Podcast | Stonehenge and the Older Circle

Stonehenge, where I am standing this Saturday morning, is the answer to a question I have been carrying since May 2021 - and it has taken me five years and three thousand kilometres to carry the question back to these stones. I want to say something at the outset that will only be fully earned by the end: I feel Ukraine’s presence here. Not as metaphor. As ancestry, as language, as the later courses of this very monument. By the close of this piece I intend to have shown you exactly where to look for her.

The coach parks are already filling. Jackdaws are working the wind above the lintels. Several hundred people are filing along the rope walkway, photographing the most famous stone circle on earth, and nearly every one of them - I have been listening - is doing so in a daughter language of a mother tongue first spoken on the steppe of what is now Ukraine. They do not know that. Most of them also do not know that when the great sarsens in front of us were being raised, a stone circle beside the Dnipro river had already been buried, deliberately, under a mound of earth, for something like a thousand years.

I have touched that older circle. This post is about who built it, who buried it, and why the answer runs in a single thread through three monuments: Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, Tara in County Meath, and the cromlech at Novooleksandrivka, fourteen kilometres south of Dnipro. What I have noticed - and it is a pattern I keep testing, not a verdict I am handing down - is that all three circles were raised by Old Europeans; that the people who buried the third one were, in the most literal genetic sense, their own descendants; and that the burying itself may have been the wisest thing anyone ever did for it. The wisest people I met in Ukraine thought so. We will get to them.

Let me take you to the Dnipro first.

The Uncovered Circle

In May 2021 a five-thousand-year-old burial mound was torn apart by housing developers in Novooleksandrivka, a wealthy suburban hromada south of Dnipro, Ukraine’s third city. News of the vandalism found a global audience - it made the front page of the New York Times, and Ukraine’s chief mound guardian told that paper: “It’s genocidal. Erasing our culture like that.” Residents blocked a road in protest.

After the kurgan - as such mounds are known in Ukraine; Mane, as I have come to call them, for reasons that will surface below - was removed, a much older stone circle was, unexpectedly, discovered underneath. Five thousand years