Photo source: Historic Environment Scotland

                          A huge monument "cursus", a place for ancient rituals, which was built at the same time as Stonehenge, was discovered on the Isle of Arran in Scotland.

The "cursus" monuments, which were built during the Neolithic period, between 4000 and 2500 BC, contain long and rectangular structures, which means that they were built by changing the terrain. The elongated structures were often marked by wooden pillars and were used for ceremonies , most likely to honor the death and worship of ancestors. During those ceremonies, ancient people would have set fire to those wooden pillars.

• A recently discovered massive dinosaur could be the largest creature that has ever stepped…
• An Anglo-Saxon cemetery, containing a huge treasure, was discovered by archaeologists

The monument in the present case, of which two parallel mounds remain, once contained wooden elements, explained Dave Cowley, the researcher who discovered the site and archaeologist at Historic Environment Scotland.

The monument was originally discovered in 2017

Cowley and his team first discovered the monument in 2017, during aerial studies of the Scottish island using Lidar technology, which reveals hidden structures by illuminating the ground with lasers and then measuring the light that is reflected back. Lidar revealed two almost parallel lines that were up to 1.1 kilometers long. Archaeologists conducted on-site research between 2017 and 2019, but those visits did not reveal many details.

Although the structure is long, the individual mounds are 3.3 meters thick and 0.3 meters high. "They seem to be intermittent and would have been built of earth or peat with very few visible stones," said the research team.

The only such monument discovered on the island of Arran

However, it is "impossible to say" whether the structure was designed with breaks in mounds or whether they appeared over the years as a result of natural processes. However, archaeologists do not believe that the rectangular structure had a roof.

Although about 70 such monuments have been discovered in Scotland, it is the only one found on the Isle of Arran. So it would have been "of great importance to the communities on the island," Cowley said, according to Live Science .

However, there are other types of Neolithic monuments on the island, and the structure could have been part of a much larger monument.