Malta is made of sedimentary rocks, i.e. compressed material from the sea bed which has, over millions of years, become limestone or sandstone. It is very soft so easy to cut for building blocks but after 200 years you have to do some serious structural work as the stone becomes weathered.  Many of the stone buildings on the island, most of which were built in the 17th and 18th century have had significant running repairs.

When someone in the stone age wheeled their wagon repeatedly along a path it cut a rut in the stone, that rut then became a water channel, over a few thousand years became deeper so you can now clearly make out where these ancient paths were. In one area we visited today there are so many ruts the archaeologists, who were clearly Brits, named it Clapham Junction. It was amazing but we were in for something even better.

We are booked to see the “must see” neolithic temple site tomorrow but today we thought we would look at a less well advertised pair of temples, goodness what tomorrow will bring as these two were mind blowing, I think they are much more impressive than Stonehenge. The two sites are a few hundred yards apart and consist of number of interconnected oval rooms which had either stone of timber roofs. The stones are huge, the largest weighs 20 tons and interestingly they could have used smaller stones but didn’t, the architect must have been showing off! Pictures below give you some idea of the sites but we were both gobsmacked.