Historic England’s Vanishing Archive

Historic England’s photos didn’t vanish. SmartFrame did. Then they broke their own links.

Not just the aerials. The lot.

Historic England still holds the negatives, the prints and the scans. What the public lost, in early September, is the ability to look at them. The official notice, last updated 25 September 2026, is admirably blunt:

“This is because the third-party service that we use to display Archive images on our website has ceased trading and entered administration.”

The 11 September version named the damage:

“This means that images are not currently available across Archive records and the Aerial Photo Explorer. Images of England images are also not available on the National Heritage List for England.”

Ground shots, architectural stills, catalogue images, aerials, and the old Images of England pictures on list entries. All of it.

The third party, named by Michael Pritchard on British Photographic History, is SmartFrame Technologies Limited. Henry Page and Shaun Walker of Mercer & Hole were appointed administrators on 26 August 2026. BusinessCloud reports assets of about £2.3m, cash of £182k, liabilities of £1.7m, and a firm that “failed to secure further funding.”

SmartFrame did not store the Archive. It streamed it: zoom, captions, right-click protection, screenshot blocking, anti-scrape. A public body wrapped a national collection in a start-up’s DRM. When the start-up died, the pictures went with it.

Confirmed down, because HE said so:

• images on Archive records
• the Aerial Photo Explorer
• Images of England photographs on the National Heritage List

Not named in the photo notice: England’s Places; list descriptions; the Swindon search room; copy orders. The early Aerofilms set is still on Britain from Above.

HE first promised previews “in several weeks.” The 25 September update is cooler:

“We are hopeful that smaller preview images will be available on the website by 2 October… 400 x 400px image thumbnails… a longer-term solution… is likely to take many months to implement.”

And, for listed-building photos on the List:

“Images of England images on the National Heritage List for England are not being replaced at this time.”

Please do not email the Archive team. The page says so. Visit, or order a copy.

In 2022 SmartFrame called Historic England “a great example” of its interactive frames. Critics noted the same wrapper was stopping people saving RAF verticals whose Crown copyright had already expired. HE later said, on X, that it had spent £65,830 net on the licence from 2020/21 to 2023/24, putting over a million images behind it, and that it was “not an income generation tool.” In 2024 there was another £41k tender. Call it a little over £100,000 to stop people saving pictures a public body was already putting online.

The comparison is the London galleries. Douglas McCarthy’s FOI figures show the National Gallery Picture Library paying a £100,000 internal fee to exist, then posting net losses of £37,575 and £47,615 in two of the last three reported years. Andrea Wallace’s 2022 UKRI report was blunter: licensing images of public-domain works “does not appear to be a present or future revenue scheme with potential for growth, and is actually a financial burden on the GLAM sector.” Tate, which also bought SmartFrame in 2022 for Tate Images, at least has living artists to clear. Historic England was spending six figures to wrap photographs the taxpayer had already paid for. Then the wrapper died, and the public cannot see them at all.

CEO Rob Sewell wrote that SmartFrame “had all the hallmarks of a global disruptor” and was “seeking to restore industry value to the photography market.” It signed football clubs and picture agencies. It did not sign a plan B for a statutory archive.

Then they did it again to the words.

On 16 September 2026 Historic England switched on a new Heritage Gateway and killed the old one. For twenty years the stable record URL was:

https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?uid=219528&resourceID=19191

That path is dead. No redirect to the record. heritagegateway.org.uk dumps you on a search box. PastScape hob.aspx?hob_id= went the same way years ago and now has nowhere to land.

Volunteer sites took the hit first: Megalithic Portal, Megalithomania, county walk pages, teaching lists — anything that treated a Gateway UID as a permalink. Annoying. Expected, if you hitch your wagon to someone else’s CMS.

Then look at HE’s own map.

The Aerial Archaeology Mapping Explorer still draws. The banks and ditches are on the Open Data Hub. What died is the click. Every grey monument pop-up was supposed to open the full record. HE baked the old Gateway URLs into the GIS. The published schema says so, in words a child could read:

• HE_URL1 to HE_URL5 — “URL link to the relevant Historic England record in Heritage Gateway”
• HER_LINK_1 to HER_LINK_25 — the same for the local HER
• HER_PREF_REF — “alternative HER UID that is used to create the Heritage Gateway URL”

Thousands of those strings are sitting in a national dataset HE still publishes. The Mapping Explorer landing page still tells you a click “will take you to the Heritage Gateway” and still points at heritagegateway.org.uk/gateway. They relaunched the catalogue and left their own map wired to the corpse. Not a third party this time. Not SmartFrame. Them.

A public body spent six figures locking pictures, then cancelled the only stable identifier the rest of the web — and its own aerial mapping tool — had been told to use. HIAS Principle 5 was “a national overview should continue to be delivered online through the Heritage Gateway.” Principle 6 was that knowledge “should not be at risk of loss, fragmentation… or system obsolescence.” They managed both in a fortnight.

Let the photographs free. Out of copyright: a JPEG. Need a tidy file for print: charge for the file, not for the looking. And if you change a national URL scheme, redirect the old ones. A statutory archive is not a Premier League still, and a mapping explorer with thousands of dead links on the organisation’s own website is not a launch.

Bloodlines in the barrows

Diachronic reuse of Neolithic burial monuments: What the Kinship Test Found

After my posts (https://www.sarsen.org/2026/09/borrowed-tombs-or-ozymandias-in-wessex.html and  https://www.sarsen.org/2026/08/a-stranger-in-family-grave.html) on Vuković et al. 2026, a query arose that the paper's main text doesn't answer. Did the study test whether the people buried at each site were related to each other, especially the three infants buried together in the Fir Tree Field pond barrow? And what exactly were the Monkton four: all siblings, or a mother and three children? The genetics finds two boys among the children, where the bones suggested one. Children can't be reliably sexed from the skeleton, so this is a correction rather than a surprise.

The main text only has room for Monkton. The answers are in the supplement. The kinship test found one first-degree family, one third-degree pair, and no link across the gap at the three reused monuments. The triple infant burial turns out to be the most surprising result of all. Figures are from Table 1 and Supplementary Data Files 9 and 10, unless noted.

How the test was run

READv2 was run on pairs, with the Neolithic individuals kept apart from the later ones so the baseline is not mixed. A first-degree pair is a parent and child, or full siblings. The authors specify a pair as siblings only where the overlap is at least 40,000 markers. Lower pairs are printed and not used for that call. The Neolithic pairs are Supplementary Data File 9. The later pairs are Data File 10. There is no published pair that joins an early burial to a later burial at the same site.

Monkton-up-Wimborne

Four people in one oval grave, dates overlapping 3364–3093 BC. The main text treats two arrangements as the most parsimonious: all four full siblings, or a mother of 30–45 with three children of about 5, 9 and 10. The site note says a woman of about 30, two girls of 5–10 and a boy of about 9. Genetic sex does not match that reading of the bones. Table 1 has two males and two females.

ID	Skeleton	Date (95.4%)	Coverage	Sex	mtDNA	Y
muw002	F23B	3364–3101	0.34×	XY	K1a+195	I2a2a
muw003	F23C	3363–3101	0.11×	XX	K1a	–
muw001	F23A	3357–3093	0.78×	XY	K1a+195	I2a2a1a1a2
muw004	F23D	3340–3096	0.41×	XX	K1a+195	–

All six pairs are called first degree. Two clear the 40,000-marker line, and both are called full siblings: muw001–muw002 (42,708 markers, kinship 0.24) and muw001–muw004 (49,696, kinship 0.25). The other four are first degree on less data, and the supplement will not say sibling rather than parent for those.

Pair	Markers	Call	Kinship
001–004	49,696	First degree, siblings	0.25
001–002	42,708	First degree, siblings	0.24
002–004	27,645	First degree	0.24
001–003	15,849	First degree	0.26
003–004	10,282	First degree	0.21
002–003	8,788	First degree	0.25

So muw001, muw002 and muw004 are one generation. muw001 and muw002 share I2a2a; muw001 is called to a finer branch. Three of the four are K1a+195. muw003 is called only K1a, on the lowest coverage and the lowest mitochondrial coverage (7.25×, against 37–107× for the others). That is a shallower call, not a second maternal line. The paper's statement is that all four lie within K1a.

muw003 is in every pair below 16,000 markers. She is the person the test cannot place. If she is the adult woman, a mother and three children fits, and the three children are already the sibling set. If the adult is muw004, the test has already called her a full sibling of muw001, so she is an older sister, and muw003 is another sibling rather than the mother. The sample list is F23A = muw001, F23B = muw002, F23C = muw003, F23D = muw004. Which of those four skeletons is the adult is not in the paper. That is the only fact still needed.

The later man is not in that test. muw005, 1519–1321 BC, coverage 0.14×, is male, mitochondrial haplogroup H, Y-haplogroup R1b1a1a2. No READv2 pair links him to the four. The runs were split by period. The paper calls him unrelated on ancestry, not on a kinship coefficient. He was laid on the surface of the partly silted central pit, not in the family's grave, and covered with a small flint cairn. His mitochondrial haplogroup is not theirs, and neither is his Y line.

Fir Tree Field pond barrow

Fourteen centuries later and not far away, on the same stretch of Cranborne Chase, the question is reversed. At Monkton the bones suggested a family and the genetics confirmed it. At Fir Tree Field a triple burial of infants looks like a family, and the genetics says otherwise.

Five individuals, all Early Bronze Age. The site note identifies four of them. F14a, F14b and F14d are the three infant inhumations in F14. F6 is a separate infant, 18 months to 2 years, extended, with a Food Vessel. F27 is in the sample list and not in that note.

ID	Feature	Who	Date (95.4%)	Sex	mtDNA	Y
dfb004	F14d	Infant	2008–1748	XY	U5b2a4	R1b1a1a2a1a2
dfb002	F6	Infant, 18 months–2 years	1955–1781	XY	I1a1	R1b1a1a2a1a2
dfb005	F27	Not described in the site note	1920–1769	XX	U5b2a1a2	–
dfb003	F14b	Infant	1886–1750	XY	T2b2b	R1b1a1a2
dfb001	F14a	Infant	1882–1745	XY	H1b	R1b1a1a2

The five mitochondrial haplogroups are five different ones. That excludes a mother and child, and siblings through the mother, among these five. The three in F14 are unrelated to each other: kinship 0.01 (F14a–F14b, 21,445 markers), 0.02 (F14a–F14d, 20,579) and 0.03 (F14b–F14d, 25,940), against about 0.25 for a first-degree pair. A brother or a parent inside the triple would have shown. One was called at Monkton on fewer markers than any of these.

The relationship that was reported is not inside the triple. dfb002 (F6) and dfb004 (F14d) are third degree: 39,862 markers, kinship 0.06. Same Y-line, R1b1a1a2a1a2, and different mitochondrial haplogroups, I1a1 and U5b2a4. The supplement calls it a distant paternal relative. Between two infants, third degree most simply means first cousins, children of two brothers, though the test cannot say which third-degree relationship it is. The authors treat it as one of the two post-Neolithic results that clear their reporting line. The other is not a relative: cfa001 and a previously published Canada Farm individual are the same person sampled twice.

The other two boys in F14 are called only to R1b1a1a2, the clade above that longer type. That can be as far as their data go. It is not a second reported relationship. F27 is unrelated to the other four on the pairs that could be read. She is the one individual in the barrow without a described context: female, dated with the others, with ordinary Bronze Age ancestry, but not in the site note, so her age, grave and position are unknown here. Her mitochondrial haplogroup, U5b2a1a2, sits on the same U5b2 branch as the F14d infant's U5b2a4, but on a different twig. That shared maternal ancestry lies far too deep to count as family.

Across the gap

Which leaves the question the paper was built around. At the three monuments where a later burial sits in an older one, the later person does not share a mitochondrial haplogroup with anyone earlier sampled there.

Site	Earlier	Later
Monkton-up-Wimborne	Four, all within K1a, 3364–3093 BC	muw005, H, 1519–1321 BC
Sisters Long Barrow	K1a4a1b, J1c3, H4a1a1, 3888–3527 BC	slb016, H1ak1, 1534–1436 BC
Sale's Lot	lot005, K1b1a1, 3946–3654 BC	lot001, H6a1b, 2622–2467 BC

No READv2 pair was published between the early and late individuals at these sites. A first-degree link across those gaps was not a plausible thing to find, and was not tested in the published runs. A maternal line from the particular people sampled is ruled out by the haplogroups. A paternal line is ruled out only at Monkton, where both the early boys and the later man have Y data and they differ (I2a2a against R1b). At Sisters and Sale's Lot the later burials are women, so there is no Y line to compare. Descent from Neolithic Britain in general is a question for the ancestry models, and for my earlier post.

Within the whole set, the only kinship READv2 reports between different people is the Monkton cluster and the one third-degree pair at Fir Tree Field. Everywhere else the within-site pairs are unrelated, or the overlap was left unused.

What it adds up to

So, to answer the query: they did look. The kinship test was run on everyone with enough data, and it simply found very little. At Monkton it found the family everyone expected, and it is one fact away from saying which family. If the adult woman is F23C, she is the mother of three full siblings. If she is F23D, all four are siblings. Someone with the skeletons can settle that.

At Fir Tree Field it found something nobody expected. The three infants laid together in F14 were not brothers, and not close kin at all. Whatever put them in one grave, whether a shared death, a shared season or a shared rite, it was not close family. The one family thread in the barrow runs between graves instead: the infant in F6 and one of the F14 three were cousins, or something like it, through their fathers. The pond barrow held a lineage, loosely, but not a household.

And across the gap, nothing, which is what anyone should have expected. Kinship tests find parents, siblings and cousins. They cannot bridge twelve centuries, let alone twenty-two. The strangers in the old graves were not the builders' grandchildren. Whether they were, in some remote and untraceable way, their descendants is a question kinship tests cannot answer.

---

Vuković, N. et al. (2026). Diachronic reuse of Neolithic burial monuments by Bronze Age newcomers in Southwestern Britain. Scientific Reports 16:26819. doi:10.1038/s41598-026-66094-z. Table 1; p. 6; site notes for Monkton-up-Wimborne and Fir Tree Field pond barrow; Supplementary Data Files 9 and 10. The position of muw005 on the surface of the infill is from the excavator's account.

Borrowed tombs, or Ozymandias in Wessex?

A paper in Scientific Reports gives the genomes of thirty people from twelve burial places in Gloucestershire and Dorset, buried between about 3800 and 1400 BC. Those laid down before 3000 BC belong with the Neolithic farmers who raised the long mounds. Those laid down from about 2550 BC are a different people, with the ancestry that comes into Britain among the Beaker dead. At three of the old monuments the later dead were put into earth their own ancestors had not built. I looked at the science: https://www.sarsen.org/2026/08/a-stranger-in-family-grave.html but there is a another puzzle.

Continued use is not the puzzle. The puzzle is what the use was for. It may be a tradition, taught on, even after the bloodline has changed. Or it may be Shelley's traveller, who comes on "two vast and trunkless legs of stone." He reads the boast on the pedestal. He does not inherit the kingdom. 

The graves look like that second kind of use, and the years are the reason. At Sale's Lot a woman was laid in a mound twelve centuries after the people who built it. At Monkton-up-Wimborne a man was set down in an old hollow seventeen centuries after the family buried there. At Sisters Long Barrow a young woman went into a mound twenty-two centuries after the men who lay in it. Not a rite kept up year by year. Two moments, far apart: one around 2500 BC, as the Beaker dead were beginning to arrive, and one around 1500 BC, when axes were being carved on the Stonehenge sarsens. The later dead were mostly not the builders' descendants. They wanted the places. Wanting a place is what the traveller does.

Beacon Hill, south of Newbury, is the same act with the paperwork kept. The hill was already an Iron Age fort, and the new grave was cut into it some two thousand years after the rampart. There were older barrows on it, it had carried a beacon, and skeletons had been dug up there long before. In April 1923 the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, who had stood at the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb and then died in Cairo, asked to be buried there in a mound of earth, with trees and stones, and not to have more than fifty pounds spent. He was laid in a shaft in the corner of the fort. We know what the grave was for, because he wrote it down. Nobody that day was keeping the faith of the people who dug the ditch. They were taking a high old hill and giving it a meaning of their own.

Twelve centuries, or seventeen, or twenty-two, is long enough for a place to stay standing and lose its name. It does not show that anyone could say who lay inside it. Stonehenge, which might have been the exception, is not much stronger. The Avenue, dug across the change of people, does carry the solstice line out to the river, and that is the best case for a plan remembered. But the later pits outside the sarsens are irregular, and nobody agrees what they were for. What is plain is a long habit of adding a mark: axe-heads cut in the stones, then names, one said to be Wren's, and cremated ashes still placed there, unofficially, in our own time. A claim, repeated. Not a plan obeyed. Shelley's man could read every word that had been cut. The sands were level all the same.

The genomes settle only the blood. It largely changed. A memory could still have been carried across that break: strangers can be taught, and children can forget. Nothing in these graves shows the teaching. The nearest we can come to watching a handing-on is watching one being made. At Stonehenge now, the druids keep a faith they have given the place, one the builders could not have handed them. The handing-on had already stopped, more than once, before anyone in the eighteenth century thought to begin it again. That is not a tradition out of the Neolithic. It is the traveller, returned, finding a family for the ruin. Carnarvon may have his mound. The druids may have their dawn. Neither are keeping an older faith. Both are giving a high old place a meaning of their own.

Vuković, N. et al. (2026). Diachronic reuse of Neolithic burial monuments by Bronze Age newcomers in Southwestern Britain. Scientific Reports 16:26819. 

Carnarvon’s instruction is the codicil to his will, April 1923. 

Shelley, P. B. (1818). Ozymandias.

Woodhenge: the line and the rings

Abstract. The claimed solstitial alignment of Woodhenge is not supported by the layout of its posts. It rests on a line drawn on Cunnington's 1929 plan at the midsummer sunrise bearing (49.4° true, the first gleam in 2500 BC). When the 156 marker posts are fitted ring by ring, every long axis lies north of that bearing. The outer rings A and B are 10–12° north of it, and their 95% ranges exclude the sunrise. The inner rings C–F are 4–8° north. They are too loosely defined to rule the sunrise out, but they do not demonstrate it. Along Cunnington's line from the centre, the view passes through ordinary gaps between posts, and the gaps themselves are centred a few degrees further north.

The June post on Woodhenge accepted the textbook position: the long axis of the timber rings points, broadly, at midsummer sunrise. That position rests on one line, the dashed axis on Maud Cunnington's 1929 plan, labelled "line of midsummer sunrise, elevation of horizon 30′". The new Woodhenge 3D model allows that line to be tested against the post positions themselves. The result is that the line meets the sunrise, but the rings do not follow the line.

The model and its checks

The model places the 156 ring posts (A 60, B 32, C 16, D 18, E 18, F 12) on the concrete markers set out by the Cunningtons, in Ordnance Survey coordinates, on lidar-derived terrain. The twelve supernumerary holes are not included. Two independent plans were used to check the geometry:

• Cunnington's 1929 plan, with its postholes detected automatically and matched to the model by a scale-and-rotation fit: median residual 0.24 m (90% within 0.48 m), rotation −0.1°, no measurable stretch.
• The 2008 GPS survey of the markers by the Jenks brothers: median residual 0.06 m, rotation 0.0°. Three ring-A markers in the east-south-east are missing from that sheet but present on Cunnington's plan.

The centre of the post pattern lies within 1 m of the published position of the monument. The markers are an interpretation of the holes rather than the holes themselves, and they do not precisely preserve the excavated positions (The Past, 2025), but the fit to Cunnington's own plan shows that any such error is well below a metre.

The sun

Sunrise and sunset are computed with the astronomy-engine library (apparent positions, standard refraction, solar semi-diameter 0.27°) against a skyline measured from the lidar terrain at an eye height of 1.6 m above the centre. In the solstice direction that skyline stands at 0.45–0.51°, in good agreement with Cunnington's 30′. For 2500 BC the most northerly midsummer sunrise falls at the following true azimuths:

• first gleam: 49.4°
• half disc: 49.8°
• full disc on the horizon: 50.2°

The modern equivalent (first gleam) is 50.1°. Midwinter sunset in 2500 BC falls at 229.7–230.6°, over a skyline of 0.28°. On this terrain the south-western horizon is lower than the north-eastern one; any obstruction of the midwinter sunset would have to come from something not in a bare-earth model, such as vegetation.

Cunnington's line

Registered to the markers, Cunnington's dashed line lies at 49.4° true and passes within 0.3 m of the centre of the post pattern. It therefore points at the first gleam of the 2500 BC midsummer sunrise to within a tenth of a degree. On the plan the line is marked 50¾° from her north arrow. When the plan is registered, that arrow sits about 1.3° west of true north, which accounts for the difference between the label and the registered bearing.

Figure 1. Cunnington's 1929 plan with the model's marker posts (blue circles) superimposed. Her dashed line runs south-west to north-east at 49.4° true. The orange and green lines are the long axes fitted to rings A–B and C–F. Plan: Cunnington 1929.

The line is drawn at a sunrise bearing through the centre. Nothing on the plan shows it being derived from the posts, and the question is whether the posts agree with it.

Where the rings point

The long axis of each ring was found by fitting an ellipse to its post positions (least-squares conic fit). Uncertainty was estimated by bootstrap: 3,000 resamples of each ring's posts, each post also displaced by a random error of 0.3 m, the fit repeated each time. As a check, the axis of best mirror symmetry of each ring was found independently. It agrees with the ellipse axis to within 3.5° for rings A–E. For ring F the fit is unstable.

Ring	Posts	Size (m)	Long axis	95% range	Short of 49.4°
A	60	44.8 × 40.7	39.7°	35.3–44.1°	9.7°
B	32	39.0 × 34.6	37.5°	32.0–43.2°	11.9°
C	16	29.9 × 25.3	41.0°	32.7–49.6°	8.4°
D	18	23.1 × 19.2	44.4°	34.0–53.3°	5.0°
E	18	18.1 × 14.0	45.2°	35.7–54.6°	4.2°
F	12	11.8 × 8.6	42.7°	26.6–59.7°	6.7°

Azimuths are true (OSGB grid bearing + 0.17°).

Figure 2. The fitted long axis of each ring, with its 95% bootstrap range, against the 2500 BC midsummer sunrise (shaded) and Cunnington's line (dashed).

Every best estimate lies north of the sunrise. None of the rings can point at any sunrise, since 49.4° is as far north as the sun ever rises here. The rings fall into two groups:

• Rings A and B lie about 10–12° north of the sunrise, and their 95% ranges exclude it.
• Rings C–F lie 4–8° north. Their ranges include the sunrise, or in the case of C only just reach it, because rings of 12–18 posts this close to circular do not fix an axis well. If only positional error is allowed for, without resampling the posts, the range for C (35.9–46.0°) also excludes the sunrise, while D (38.6–50.3°) and E (39.4–50.8°) still just include it.

This division matches the suggestion by Chadburn (2010) and Chadburn and Ruggles (2017) that only rings C–F follow the astronomical axis. The fits support it, and add that rings A and B are measurably off it. In Ruggles and Chadburn's grades of precision, C–F sit at the "broadly solstitial" level of about 5°. A–B fall outside it.

The sightline

The Cunningtons watched the midsummer sunrise from the site in 1927 and believed that a gap in the posts could have been used to observe it (The Past, 2025). Along Cunnington's line from the centre, the nearest post centres are as follows:

Ring	Nearest post, NE (m)	Gap centre, NE	Nearest post, SW (m)	Gap centre, SW
F	0.94	46.9°	0.18	238.5°
E	0.30	42.6°	1.07	227.9°
D	1.16	46.5°	0.18	220.8°
C	1.79	45.4°	1.31	223.6°
B	1.04	45.9°	0.37	223.8°
A	0.43	47.4°	0.42	231.0°

Distances are from the post centre to the line. The gap centre is the bearing of the midpoint of the gap the line passes through.

At every ring the line crosses an ordinary inter-post gap. Only ring B's gap is wider than its normal spacing (13.0° against 10.9°), and no corridor is left open along the line. Towards the north-east, the view clears the posts as long as the E posts were less than about 0.6 m across and the A posts less than about 0.85 m. The A posts are estimated at 0.3 m (Marshall et al. 2024). The diameters of the D–F posts are not known. Towards the south-west the line passes 0.18 m from a D post and from an F post, which would block it unless those posts were under about 0.35 m across. The gaps themselves are centred on 42.6–47.4° in the north-east, averaging about 46°, and 220.8–238.5° in the south-west. The open corridor through the rings therefore runs a few degrees north of Cunnington's line, not along it.

Figure 3. The 3D model at first gleam, midsummer 2500 BC, in plan view. The sun ray (yellow) runs along Cunnington's line (white). The fitted C–F axis (green) and A–B axis (orange) diverge from it. Posts are drawn at a uniform 0.64 m diameter.

What this changes

The solstitial axis at Woodhenge is a property of Cunnington's line, not of the timber rings. The line was drawn at the sunrise bearing through the centre of the rings, and the alignment as usually stated derives from it. Measured against the posts:

• rings A and B are oriented about 10–12° north of the 2500 BC midsummer sunrise, and their 95% ranges exclude it;
• rings C–F are oriented 4–8° north of it, which is consistent with a broad solstitial intent but does not establish one;
• the clear sightline along the line depends on post diameters that are known only for rings A–C, and the free corridor through the rings is centred a few degrees further north.

Because the axes lie north of any possible sunrise, they cannot be solar on any date. Lunar and stellar targets are available. At the major standstill of about 2498 BC, the most northerly moonrise (upper limb, over the same skyline) falls at 39.7° and the most southerly moonset at 218.0°. These coincide with the ring A axis (39.7°) and the A–B mean (38.6°/218.6°). Capella in 2600 BC, first visible 1–2° above the horizon, rises at about 43–45°, on the C–F axis (43.3°). Neither coincidence carries much weight. Solar and lunar extremes together offer about a dozen target directions, and the rising and setting points of the first-magnitude stars fall within 3° of roughly a third of all azimuths. The ring axes span 37.5–45.2°, each with a 95% range of 9° or more, so choosing a target ring by ring enlarges the chance further. Nothing independent points to the moon or to Capella at Woodhenge, and no lunar claim for the rings has been published. The coincidences are recorded here so that "north of the sun" is not read as "aligned on something else".

The June post concluded that the long axis of the rings "does point, broadly, the right way". That holds only for the inner rings, and only at the broad end of the precision scale. It does not hold for rings A and B.

Limits

All of the geometry uses marker positions checked against Cunnington's drawn plan, which is itself her record of the holes. An error common to both would not be detected. An ellipse is one model of the ring shape. Thom's egg-shaped constructions define the axis differently and would give different figures. The bootstrap treats posts as interchangeable, which is crude for rings of 12–18 posts. The results would be most improved by the D–F post diameters and an independent survey of the excavated holes.

Sources

• Chadburn, A. 2010. "Case study 2.1: Stonehenge World Heritage Site, United Kingdom." In C. Ruggles and M. Cotte (eds), Heritage Sites of Astronomy and Archaeoastronomy in the Context of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention. Paris: ICOMOS/IAU, 36–40.
• Chadburn, A. and C. L. N. Ruggles. 2017. "Stonehenge World Heritage Property, United Kingdom." In C. L. N. Ruggles (ed.), Heritage Sites of Astronomy and Archaeoastronomy in the Context of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention: Thematic Study no. 2. Paris: ICOMOS, 41–62.
• Cunnington, M. E. 1929. Woodhenge: A Description of the Site as Revealed by Excavations. Devizes.
• Marshall, P., A. Chadburn, I. Hajdas, M. Dee and J. Pollard. 2024. Woodhenge, Durrington, Wiltshire: Radiocarbon Dating and Chronological Modelling. Historic England Research Report Series 94/2024.
• Ruggles, C. L. N. 2006. "Interpreting Solstitial Alignments in Late Neolithic Wessex." Archaeoastronomy 20: 1–27.
• Ruggles, C. L. N. and A. Chadburn. 2024. Stonehenge: Sighting the Sun. Liverpool University Press / Historic England.
• The Past. 2025. "100 years of Woodhenge: tracing an archaeological icon, from discovery to new dating evidence."
• Jenks brothers. 2008. GPS survey of the Woodhenge marker posts (unpublished plan).
• Cross, D. Astronomy Engine (software library).
• Model and data: github.com/TimDaw37/stonehenge-block-3d.

Woodhenge - The 3d Model

 

An interactive 3D model of Woodhenge, accurately georeferenced with the sun, sky and moon modelled over the age of the monument: https://timdaw37.github.io/stonehenge-block-3d/woodhenge/

Stonehenge - The Complete 3D model

 

Autumn Equinox Sunrise

Stonehenge, rebuilt stone by stone and set moving: timdaw37.github.io/stonehenge-block-3d is a free, interactive 3D model of the monument, built from survey-locked stone positions on real LiDAR-derived ground — open it in a browser and walk around all 93 stones, or watch the sky itself move over them.

The sun and moon travel across the horizon in real time, not as a fixed marker: a time slider and "Sun's arc" / "Moon's arc" controls animate the rise, with Gleam, Half orb, and Full orb settings for exactly when a disc counts as up.

An Epoch control swings the whole sky between Modern and 2500 BC, or any year typed in. Go back to 2500 BC and the pole star marker moves too — from Polaris to Thuban — the slow wobble of the Earth's axis, not a rounding error.

A Newham mode draws the station stones' own sightlines — long sides for the moon's furthest rising and setting points, short sides for the solstice sun — as lines running through the stones themselves, with Most Northerly / Most Southerly toggles for the moon's extremes, and a readout comparing the stone-pair bearing against the live sky azimuth side by side.

A Complete view shows the monument with a theoretical complete sarsen build: every lintel in place, the fallen stones ghosted rather than erased. Terrain, orbit and top-down views, and hover-for-coordinates in both OSGB and WGS84 are built in throughout.

Source and data are open on GitHub.

Ramson Cliff erratic: a second thin section still points Cornubian, not glacial

A second thin section, same answer: still more Cornubian than glacial.

Prof Slack has kindly loaned a second thin section cut from the original hand specimen of the Ramson Cliff (Croyde) epidiorite — the ~700 kg block at ~80 m OD on Baggy Point. Discussion with Dr Mik Markham, who knows Cornubian greenstones and the axe-head groups as well as anyone, prompted a fresh transmitted-light description. It confirms the account in Daw, Ixer & Madgett (Quaternary Newsletter 167, 2026) with only small corrections.

The rock is a highly altered ophitic microgabbro with relict clinopyroxene, no olivine and no quartz. Secondary minerals are dominated by brown-green hornblende and colourless-to-green actinolite, two generations, with actinolite the later, and by minor chlorite, epidote and clinozoisite. Biotite and white mica were not confirmed. That assemblage matches the outer aureole of the Dartmoor Granite as described in the BGS Okehampton memoir, and is consistent with Cornubian contact metamorphism more broadly. It does not match non-aureole Devon or Cornish greenstones, which reach actinolite grade only and carry albitised, sericitised feldspar; nor does it match the Welsh Ordovician metadolerites on the Irish Sea route. A Scottish Dalradian source cannot be excluded on the amphibole evidence alone, but remains less likely on transport grounds; further tests on the relict pyroxene chemistry and plagioclase composition would settle it.

What has not changed is the emplacement argument. The block has been used as evidence that Irish Sea ice reached ~80 m OD on this coast. That reading was already thin: first recorded standing upright in pasture in 1969, absent from earlier maps and photographs, angular and unabraded, and the only claimed erratic on the south Bristol Channel shore above ~30 m OD. A Cornubian source does not prove human movement, but it does make a lone high-level glacial drop even less likely. A second slide from the same specimen does not turn an isolated, poorly documented boulder into proof of high-level ice, nor into a stepping-stone for glacial bluestones on Salisbury Plain.

Full description below.

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Rob Ixer's Analysis

A second thin section from the original hand specimen was generously loaned by Prof Slack and prompted discussions with Dr Mik Markham, an authority on Cornubian greenstone axes and on the petrography of Cornubian altered greenstones.

A petrographical examination of it confirmed the original petrographical description (Daw et al. 2026) albeit with some minor corrections. The un-named green amphibole is identified as actinolite. Trace amounts of white mica/muscovite and mixed muscovite-chlorite were not confirmed (the latter was probably misidentified mixed chlorite–limonite-stained chlorite) but trace amounts of epidote with high interference colours were. The suggestion that the rock could be Cornubian in origin is maintained.

The rock is a highly altered microgabbro, hence locally plagioclase–pyroxene have their characteristic ophitic relationship. It comprises relict primary pyroxenes showing both high and low interference colours, unaltered to highly altered plagioclase feldspar, and skeletal and equant-shaped opaques including probable titanomagnetite. The degree of alteration varies on a small scale and secondary alteration minerals are dominated by brown-green amphibole (‘hornblende’) and green actinolite and minor chlorite, with trace amounts of titanite, epidote and clinozoisite. White mica, if present, is very rare. Amphiboles replace and pseudomorph pyroxene but also occur as discrete and distinctive fine-grained mosaics intergrown with chlorite and enclosing very minor titanite, possible zircon and feldspar (perhaps albite). Texturally there is a strong suggestion of more than one generation of amphibole, with actinolite being the later.

Unzoned polysynthetically twinned plagioclase is variably altered from largely unaltered to highly altered, hence much relict feldspar is present. The main alteration is to fine-grained actinolite crystals, with this alteration initiated along cleavage and twin planes. Very minor amounts of chlorite, epidote with high interference colours and probable clinozoisite with low interference colours accompany actinolite. Plagioclase altering solely to fine-grained clinozoisite is rare; fine-grained white mica could not be positively identified.

Pyroxene displaying both high and low interference colours is the only primary mafic mineral; no olivine or pseudomorphs after olivine are present. Relict pyroxene is enclosed within lower-relief amphibole; both are in optical continuity. Much pyroxene is altered to colourless to grey-brown-green amphibole with a good cleavage and with very fine-grained titante lying along that cleavage; this amphibole is enclosed within green actinolite rims. Amphibole fringes about pyroxene are absent but total replacement is common. Other pyroxenes are altered to green actinolite along cleavage and fracture planes or to mosaics of fine-grained stubby actinolite. Locally pyroxene with low interference colours is altered to amphibole with unusual yellow interference colours.

Although a positive identification of the opaques is not possible in a normal thin section, their habit (equant and skeletal) and texture (abundant opaque ilmenite laths within a less opaque different phase; titanite replacing magnetite) strongly suggest the presence of altered titanomagnetite. Lobate opaques that would suggest ilmenite are absent. Opaques are replaced/pseudomorphed by actinolite and an opaques–actinolite association is widespread.

Pleochroic colourless to green actinolite (brown-grey-green amphibole is absent from this association) forms mosaics comprising euhedral to subhedral blocky crystals. Although some replace/pseudomorph pyroxene and opaques, most infill spaces between plagioclase laths; all mosaics are fine-grained but they vary in grain size between aggregates. Some just contain actinolite, others actinolite in minor chlorite, and a few are chlorite-rich with actinolite laths, often radiating, growing into the chlorite. Trace amounts of titanite, a high-relief accessory mineral within its pleochroic halo (zircon perhaps) and small twinned feldspar with fluid inclusions (possibly albite) are present but rare.

Colourless to very pale green pleochroic chlorite with blue and very rarely brown interference colours is the second most abundant secondary mineral after amphibole in amount, but is uncommon. It forms thin cross-cutting veinlets or occurs as a very minor secondary mineral in plagioclase. Most chlorite occurs as short stubby crystals surrounding stubby actinolite or as the main phase enclosing actinolite laths and enclosing minor titanite and possible albite. Some chlorite laths are intergrown with a phyllosilicate with high interference colours; although superficially it looks like muscovite, it may be limonite-stained chlorite. Biotite and positively identified muscovite were not recognised.

Trace amounts of titanite may replace primary iron–titanium oxides or lie along cleavage planes in pseudomorphing amphibole. Small euhedral rhombic titanite is present within stubby actinolite–chlorite segregations.

Very minor amounts of high-relief epidote form thin laths along twin planes in plagioclase; other high-relief epidote-group minerals with blue interference colours are visually identified as clinozoisite.

Trace amounts of sulphide, now altered to limonite, are associated with actinolite mosaics.

Possible zircon has a pleochroic halo when enclosed in actinolite.

This new petrographical description continues to allow the possibility that the erratic is Cornubian in origin, namely a microgabbro that has suffered contact metamorphism from the underlying granites. It cannot be matched to any of the main IPG Group Cornubian axe groups (Groups I–IV), but nor can many Cornubian axe-heads.