The evidence suggests that they were part of a large Neolithic enclosure with a diameter of around 300 to 400 metres. Red markings, denoting sites of some of the timber posts, can be seen in the car park of Waitrose. Roman era Maumbury Rings was remodelled in the Roman period when it was adapted for use as an amphitheatre for the use of the citizens of the nearby Roman town of Durnovaria (Dorchester). The banks were lowered by around 3 metres, with the material produced piled onto the banks. The interior was modified by the excavation of an oval, level arena floor, and the cutting of seating into the scarp and bank which was revetted with either chalk or timber. Chambers were cut into the bank to the south-west and one on each side of the centre. Finds found during the excavations include an uninscribed British coin, Roman pottery, leg bones, coins, and a 2nd-century burial. The amphitheatre may have been out of use by the mid-2nd century, although objects found on the arena floor and elsewhere suggest activity in the 4th century. Civil war Between 1642 and 1643 the henge was modified in response to the English Civil War. The site was used as an artillery fort by Parliament supporters in order to guard the southern approach to Dorchester. This involved the placing of a gun platform and a ramp on the southwest side, and the internal terrace was built. An unfinished well near the northwest edge of the arena and finds of 160 lead pistol bullets on the east bank all date to this time, along with a ditch beyond the northern enclosure bank. Later use Its amphitheatre role was briefly revived in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, as a place of public execution. In 1685, at the close of the Monmouth Rebellion, Judge Jeffreys ordered eighty of the rebels to be executed here. In 1705 Mary Channing, a nineteen-year-old woman found guilty of poisoning her husband, was executed by strangulation and burning at the Rings. Thomas Hardy used this event in his poem The Mock Wife and mentioned it in his 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, as well as recording some details of his research into the event in his personal writings. By the later 18th century, the enclosure was being used as farmland. In 1846, the proposed alignment of the Southampton and Dorchester