What is a cursus?

What a cursus is

Known examples range from less than 100 metres to almost 10 kilometres long, and the Dorset Cursus on Cranborne Chase is the longest known. The name, Latin for a racecourse, reflects a use suggested by William Stukeley in the 18th century. An antler pick from the Greater Stonehenge Cursus, which is just under 3 kilometres long, has been radiocarbon dated to 3630 to 3375 BC, and other cursuses are dated to about 3400 to 3000 BC, earlier than the 3000 to 2400 BC given in older Historic England texts. Most are known only from cropmarks, and Historic England texts give totals for England of between about 40 and about 100.

How cursuses look on LiDAR

Where a cursus survives as an earthwork, it shows as two long, parallel low banks or ditches tens of metres apart, sometimes with a squared or rounded terminal at the end. A local relief model shows the very low banks best and sky-view factor shows the ditches, while hillshade can lose the long sides when they run parallel to the light. Most cursuses have been ploughed flat and show nothing on a bare-earth model, and the Greater Stonehenge Cursus is one of the few with substantial surviving earthworks.

See LiDAR visualisations explained for what each method shows.

What can look like one

Pairs of parallel ditches are also formed by Roman and later roads, droveways, trackways, the boundaries of strip fields and modern pipeline trenches. A Roman road usually has a raised central bank (agger) between its ditches, which a cursus does not.

Protection

Historic England considers all cursus monuments to be nationally important, and surviving examples are scheduled monuments protected in England by the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979 and in Wales by the Historic Environment (Wales) Act 2023.

Examples on the LiDAR

Where they are

Counties with the most cursuses that have a page here.

More examples