An Bord Pleanál reopened a two-year-old oral hearing into proposals for a major regional landfill on a 600-acre site at Nevitt in north Co Dublin (Ireland). The board said the re-opening was in response to concerns from academics that the site may be the location of a pre-Christian, 'large-ditched enclosure of the Tara or Navan kind'.

Addressing the inquiry, board inspector Des Johnson outlined a series of submissions between academics and the Department of the Environment, since the first hearing closed in October 26th, 2006. The department had voiced concern that Nevitt 'could be a site of exceptional importance' and 'possibly a site of national importance'. The submissions centred on the name Nevitt being the Celtic word for 'the sacred place', suggesting an archaeology richer than had been estimated by the environmental impact assessment (EIA), commissioned by Fingal County Council.     

Archaeologists have discovered Stonehenge's birthdate, solving one of the historic site's longstanding mysteries. The monument's original stones were erected in about 2300 BCE, it has been discovered - 300 years later than had previously been thought. The finding came in an ambitious project, involving the first dig inside the historic stone circle for 44 years.

A trench was excavated in March as part of a bid to establish the precise dating of the Double Bluestone Circle, the first stone structure built there thousands of years ago. The hole, which measured 3.5 metres wide and 1.5 metres deep, was dug by hand in a previously excavated area on the south-eastern quadrant of the Double Stone Circle. Professors Timothy Darvill and Geoffrey Wainwright, the project leaders, are set to disclose other early findings. Prof Darvill, of Bournemouth University, and Prof Wainwright, President of the Society of Antiquaries, compared samples from the dig with research in the Preseli hills in south west Wales, from where 80 such stones were carried an estimated 4,500 years ago. The dig unearthed about 100 pieces of organic material from the original bluestone sockets, now buried under the monument. Of these, 14 were selected to be sent for modern carbon dating, at Oxford University.     

The Devil's Quoits (Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire) would have been one of the most important standing stone circle sites in Britain. By the end of the 19th century only three of the stones were standing, surrounded by ploughed fields. A photograph from the 1880s shows one of these about 2.5 m high. The site was briefly archaeologically excavated in the 1940s just before the three stones were pulled down to make way for a war time aerodrome whose runway cut straight through the monument. After the war, a large part of the adjacent site was excavated for gravel. Further archaeological excavations were carried out in 1972-3 and then again in 1988 and these showed that once there were more than 30 stones in a 75 m diameter circle with a two metre ditch and outer henge bank surrounding them.  The stones are formed from a local conglomerate stone. The stone circle is now thought to be between 4000 and 5000 years old and is partly a Scheduled Ancient Monument.