For a long time, historians have been divided on whether the stones at Stonehenge had originally formed a full circle. With no stones found in the southwest area, some researchers believed the structure had never been completed.
But a short hosepipe accidentally solved the mystery without excavation or expensive equipment. Tens of thousands of people had earlier overlooked the answer.
When a custodian couldn’t water the grass in the entire Stonehenge area (as was usually done) due to the short hose, the grass failed to grow in the unwatered area, revealing depressions in the ground. If some of those parched areas had held stones, the circle would have been complete. Other brown patches matched areas of known archaeological excavations, confirming that the parched areas represented ground that had been intentionally disturbed.
“A lot of people assume we’ve excavated the entire site and everything we’re ever going to know about the monument is known,” said historian Susan Greaney of English Heritage. “But actually, there’s quite a lot we still don’t know and there’s quite a lot that can be discovered just through non-excavation methods.”
That still leaves the mystery of what happened to the missing stones. Were they used to build houses or roads in the area? No one knows, but English Heritage may purposely avoid watering some areas of Stonehenge during the next dry spell to see if the answers to other puzzles emerge.