Signs of a henge, a man-made enclosure from thousands of years ago thought to serve as a gathering place, were photographed by a camera-enabled drone on Monday.CreditAnthony Murphy
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It took an unusually brutal drought for signs of a 5,000-year-old monument to suddenly appear in an Irish field, as if they had been written into the landscape in invisible ink.
On Monday, Anthony Murphy, an author and photographer, sent a camera-enabled drone high above the Brú na Bóinne archaeological landscape, a Unesco World Heritage Site about 30 miles north of Dublin. He suspected that recent dry conditions might reveal evidence that a henge — a man-made enclosure from thousands of years ago thought to serve as a gathering place — had once been there.
What he and a friend saw in the images shocked him: a series of discolorations in the farmland, caused by differences in soil, spread about 150 meters wide in a perfectly circular pattern. He had flown the drone over the same field many times before and never saw a hint of what was now perfectly clear, he said.
It has been more than 40 days since the Dublin area has had significant rainfall, and the dearth of water had left the field, which is on privately owned land, scorched by the sun.
The drought also revealed the sites of ruins in Wales. From ABC News:
Cropmarks of a large prehistoric enclosure in the Vale of Glamorgan with the faint footings of a probable Roman villa within.Supplied: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW)
Cropmarks of a large Bronze Age barrow cemetery on the Llyn Reninsula, Gwynedd. Supplied: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW)
