Malta’s Cart Ruts: Clapham Junction, the Big Cave and a Prehistoric Puzzle

Alex van Terheyden

11 hours ago

10 min read

High on Malta’s south-western plateau, near the Dingli Cliffs, pairs of deep grooves run across the bare limestone. They dip into hollows, cross one another, split, merge and stop dead. Nobody wrote down who made them, or when. They are Malta’s cart ruts, and the most famous cluster of all, at Misraħ Għar il-Kbir, goes by a name every Londoner will recognise: Clapham Junction. If you are planning a wider trip, start with my Malta travel guide, which covers the knights, the temples, Gozo and the less polished side of the islands.

This is the last of my seven Malta deep-dives. I have already walked among the stones of the Tarxien Temples and Ġgantija on Gozo, and climbed Gozo’s Citadel. This time I set out to answer a simple question: who made these tracks, and what kind of world were they living in? In the film I range from the academic to the anomalous. Below I have kept the wonder but checked the claims, so you get the evidence as well as the mystery. Watch the film first, then read on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQn5XyGM43s

An island built on old coral reefs

I started on a quiet headland with a smell of manure on the breeze and a view across to Verdala Palace, the 16th-century residence built for Grand Master Hugues Loubenx de Verdalle and now the President of Malta’s summer home. It was closed when I passed. Under my feet was the reason the cart ruts exist at all: limestone. Much of Malta is made of rock laid down in warm, shallow seas millions of years ago, full of fossil shells and old reef. You can still see the texture of it, and the edges where blocks have been quarried out, some recently and some clearly long ago.

Not many people come up here. The scrub is full of tiny wind-sculpted plants that look like bonsai trees, and, near the road, a plant I am fairly sure was a wild asparagus run riot, taller than me. Malta has long been nicknamed the land of the giants, after folk tales that only giants could have raised the megalithic temples. A giant asparagus felt like a fitting first clue.

What are the cart ruts?

Cart ruts are pairs of parallel channels worn or cut into the bedrock. They appear all over Malta and Gozo. According to Wikipedia’s entry on Misraħ Għar il-Kbir, good examples on the main island include Busewdien in St Paul’s Bay, Naxxar, San Ġwann and Bidnija, while Gozo’s best are on the Ta’ Ċenċ plateau near Sannat. At Misraħ Għar il-Kbir some ruts are up to 60 centimetres deep, and the two grooves in a pair are on average 110 to 140 centimetres apart. Some cross, and others form junctions, which creates the illusion of a great rail yard.

Deep parallel cart ruts cut into the limestone at Misraħ Għar il-Kbir (Clapham Junction), Siġġiewi, Malta

I measured them the only way I could: with my feet. I am a UK size 12, and in the first set I found each groove was almost exactly the width of my boot. Look along them from a low angle and there is no getting your head around it. Whatever the explanation, that is a track. Further on I found pairs that were half that width, and others that were a good extra half a foot deep, partly filled with debris but still running on downhill.

Clapham Junction, Malta

The nickname is credited to the archaeologist David H. Trump, who said the tangle of tracks reminded him of the busy railway junction in south London. For me it was oddly fitting. I had started this trip by catching a train from Clapham Junction to Gatwick and flying to Malta, so I went from one Clapham Junction to another. This one is far less busy and far less scary. I spent an hour and a half there and did not see another soul: just me, the hire car parked at the edge, and the tracks.

I should confess that I filmed this while recovering from a nasty bout of food poisoning that had already cost me several days, so forgive the pace. Clapham Junction rewards a slow walk anyway. The ground is uneven, the grooves are ankle-breakers, and the more you look, the more sets you see.

Għar il-Kbir: the big cave below the tracks

Just beside the ruts lies another world. Għar il-Kbir, literally “the big cave”, is a complex of eight caves on two levels around a hollow where the roof of the main cave has collapsed. For centuries this was not just a shelter but a home. The Cliffs Interpretation Centre records that by the mid-16th century some 117 people in 27 families lived here. In the film I say up to 150; the documented figure is a little lower, but the point stands. These were not hermits. They were farming families, living side by side for generations.

Rubble walls and cave openings of the old troglodyte dwellings at Għar il-Kbir, near Clapham Junction, Malta

You can still see the rubble walls that divided the living spaces, pick marks where the caves were enlarged, sleeping recesses, niches and tethering holes for animals. The 17th-century scholar Athanasius Kircher described families living side by side with their animals, each with its own hearth. By the early 19th century the community was shrinking, and in the 1830s the British authorities moved the last cave dwellers out and resettled them in nearby villages, for sanitary or tax reasons. Savio College, whose campus is about two kilometres away, gives the date as 1835 and says the families were resettled in Siġġiewi. Local tradition holds that the roof of the main cave was blown in to stop anyone moving back.

Walking through, it goes totally dark, and I ended up navigating by my camera screen rather than my eyes. Above you are the tracks of a vanished people; below, the echo of lives carved out of stone. Two histories separated by thousands of years share the same rugged hilltop.

When were the ruts made?

This is where the honest answer is: nobody knows for certain. In the film I quote a mainstream range that I garbled, so here is the correction. Wikipedia’s summary is that estimates run from the Neolithic to medieval times. The ruts could have been made no later than about 700 BC, and several examples point to the Temple Period, roughly 3800 to 2500 BC. Some researchers think they were used in different periods, perhaps for different jobs, which would explain why they intersect and tangle: they were not all made at once.

The question that nagged me on the day was how a cart with a fixed axle could follow grooves over such uneven ground. The geomorphologists Derek Mottershead, Alastair Pearson and Martin Schaefer of the University of Portsmouth tackled exactly that. Their 2008 paper in Antiquity concluded that the ruts could have been made by two-wheeled carts with a gauge of about 1.40 metres carrying moderate loads. Malta’s limestone is weak, and when wet it loses much of its strength. Carts would first have worn tracks in the soil; once the soil had eroded, the wheels ran on bare rock and cut down into it. When a pair grew too deep for the cart’s ground clearance, about 67.5 centimetres, drivers simply started a new route alongside. That is why there are so many, and why they braid across the plateau.

A 2019 follow-up chapter by the same team, looking at four key sites, adds that the ruts mark a big and irreversible change in Malta’s landscape: the soil that once covered these plateaus has gone. It also explains something I wondered about on camera: why there are no wooden carts or wheels. Timber rots, and Malta’s thin soils preserve very little. The many ruts that run straight past old quarries are a strong hint about what was being moved.

The ruts that run into the sea

The most tantalising tracks are the ones that do not stop at the shore. At St George’s Bay in Birżebbuġa, ruts run into the water and continue below the surface. That has led to media speculation that they were made during the last Ice Age, when, according to Wikipedia, global sea levels were roughly 120 metres lower than today. If that were true, the ruts would be more than 10,000 years old.

There is a big problem with that idea. The earliest evidence of people living on Malta dates from about 5900 BC, thousands of years after the Ice Age ended. Coastlines also move for local reasons such as erosion and earth movement, so a rut running into the sea does not need an Ice Age to explain it. At the end of my journey, on the north of the island before the Gozo ferry, I went looking for ruts running into the sea myself. At first I thought I had been pranked, as the “tracks” were boat moorings. But down on the limestone there really was a pair of ruts, exactly the same as the rest, heading for the water.

Alternative theories, and what the evidence says

In the film I spend a while on the ideas of the writer Graham Hancock, who argues in his book Underworld and the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse that an advanced Ice Age civilisation was wiped out around 12,000 years ago, and he has pointed to Malta as one of its traces. I find those ideas fun to think about while standing on a windswept plateau, but in fairness to readers: archaeologists have criticised the series heavily, and Wikipedia describes its central theory as pseudoarchaeological, with claims that lack evidence. The suggestions that turn up online, such as anti-gravity craft or energy grids, have no evidence behind them at all.

What I would stand by from the film is this: we should not underestimate the people who came before us. The temple builders of Malta raised megaliths weighing tons at Ġgantija and Tarxien more than 5,000 years ago, and Ġgantija is older than Stonehenge. Some of the ruts may belong to that world, and some to the Bronze Age and later farmers and quarrymen. The cave dwellers who lived beside them came long afterwards. You do not need a lost civilisation to find that astonishing.

Malta is not entirely unique, either. Rock-cut tracks are reported in other parts of the Mediterranean, and the literature on Malta’s ruts compares them with old cart routes in Switzerland, Alsace and the Aosta Valley. But nowhere I know of has them as dense and as defined as here, and nowhere else sits them so close to temples older than the pyramids.

Sunset over Filfla

Off the cliffs, a short drive away, is a viewpoint Google Maps calls Sunset Wild Place, beside a radar station. Sit on the cliff edge, watch the sun drop into the sea, and you look straight at Filfla, a flat-topped, uninhabited islet about 4.5 kilometres offshore.

Filfla islet off the south coast of Malta, seen across the sea from the cliffs near Mnajdra

I garbled its history in the film, so here are the facts from Wikipedia. The name probably comes from the Arabic word for peppercorn. Its only known permanent structure was a chapel built in a cave in 1343 and destroyed by an earthquake in 1856. Until 1971 the Royal Navy and the RAF used Filfla for target practice, and spent cartridges can still be found there; fishing is banned within a nautical mile of it because of the risk of unexploded ordnance. It became a bird reserve in 1980, and access is now limited to educational or scientific visits with permission. Its cliffs host thousands of pairs of European storm petrels, so maybe that was the bird I could hear in the distance.

How to visit Clapham Junction and Għar il-Kbir

Misraħ Għar il-Kbir lies in the limits of Siġġiewi, between Dingli and Buskett, and is signposted “Għar il-Kbir” and “Cart Ruts” from the road. It is an open site. When I went there was no ticket office, no fence and no facilities, so bring water, a hat and sturdy shoes. The rock is sharp and uneven, the grooves are deep, and the caves are dark and unguarded: take a torch and watch children closely. Please tread lightly, as these tracks have survived thousands of years and cannot be replaced.

A car makes the whole south-west much easier, including Dingli Cliffs, Verdala Palace and the temples of Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra. Buses run to Dingli and the Buskett area, but leave a walk at the end; plan routes on Malta Public Transport. Go early or late for soft light and the fewest people; off-peak, I had the place to myself. Details were checked on 25 October 2026; confirm before you go.

Where to stay

The cart ruts are an easy drive from anywhere on Malta. Mdina, Rabat or Dingli put you close to the south-west, while Valletta and Sliema have more choice. Compare hotels on Booking.com Malta or find an apartment on Airbnb. Use the Malta hotels map below to pick a base.

Guided tours in Malta

If you would rather not drive yourself, browse Malta tours on Viator or Malta tours on GetYourGuide for south-west island tours, jeep safaris and temple trips that pass Dingli and the cart ruts. Read the Malta travel guide first, and pair the ruts with the Tarxien Temples and Valletta for a day that runs from prehistory to the knights.

Getting around and staying connected

I explored by hire car. I book cars through Discover Cars, and I cover the rental excess with Cover4Rentals rather than paying the desk’s pricey top-up. If you want a driver waiting at Malta International, book a private transfer with GetTransfer. For data, my go-to eSIM is Saily (code Wondering for 15% off); Roamless is another good option (code WONDERING for 20% off). For euros without the bank fees I use Wise. I filmed this on the DJI Osmo Pocket 3, recording onto a 256GB micro SD card.

Plan your trip

Hotels: Booking.com Malta
Apartments: Airbnb
Tours: Viator Malta
Tours and tickets: GetYourGuide Malta
Car hire: Discover Cars plus excess cover from Cover4Rentals
Private transfer: GetTransfer
Buses: Malta Public Transport
Mobile data: Saily (code Wondering, 15% off) or Roamless (code WONDERING, 20% off)
Money: Wise
Island guide: Malta travel guide

Flights

Flying to Malta? Compare fares below.

The Wondering Englishman has visited over 90 countries so far, and I'm slowly making my way around the world. That completes my seven Malta deep-dives. If you missed any, catch up on Valletta, the Mosta Rotunda, the Tarxien Temples, Ġgantija, the Gozo pilgrimage and Gozo’s Citadel, or start with the Malta travel guide.