Durrington Walls

The earthworks here are genuinely vast - you're walking inside what was once a massive ritual enclosure, and the scale of it hits you immediately even though you're looking at lumps and bumps in grassland rather than standing stones. Durrington Walls is technically bigger than Stonehenge, which sits just three miles away, but it gets a fraction of the visitors because there's far less to actually see.

What you get is a Neolithic henge - essentially a massive circular bank and ditch dug around 2600 BC - plus the remains of what was likely a massive timber building inside. The site's roughly two kilometres across, so you're not popping over for ten minutes. Walkers and archaeology enthusiasts will genuinely enjoy the scale of it, but families with younger kids might find themselves underwhelmed after half an hour unless you've got proper keen ones who can get excited about 4,500-year-old ditches.

It's free to access and you can wander it pretty much any time - the village of Durrington surrounds it, so facilities mean nipping into Salisbury three miles south. The real appeal here is standing in the middle of something that functioned alongside Stonehenge as part of the same ceremonial landscape. If you're basing yourself at Stonehenge Campsite & Glamping nearby, this is well worth the short walk to understand the bigger picture of what Neolithic Britain was actually doing. Don't expect drama - expect space and atmosphere and the odd moment of genuine historical weight.