article for April 9, 2020
Article of the day for April 9, 2020 is Fir Clump Stone Circle . Fir Clump Stone Circle was an ancient monument in Burderop Wood near Wroughton in the south-western English county of Wiltshire. It was one of at least seven stone circles known to have been built in northern Wiltshire south of Swindon, but none of them remain. The ring was part of a tradition of stone circle construction that spread throughout much of Britain, Ireland and Brittany during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, between 3300 and 900 BCE. The purpose of such monuments is unknown, although archaeologists speculate that the stones represented supernatural entities. Around the 1860s, the megaliths in Fir Clump Stone Circle were levelled, but some of them were rediscovered in 1965 by the archaeologist Richard Reiss, who described and measured the monument. In 1969, these stones were removed during construction of the M4 motorway.