When the author Thomas Hardy was writing Tess of the D’Urbervilles in 1891, he chose to set the novel’s dramatic conclusion at Stonehenge, where Tess sleeps on one of the stones the night before she is arrested for murder.
What the author did not know, as he wrote in the study of his home, Max Gate in Dorchester, was that he was sitting right in the heart of a large henge-like enclosure that was even older than the famous monument on Salisbury Plain.
Though invisible at ground level after millennia of ploughing, the enclosure still survives under Hardy’s garden. It has now been given protection by the government as a scheduled monument, recognising its status as a nationally important site.
Hardy had known nothing of the Dorset site’s significance when he began building a house of his own design in Dorchester, although the discovery of Roman and iron age burials during construction led him to think it was an ancient burial ground. He did find a large sarsen, however, which he called a “druid stone” and re-erected in his garden, recognising that the site also had a Neolithic past.
It was only when excavations were carried out in the 1980s, before the construction of a road next to the house, that archaeologists discovered what else was under the soil: a large circular Neolithic enclosure, or “proto-henge”, almost 100 metres in diameter, that was built in about 3,000BC, or about the same time as the circular earth bank that today surrounds Stonehenge’s stone circles, the earliest phase of the monument.
Almost half of the enclosure, known as Flagstones, was destroyed by the road scheme but the remainder is preserved in the grounds of Max Gate, now owned by the National Trust.
A second dig in 2022 found evidence of activity from 500 years or more before that, making this one of the oldest sites in south-west England.
“What came out of that [excavation] was that this was a really, really significant archaeological site,” said Martin Papworth, the National Trust archaeologist who led the project.
With similar sites in the area having the legal protection offered by scheduling, it was clear that what remained of Flagstones ought to have the same protection, he said.
“We wanted to have that designation so the National Trust in future wouldn’t build a car park on it,” Papworth said. “Not that they would, but you never know how things would change through time.”
Finding antler pick-marks made by the enclosure’s original builders 5,000 years ago had given him an “electric charge”, he said, while the Hardy connection made the site even more resonant.
“It’s that link this story has between Hardy and his fascination with the past and time, and me stuck in a trench, in this [monument] he didn’t know about, underneath his drive in front of his front door,” Papworth said.
Jill Guthrie, a listing adviser for Historic England, said: “Some people might ask why we’re scheduling something that we’ve only got half of, but it really is such a rare type of monument, particularly from the Neolithic period. There are only a dozen similar sites of similar dates that have been identified in the rest of Britain.”
She said scheduling would “preserve and protect the buried archaeology for the benefit of current and future generations, and that’s the important thing”.
• The headline of this article was amended on 24 September 2024. An earlier version suggested incorrectly that the enclosure had just been discovered.
