Walking through Malta’s charming, sun-drenched landscapes, we may encounter an unusual sight. We are talking about the mysterious structures known as ‘cart ruts’ - pairs of parallel grooves carved into the hard limestone, forming a signpost of the past. Cart ruts are pairs of grooves with spacing comparable to modern railway tracks. Interestingly, nowhere else in the world will one find such a huge concentration of these structures as precisely on Maltese soil. In the village of Baħrija, I found some of them, which I present as a 3D model in my virtual museum.

The origin and purpose of these puzzling structures are hotly debated. Some scientists believe the ‘cart ruts’ were created by the heavy traffic of carts filled with earth or stones travelling along these paths in Neolithic times. Others suggest they may have served as signposts to quarries during the Classic period. However, have you considered whether they may have had astronomical or religious roles? One could imagine them as huge stone calendars ma