There is, Davis explains, lots of evidence of feasting on animals at Durrington Walls within the Stonehenge landscape in England, and these sorts of sites are sometimes referred to as passing enclosures – places people congregate at during the changing of the seasons.

"The discovery means we have the highest concentration of late neolithic henges anywhere in the world," Murphy says. He believes there may be some astronomical alignment to unearth - at nearby Dowth Hall, alignment towards the summer solstice sunrise has been discerned.

"I'm still struggling to take it in – the enormity of it," says Murphy. "It's almost overwhelming. I'm delighted to have been involved in the discovery of it, I'm really excited about the research into and seeing how this story progresses from here."