The ring was part of a tradition of stone circle construction that spread throughout much of Britain, Ireland, and Brittany during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, over a period between 3300 and 900 BCE.

The purpose of such monuments is unknown, although some archaeologists speculate that the stones represented supernatural entities for the circle's builders.

[1] By 3000 BCE, the long barrows, causewayed enclosures, and cursuses that had predominated in the Early Neolithic were no longer built, and had been replaced by circular monuments of various kinds.

[6] The archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson argues that in Neolithic Britain, stone was associated with the dead, and wood with the living.

[8] As noted by the archaeologist Aubrey Burl, these destroyed examples have left behind "only frustrating descriptions and vague positions".

[14] In the late nineteenth century, the antiquarian A. D. Passmore wrote two notebooks in which he discussed archaeological sites in Wiltshire.

He recorded a local tradition that there had been a large stone circle near the railway bridge outside Swindon Old Town and the old Marlborough road to Ladder Hill.

[16] The contents of Passmore's notebooks and their references to Fir Clump stone circle were not published until 2004, after they had been purchased by the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society.

[9] In an 1894 article in The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, Passmore briefly mentioned the presence of "a number of sarsens, which may or may not have formed part of a circle", at Hodson, which is adjacent to Burderop Wood.