The Mystery Hole in the Woods!

The Mystery Hole in the Woods! There is a hole in Colborn Woods in Wiltshire that nobody can explain, and the more I looked into it the less sense it made. A perfect circle fifteen metres across, cut five metres down into the chalk, with a raised bank running all the way round it and one narrow break that might be an entrance. The Wiltshire Historic Environment Record holds over thirty five thousand sites and this is not one of them. It sits inside Chute Forest, which appears in the Domesday Book as royal hunting land where quarrying has been banned for nearly a thousand years. In this one I go through every ordinary explanation and watch each one fall apart. A lime kiln does not leave a bank. A bomb crater is never that symmetrical. A sinkhole swallows earth, it does not stack it neatly around its own rim. And an old woodland track on a map from the eighteen hundreds cuts straight through the bank, with half the bank sitting on each side, which means the hole was already there before the track was. The thing that genuinely got under my skin is what it resembles. A pond barrow, a Bronze Age monument that is a hole going down instead of a mound going up, and only about sixty are known in the whole country, concentrated in exactly this part of Wiltshire. The one objection was depth, because pond barrows are usually under two metres. Then I read about Wilsford, twenty minutes down the road near Stonehenge, where a shallow dip thirty centimetres deep turned out to be sitting on top of a shaft cut thirty metres into the chalk with antler picks. Nobody has ever put a spade into Colborn Woods. That is the bit I cannot let go of.