In ancient Wessex, Guy Hayward walks the sacred paths of our Neolithic ancestors, where the tracks connect to the moon and stars above

This seven-mile pilgrimage covers one of Britain’s most revered landscapes – a complex of sacred places where our ancient forebears aligned sky, stone, and spirit. The walk begins at Woodhenge in Wiltshire, an enigmatic Neolithic timber circle. Once a ring of tall wooden posts encircled by a ditch and bank, it may have held spiritual or astronomical significance. Though the posts have long since vanished, concrete markers stand in their place, leaving your imagination something to flow on. Some believe the henge was aligned with the moon, and was a place of ancestral and ceremonial offerings.

From Woodhenge, walk towards Durrington Walls, a colossal henge enclosure more than 500 metres across. Radiocarbon dating places it around 2600 BC, the same period Stonehenge’s great sarsen stones were erected. Recent excavations uncovered house floors, hearths, and animal bones here – evidence that it was a vibrant seasonal village. Thousands of people may have travelled here for midwinter gatherings, drawn together to feast and reiterate shared values. It was likely to have been the living settlement to Stonehenge’s domain of the buried dead.

Continue onward to the high spine of King Barrow Ridge, a striking line of Bronze Age burial mounds laid out like vertebrae along the chalk escarpment. These mounds, built between 2000 and 1600 BC, contained elite individuals – perhaps tribal leaders or priest-kings – and were positioned facing east, toward the rising sun.

First along the ridge are the Old King Barrows – less formal in arrangement, and more mysterious. These early burial sites may date back to the dawn of the burial mound tradition. As you descend gently to the New King Barrows, which are more recent, the layout here is more symmetrical, possibly reflecting evolving ritual practices or changes in social structure.

Now the pilgrimage takes a turn onto The Avenue, a serpentine ceremonial route designed to connect the River Avon to Stonehenge itself. Once flanked by upright stones or timber posts, it curves gently before straightening toward the solstice axis. As you walk its path, the sense of deliberate orientation builds, with your feet tracing the footsteps of countless pilgrims before you, converging on the great circle.

Stonehenge, constructed in multiple stages from roughly 3000 to 1600 BCE, has an architecture that reveals astronomical precision. The Heel Stone, the Slaughter Stone, the trilithons – all are arranged to frame the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset. This was not just a burial site or temple but a cosmic engine, a place of seasonal attunement and ancestral invocation. They were anchoring the cosmos in stone. The bluestones – dragged over 150 miles from the Preseli Hills of Wales – show how much this proper connection to cosmos mattered.

From this epicentre, continue on to the Cursus Barrows, a series of burial mounds that flank the neighbouring Stonehenge Cursus – a vast linear earthwork stretching over two kilometres. Built more than 500 years before the stone circle, it may have served as a grand processional route or symbolic division of sacred space. Its exact use remains a mystery, but its east-west alignment suggests ritual movement through time – sunrise to sunset, birth to death.

Walk the full length of the Cursus, past the site of a Long Barrow, and you reach the final, quieter destination: the Cuckoo Stone. Once upright, this sarsen monolith now lies on its side. It may have been a marker stone, part of a broader ceremonial network, or a site of agricultural blessing. Some believe it was used for fertility rites.

Touch it. Let your pilgrimage end not in expected grandeur, but in embodied connection with subtle forces. And then spiral back to Woodhenge, a few hundred metres away, to know your starting place for the first time.

This is a pilgrimage of conversation between you and the land, land and cosmos, and alignment in all its forms.

Guy Hayward is Director and Co-founder of The British Pilgrimage Trust, which promotes pilgrimage routes and low-cost pilgrim accommodation across Britain.

This article appears in the current edition of the Idler.

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