It is mid-evening on July 14, 2450BC, and the piglets are starting to sizzle nicely over the cooking fires. Hundreds of people are gathered near a small chalk cliff above the River Avon in what is now Wiltshire.

All around, feasts are being prepared. Fires glow in huts and hearths across the valley. Then men and women gather on the ceremonial street running from the river towards the great wooden henge with its giant posts. As the crucial moment comes, they all turn and face the west.

It is the summer solstice and they gaze down the avenue, 300ft long, as the sun sets in perfect alignment, its dying rays sparkling off the flint surface. This year the sun sets on the valley at 8.23pm.

Below the sun, in a natural amphitheatre, sits the centrepiece of their settlement, a forest of more than 160 wooden pillars with a semi-circle of shrines to the gods arrayed around it.

As the sky darkens, the crowd move to the nearby houses, tucked behind neat wooden fences, for a pork feast in honour of the solstice.

The celebration marks the end of a day that began 17 hours earlier when these Stone Age Britons gathered in the centre of a megalithic circle two miles to the south — at Stonehenge. There, a solemn ceremony marked the rising of the sun between two giant uprights at the edge of the circle.

But as the day had progressed so had the crowd, moving from Stonehenge along another avenue and up the river, until they arrived here at the site of their evening festivities.

THIS account of a midsummer day more than 4,000 years ago may require a little imagination. But a series of discoveries announced last week has led archeologists to believe they can put together an increasingly detailed picture of life at the most famous ancient monument in Britain at the time it was built.

Though modern excavations at Durrington Walls, which lies to the north of the stone monument, began in the 1960s, the latest have been far more extensive than any before. They are part of a programme to investigate the whole Stonehenge site, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which began in 2003.

An earlier stage in the excavations was shown on Channel 4’s Time Team, but only now are archeologists discovering the full extent of the settlement at Durrington Walls. They have mapped the whole of a giant wooden henge — a circular monument — and unearthed the foundations of shrines and houses. They have also found large quantities of animal bones.

The scale of the settlement and its monuments has taken archeologists by surprise. “It is starting to look like Stonehenge was more of a building site, but this place was the party zone,” said Mike Parker Pearson, professor of archeology at Sheffield University and head of the team excavating at Durrington Walls. “It’s filthy, we’ve never seen such quantities of pottery, animal bone and flint lying around.

“No other neolithic villages have been found in southern Britain, and the discovery of seven houses in the tiny area we have excavated demonstrates this valley was probably filled with hundreds or even thousands of small dwellings.”

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