Could the Avebury, Woodhenge, and Stonehenge sites be part of a larger complex known as the Wiltshire Oval? The Belgian historian Marcel Mestdagh believed that one vital aspect of the Stonehenge-Avebury complex had been overlooked: a perfectly curved road that connects the two sites. A quick glance on a map will indeed reveal that the monuments are connected by sections of the A360 and A361 roads. East of Stonehenge, this curved road continues (under the designation of the A303) and begins to form the outline of an oval. The map also shows that we have almost half of an oval, made up of various roads, from Avebury curving southwards towards Stonehenge, then eastwards, right to the outskirts of Andover. Mestdagh next drew a completed oval on the map. The sites located on this oval were Devizes, Potterne, West Lavington, Tilshead, Shrewton, Rollestone, Amesbury, Thruxton, Weyhill, Vernham, Axford and Beckhampton, and of course, Stonehenge and Avebury. Were these roads built on top of an older construction, like a giant henge, which would later make them ideally suited for road construction?

When the oval was completed on the map, Avebury and Stonehenge weren’t just anywhere on this circle. One could form a perfect triangle, each side measuring 27.5 km long, with the point where the longest axis of the oval cut the oval itself. This site of this point was the tiny village of Little Down, where three counties (Wiltshire, Berkshire and Hampshire) all met. Coincidence, or evidence of the prior presence of something, just like with the road connecting Stonehenge and Avebury? A more detailed analysis of this oval revealed that two-thirds of this oval was still intact, and existed in the form of roads. When Mestdagh measured the oval, he came to the surprisingly realization that its dimensions seemed to be in correspondence with the dimensions that Plato had given about a civilization that he had described as Atlantis. In his ‘Timaeus’, Plato gave detailed descriptions of Atlantis. A correct reading of these, specifically the plain of Atlantis, reveals that whatever Plato was intending, the dimensions of this plain were an elongated square, each side measuring 3000 stadia (533 km). Mestdagh realized that this elongated square inscribed an oval, with axes of 475 and 591 kilometers long. In the final analysis, it was clear that both Atlantis and the Wiltshire Oval were… ovals, and that both Atlantis’ dimensions and the Wiltshire Oval translated into round measurements in stadia. Is this merely a coincidence or evidence that there was a connection between this oval and the lost civilization of Atlantis? One observation that has escaped most is that Plato describes Atlantis’ capital as a series of concentric circles. Can it truly be coincidence that Woodhenge is a series of concentric circles, located inside a large Oval, which shares dimensional characteristics with Atlantis?

It would be dangerous to extrapolate too much from a few unfinished lines in one author’s treatise of a lost civilization. We do not know all that much about Avebury, Woodhenge, and Stonehenge. What we do know is that all three monuments seemed to have been sites of burial and ancestor worship. We know that they were located in a very prosperous hub of Neolithic Britain, a true civilization. Can we suggest that when the plans for this new center were drawn, that somehow, its designers had access to the same information Plato consulted and that they built the Wiltshire Oval based on Atlantis? Most archaeologists adhere to isolationist stances but it is a fact that Stonehenge and Avebury were built at a time when Britain was influenced by European cultures. Could these cultures have introduced the concept of a lost civilization, which the budding Wiltshire economy then incorporated into its building plans?