Extensive research suggests that Stonehenge was part of a ritual landscape and was joined to Durrington Walls, a large Neolithic settlement, by their corresponding avenues and the River Avon. “Durrington Walls Henge was a place of the living, whilst Stonehenge was a domain of the dead” (Castleden 60). A journey along the Avon River to reach Stonehenge was part of a ritual passage from life to death, perhaps to celebrate past ancestors and the recently deceased. “These explanations were first mooted in the twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who extolled the curative properties of the stones and was also the first to advance the idea that Stonehenge was constructed as a funerary monument”
