Stonehenge, the U.K.'s most famous ancient site, may have been a place of worship some 500 years before the first stone was erected, a research has claimed.

Archaeologists from the universities of Birmingham, Bradford and Vienna claim that the sanctity of Stonehenge's location may have determined the layout of key aspects of the surrounding sacred landscape.

The research increases the likelihood that the site was originally and primarily associated with sun worship, 'The Independent' reported.

The research has also enabled the archaeologists to reconstruct the detailed route of a possible religious congregation or other ritual event which they suspect may have taken place annually to the north of Stonehenge.

In their research, the archaeologists discovered two great pits, one towards the enclosure's eastern end and the other nearer its western end.

When they modelled the relationship between these newly discovered Cursus pits and Stonehenge on their computer system, they realised that, viewed from the so-called "Heel Stone" at Stonehenge, the pits were aligned with sunrise and sunset on the longest day of the year.

The chances of those two alignments being purely coincidental are extremely low.

The archaeologists then began to speculate as to what sort of ritual or ceremonial activity might have been carried out at and between the two pits. In many areas of the world, ancient religious and other ceremonies sometimes involved ceremonially processing round the perimeters of monuments.

They therefore thought it possible that the prehistoric celebrants at the Cursus might have perambulated between the two pits by processing around the perimeter of the Cursus.

The "eureka moment" came when the computer calculations revealed that the midway point (the noon point) on the route aligned directly with the centre of Stonehenge, which was precisely due south.

This realisation that the sun hovering over the site of Stonehenge at its highest point in the year appears to have been of great importance to prehistoric people, is itself of potential significance.

For it suggests that the site's association with the veneration of the sun was perhaps even greater than previously realised.

However, the implication of the new evidence is that in a sense, the story may have been the other way round, that the site of Stonehenge was sacred before the Cursus was built, says lead archaeologist Dr. Henry Chapman, who has been modelling the alignments on the computerised reconstructions of the Stonehenge landscape.