The Middle Neolithic in Britain (c. 3400–2800 cal BC) can be seen as a transitional period, with a shift from the construction of rectangular and linear monuments (such as long barrows, bank barrows and cursus monuments) to a circular archetype (

The people who constructed Flagstones adopted the widespread practice of placing cremations within small circular monuments but they also created an innovative larger monument, with funerary practices, art and artefacts that suggest long-distance connections, most strongly to Ireland.

This new style of monument acted as an anchor within the development of the Dorchester complex and its form may have been directly replicated at Stonehenge. It is likely that the development of other proto-henges in western and northern Britain followed their own trajectories.

Burrow argues that this type of monument needs an appropriate name of its own, rather than being associated with the broad, and somewhat problematic, category of henges, now clearly a distinctly later phenomenon.