LiDAR Lens goes outdoors: field mode for walkers

 

LiDAR Lens now has a second face. Alongside the full research view (now called Lab) there is a stripped-down Field mode built for a phone held in one hand on a footpath: where am I, where is the earthwork, which way do I walk, and what is it when I get there.

Open it at lidarlens.sarsen.org/?ui=field, or switch between Field and Lab with the toggle at the top of the screen in either view.

What Field mode shows

The screen carries a search box (place, postcode or grid reference), zoom buttons and a single control panel at the bottom. Everything else in Lab — the fifteen visualisations, sliders, data layers and analytical tools — is hidden. The LiDAR fills the whole screen rather than sitting inside the lens circle.

Four view buttons cover what matters outdoors:

• Hillshade — single low sun from the north-west, the conventional reading of earthworks.
• VAT — the Combined VAT visualisation (Kokalj & Somrak 2019), blending hillshade, slope, openness and sky-view; better for low banks and ditches that a single sun misses.
• Old map — the Ordnance Survey six-inch map (1888–1913) over the aerial photograph, useful for field boundaries, lost tracks and antiquarian annotations.
• Aerial — the aerial photograph alone, for orientation against hedges, gates and buildings.

Coverage is the whole of Great Britain where 1 m LiDAR exists: the Environment Agency composite DTM for England, the Welsh Government DTM for Wales and the Scottish Remote Sensing Portal data for Scotland, all Open Government Licence and fetched live.

Finding a monument

1. Set a target. Tap ◎ Target, then tap the feature on the map — or search for a place or grid reference. The target's grid reference appears in the panel.
2. Allow location. The phone's GPS position is shown on the map and updated continuously. With a fix, the panel gives the distance and compass bearing from you to the target.
3. Use the arrow. By default the arrow is drawn on a north-up map. Tap Use compass and the arrow turns with the phone, so it points the way to walk. On an iPhone this needs permission for motion and orientation, asked for the first time the button is pressed.
4. Recentre. Panning the map stops it following you. Recentre returns to your position (framing the target too when it is close) and resumes following.
5. Arrival. Within about 25 m of the target the panel reports that you are there; the threshold widens to as much as 50 m when the GPS fix is poor.
6. What is it? Lists the heritage records within 30 m of the target, or of your position if no target is set: Historic England (National Heritage List and Aerial Investigation and Mapping) in England, Cadw and Coflein in Wales, and Historic Environment Scotland and Canmore in Scotland, with links to each record and Creative Commons photographs from Geograph where they exist. Measure this feature from the DTM gives its dimensions from the LiDAR.
7. Done. Clears the target and leaves the map where it is, for looking at the LiDAR around you.

The target is stored in the page address, so a link copied from the browser opens with the same target set — a simple way to send someone a barrow to find.

Putting it on your phone's home screen

Field mode is set up as an installable web app. Added to the home screen it gets its own icon, is named LiDAR Field, opens straight into Field mode and runs full screen without the browser's address bar.

iPhone and iPad (Safari)

1. Open lidarlens.sarsen.org/?ui=field in Safari.
2. Tap the Share button (the square with an upward arrow).
3. Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen.
4. Keep the name LiDAR Field or change it, and tap Add.

Recent versions of iOS also offer Add to Home Screen from the share menu in Chrome and Edge.

Android (Chrome)

1. Open lidarlens.sarsen.org/?ui=field in Chrome.
2. Tap the ⋮ menu at the top right.
3. Tap Add to home screen (shown as Install app on some phones) and confirm.

Location permission. If the panel reads Location blocked, the browser has refused GPS access to the site. On iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Safari Websites, set to While Using the App with Precise Location on. On Android: in Chrome, tap the icon to the left of the address, then Permissions → Location → Allow. Tap Retry in the panel afterwards. The map and target work without location; only your position and the distance and bearing are lost.

Before you go

• Signal. LiDAR tiles and records are fetched as you look and kept in the browser's cache, so ground already viewed reloads instantly. Browsing the walk at home on the phone over Wi-Fi is the best preparation for a valley with no signal. This is a cache, not a guaranteed offline map: an area not viewed beforehand will not load without a connection.
• Access. Field mode does not show rights of way. Check the route in Lab beforehand, where the public footpaths, bridleways and byways layer and CRoW access land can be switched on. Many features on the LiDAR lie on private land.
• Bare earth. The model is a terrain model with trees, hedges and buildings removed. A bank clear on screen may be under scrub on the ground.
• Scheduled monuments. Looking is fine; metal detecting, digging or driving on them is not.
• GPS accuracy. A phone in open country is typically good to a few metres, worse under trees or beside steep slopes. Use the target to get close, then the ground itself.

The code is open source on GitHub. Faults can be reported from the Report a fault link in Lab, which fills in the browser details automatically.

Alfred and the Danes: an animated campaign map, 865–899

The Danish wars of 865–899 are documented almost entirely by one source tradition: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Asser's Life of King Alfred (which follows the Chronicle closely for these years) and Æthelweard's Latin chronicle. Together they give a year-by-year itinerary of winter camps, sieges, named battles and treaties. They do not give routes, force sizes or, apart from Asser's account of Ashdown, tactical detail. Several of the named places cannot be located with confidence.

A new interactive map, Alfred and the Danes, 865–899, sets that itinerary out in 34 steps on a terrain base, from the arrival of the Great Army in East Anglia to Alfred's death in October 899. Each step is keyed to its annal and, where relevant, to Asser's chapter.

Day 3 of the Edington campaign, 878. The open dots are alternative identifications for Ethandun and Iley.

What the map shows

Danish movements are drawn in red and West Saxon movements in blue. Movements by sea, or where the starting point is not recorded, are dashed. Markers distinguish camps, battles, sieges, fortifications and treaties, and are coloured by which side held the field. The sources give places, not routes, so each line simply joins the recorded places in order and is schematic.

The background is built from:

• OS Terrain 50 relief, with a tint deepening from 40 m to 260 m OD;
• a mask of land below 6 m OD, as a rough indication of former wetland in the Somerset Levels and the Fens;
• named main rivers from OS Open Rivers;
• Roman roads from the Itiner-e dataset (static version 2024), drawn solid where the course is conjectured and dashed where it is hypothetical.

The Burghal Hidage burhs and the boundary in the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum can be switched on. The coastline is modern. It does indicate though the 9th-century Wantsum Channel, the Limen estuary at Appledore and the earlier Fen edge.

Uncertain sites

Six of the named places are disputed: Ashdown, Meretun, Cynuit, Egbert's Stone, Iley and Ethandun. For each, the map draws the routes to a working identification, rings it, and shows the other candidates as open dots. Selecting another candidate redraws the routes. The candidates and their main proponents are:

• Ashdown (871). Æscesdun was a name for the Berkshire Downs as a whole. Candidates are Kingstanding Hill near Moulsford, Lowbury Hill, Thorn Hill near Compton and, on antiquarian grounds, White Horse Hill. Asser's single stunted thorn tree does not narrow the choice.
• Meretun (871). Candidates are Martin (Hampshire), Marten (Wiltshire), Marden (Wiltshire), Merdon near Hursley, and Merton in Oxfordshire or Surrey. None is preferred in the literature, and the working point is for display only.
• Cynuit (878). Asser names the fort; the Chronicle says only "in Devon". Candidates are Countisbury, Cannington Camp, Kenwith near Bideford and Castle Hill near Beaford. Historic England treats Cannington as the accepted site, although it lies in Somerset.
• Egbert's Stone and Iley (878). The Chronicle places Egbert's Stone east of Selwood. Proposed sites include Kingston Deverill, Kingsettle Hill, Penselwood and Willoughby Hedge. Iley follows the English Place-Name Society's identification with Iley Oak, the lost meeting-place of Warminster and Heytesbury hundreds.
• Ethandun (878). Edington, Wiltshire is the consensus identification, with the fighting placed on or below the escarpment near Bratton Camp. The Somerset Edington on the Poldens remains a minority alternative.

The Edington march

The 878 campaign gets its own day-by-day sequence at larger scale, because the Chronicle gives an unusually tight itinerary. Alfred leaves Athelney in the seventh week after Easter and rides to Egbert's Stone, where the men of Somerset, Wiltshire and part of Hampshire meet him. After one night he moves to Iley, and after a second he moves at dawn to Ethandun and fights. Asser adds the pursuit to the Danish fortification and the fourteen-day siege, which ends with hostages, oaths and Guthrum's baptism at Aller.

The panel computes straight-line distances for each leg from whichever candidates are selected. With Kingston Deverill and Eastleigh Wood as working sites, the legs are:

• Athelney to Egbert's Stone: 50 km
• Egbert's Stone to Iley: 8 km
• Iley to Ethandun: 10 km
• Ethandun to Chippenham: 21 km

The first leg ranges from about 40 km (Kingsettle Hill) to 55 km (Willoughby Hedge), depending on the candidate. These are minima, not road distances. On any of the eastern candidates, the march runs off the Levels, over the Selwood ridge and up onto the chalk, so the final approach to the Edington escarpment comes from the south-west across the Plain.

Ashdown, 871, with the four candidate sites on the Downs west of Reading.

Chronology

The Chronicle's year in this period began in autumn or at Christmas, so modern dates for the early annals can fall up to a year before the annal number. The battle of Reading, for example, belongs to the turn of 870–871 under annal 871. For the 890s the map follows the corrected chronology; manuscript A numbers several of those annals a year later.

Use

The map steps or plays through the campaigns, and can be panned and zoomed. Each step has its own link, for example #step-878f for Ethandun. Layers for rivers, low ground, Roman roads, the schematic Ridgeway and Harrow Way, burhs and alternative sites are under Layers.

The code and data are on GitHub. Corrections to site identifications, and further candidates with references, are welcome.

Sources

• Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, annals 866–901; Asser, Life of King Alfred, chs 30–56; Æthelweard, Chronicon.
• Hadley, D.M. and Richards, J.D. 2021. The Viking Great Army and the Making of England. London: Thames & Hudson.
• Itiner-e: A High-Resolution Dataset of Roads of the Roman Empire, static version 2024.
• English Place-Name Society, Wiltshire: Iley Oak.
• Exmoor HER: Countisbury Castle.
• Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026 (OS Terrain 50, OS Open Rivers). Natural Earth data in the public domain.

Heritage at Risk 2026: still at risk, on the nation's own land

https://heritage-at-risk-crown.netlify.app/

Historic England has just published its 2026 Heritage at Risk Register. It lists 4,991 entries: 197 were added this year and 85 came off for positive reasons. Those headline totals look like steady progress. The picture is very different when you look at land owned by the Crown, meaning the Crown Estate, the Duchy of Cornwall and other Crown bodies.

The Crown's list is getting longer

In 2025, 97 Crown-owned entries were on the register. In 2026, all 97 are still there, and none has been rescued. Ten more have been added, bringing the total to 107. Nine of the new ones are on the Isles of Scilly, where 46 of the islands' 50 at-risk entries are Crown land, and the tenth is Warren Farm Barn at Chadwell Heath.

These are not recent problems. Sixty-eight of the Crown's entries have been at risk since at least 2013. Historic England records 79 of the 107 as declining, 20 as stable and only 8 as improving.

On our doorstep: the Marlborough Downs

Six Crown-owned monuments on the Marlborough Downs, near us and near Avebury, are still on the list. They are barrows and a farmstead on Bishops Cannings Down, Horton Down and Beckhampton, and they range from Kitchen Barrow to the Horton Down barrow cemetery. All six have been at risk since at least 2013, and all six are declining. Across the wider Marlborough Downs, 36 sites are at risk, down from 38 last year.

The National Trust and Wiltshire

For comparison, 64 entries are on National Trust land, up from 61. All four new ones are on Lundy, and one, the Quarterwall cottages on Lundy, came off. Forty-two of the Trust's entries have been at risk since at least 2013.

Wiltshire and Swindon together have 144 entries at risk, down from 150. Eight came off, including the henge and barrows southwest of Fox Covert on the boundary of Bishops Cannings and Avebury, and the Liddington Warren long barrow. That is welcome news. One genuinely new entry was added, the medieval cross in St Mary's churchyard, Purton.

What should happen

The Crown is not a struggling private owner. It is the nation's own landholder, with professional land agents and considerable income. Yet it has not removed a single monument from the at-risk register this year, its list has grown by ten, and most of its entries are getting worse.

I would like to see a simple step taken: for every Crown and Duchy entry on the register, a published plan and a target date for getting it off.

You can explore the sites yourself on my Heritage at Risk map, which has a slider covering 2013 to 2026.

Figures come from Historic England's 2026 Heritage at Risk spreadsheet and map data. National Trust figures count register sites that overlap Trust land by at least 10%.

The Hunt for the Altar Stone Source - the video

The Youtube video

Altar Stone diagnostic toggle map

The Altar Stone diagnostic toggle map is an interactive screen of candidate source areas for the Stonehenge Altar Stone. Each published diagnostic is a layer that can be switched on or off, so the effect of any one test on the list of surviving candidates can be seen directly. The code and data are in the GitHub repository.

What it plots

The map covers 85 candidate places: Ba/Rb geochemical clusters across Britain and Ireland, plus named sites with published measurements. An Old Red Sandstone underlay from the BGS Geology 625k dataset shows where the outcrop lies. Fourteen layers score each place:

• L0–L9: the baseline screen, covering barium and Ba/Rb geochemistry, mineralogy, zircon ages, thermal maturity and related published criteria.
• L10 and L11: a strontium ceiling and the Sr/Ca ratio, applied only where rock Sr has been measured.
• U1 and U2: chrome spinel (CZi) and illite/smectite expandability, from Pirrie et al. (2026). Both start off.

How to read it

A place is a match only if it fails none of the layers switched on. Each layer has strict and relaxed settings where the evidence allows. Untested is not failed: a place with no data for a layer stays open on that layer. Presets switch one test or group off at a time (leave-one-out), which shows how much each test contributes, and the preset "CZi + I/S ON (Pirrie et al. 2026)" applies the new chrome spinel and clay results.

Several things are deliberately not scored: the ORS between the Midland Valley and the Welsh Borders, the Lanark Basin, Carboniferous sandstones such as the Clifton Rock, and the Sr–Nd isotope result, because the evidence is missing or has no comparison data. The Latheron–Niandt cool sliver is drawn as schematic only.

Limits

The map is a screening tool. A place that survives is untested or consistent with the evidence so far, not identified as the source, and exclusion by elimination covers only the ground that has been sampled. Corrections and additional data are welcome.

The Pirrie, Bevins, Ixer et al paper that prompted the latest update is discussed in a separate post.

Paper: Pirrie, D., Bevins, R.E., Ixer, R.A., Pearce, N.J.G., Turner, P., Power, M.R. et al. 2026. Searching for the origin of the Stonehenge Altar Stone: new sedimentological, petrographical, mineralogical, geochemical and isotopic constraints. Journal of the Geological Society 183, jgs2026-090. doi:10.1144/jgs2026-090

Searching for the origin of the Stonehenge Altar Stone

A paper now published in the Journal of the Geological Society reopens the question of where the Stonehenge Altar Stone came from. Pirrie, Bevins, Ixer and ten further co-authors give the most detailed description of the stone to date: sedimentology, petrography, heavy minerals, clays, geochemistry and isotopes. Their conclusion is that no outcrop of Old Red Sandstone (ORS) examined so far matches it on every count, and that its provenance "has yet to be determined with confidence".

Paper: Pirrie, D., Bevins, R.E., Ixer, R.A., Pearce, N.J.G., Turner, P., Power, M.R. et al. 2026. Searching for the origin of the Stonehenge Altar Stone: new sedimentological, petrographical, mineralogical, geochemical and isotopic constraints. Journal of the Geological Society 183, jgs2026-090. doi:10.1144/jgs2026-090
Data: figshare doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.33993488.v1

Fig. 1. (a) Map of the UK showing the location of Stonehenge and the distribution of non- marine sediments of the Old Red Sandstone. (b) Plan showing the position of the Altar Stone within the Stonehenge monument (c) Photograph looking towards the SW; the Altar Stone (arrowed AS) is lying mostly underneath the two large sarsen stones. (c)
Source: photograph by Adam Stanford.

Where the question stood

The Altar Stone is a block of about six tonnes (4.9 × 1 × 0.5 m) lying flat beneath fallen sarsens 55b and 156. For a century it was assigned to the Cosheston beds of West Wales, following H.H. Thomas in 1923. Bevins and colleagues refuted that in 2020, and in 2023 they excluded the Anglo-Welsh Basin as a whole: of 58 samples, all but four failed on geochemistry and the remaining four on mineralogy. In 2024 Clarke et al. (Nature) dated zircon, apatite and rutile grains from Altar Stone debitage and proposed the Orcadian Basin of NE Scotland. Clarke et al. (2026) later suggested Caithness or the Inverness–Black Isle area as the most likely sources.

What the new paper adds

The study combines previously published in-situ pXRF on the three exposed areas of the stone with new laboratory work on three museum fragments (MS1–MS3): automated SEM-EDS mineralogy, X-ray powder diffraction of bulk rock and clay fractions, cathodoluminescence, C–O isotopes and colour. Sr–Nd isotopes were measured on MS1 and MS2. The characteristics that emerge are:

• A bedding plane. Low-angle illumination in 2024 showed climbing ripples and slumped foresets on the exposed surface. If it is a bedding plane, the bed was at least 0.5 m thick and extended at least 4.9 m. There is no cleavage, and no petrographic sign of palaeosols or near-surface soil formation.
• Chrome spinel. The chrome spinel:zircon index (CZi) is 35.9–38.6 in the three fragments. In ORS comparison data it averages 1.3 on Orkney (n = 35), 1.4 on the Tarbat peninsula, Inner Moray Firth (n = 42), 0.4 on Foula and Shetland (n = 13) and 0.2 in the Lower ORS of Pembrokeshire (n = 32).
• Clay minerals. The clay fraction contains illite, mixed-layer illite/smectite, kaolinite, chlorite and tosudite. The illite/smectite is about 20% expandable in all three fragments. Expandability falls with burial and heating, and the ORS of Caithness and Orkney is below 10%, which excludes them. The clays alone would not exclude parts of the Moray Firth.
• Barium. Dispersed baryte cement gives pXRF Ba of about 1000–5500 ppm (mean 2758 ppm), linearly related to Sr. This separates the stone from ORS analyses in Wales and Orkney.
• Sr–Nd isotopes. ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr is 0.7163–0.7169 and ¹⁴³Nd/¹⁴⁴Nd 0.5119–0.5121. Published Carboniferous sandstones (Leng et al. 1999) have either higher Nd or higher Sr isotope ratios, so there is little overlap. The Nd range of the ORS overlaps closely, but no ORS Sr isotope data exist, so the comparison cannot be taken further. The authors conclude that an ORS source is more likely than a Carboniferous one.
• Diagenesis. Pore-filling kaolinite pre-dates significant compaction; baryte post-dates compaction; both pre-date the dominant poikilotopic burial calcite cement.

What is excluded

• West Wales and the Anglo-Welsh Basin: excluded on earlier geochemistry and mineralogy, and in this paper by the absence of chrome spinel in West and South Wales and Somerset. Welsh Borderland tosudite occurrences are excluded on Ba.
• Orkney and Caithness: excluded on clay expandability. Chrome spinel is also scarce in the Orkney, Tarbat and Shetland samples; Caithness itself was not sampled for it.
• Moray Firth / Tarbat: compatible on clay, excluded on chrome spinel.
• Midland Valley ORS: excluded on abundant lithic grains (Phillips 2007). In the NE Midland Valley, the Stonehaven and Arbuthnott groups have too little I/S expandability, and the zircon populations of the Dunnottar–Crawton to Strathmore groups differ. The Strathmore Group clays are comparable, but its zircons and the texture of its tosudite are not.
• Southern Uplands: chrome spinel is common in the Lower Palaeozoic sandstones, but the Altar Stone contains kaolinite, which indicates it has not undergone low-grade metamorphism.
• Late Carboniferous–Triassic of south-central Britain: no Variscan-age zircons in the Altar Stone.

What remains open

• The ORS between the Midland Valley and the Welsh Borders, where modern heavy-mineral and zircon data are virtually absent.
• Areas with Ba anomalies in stream-sediment geochemistry, including the Lanark Basin and the Fintona Basin of Northern Ireland. The paper reports no chrome spinel, zircon or clay data for the Lanark Basin.
• Carboniferous sandstones recycled from Caledonide sources, such as the chrome-spinel-rich Clifton Rock of the Pennine Basin. Its zircon pattern differs (a large Early Palaeozoic peak, no Neoproterozoic group) and the Sr–Nd data favour the ORS, but the authors do not exclude it.

The diagnostic toggle map

These tests can be switched on and off in my Altar Stone diagnostic toggle map. Nothing to do with the paper or authors, I have just updated it with their data.  Each test is a layer: Ba/Rb screening, K-feldspar, zircon, clay and thermal maturity, strontium (L10, L11), and the chrome spinel (U1) and clay expandability (U2) results of Pirrie et al. The Pirrie layers start off; the preset "CZi + I/S ON (Pirrie et al. 2026)" switches both on. A place survives only if it fails none of the layers switched on, and untested is not the same as failed. Leave-one-out presets show how much each test contributes. The areas listed above as open, and the Sr–Nd result, are not scored on the map.

Relation to the NE Scotland proposal

The paper accepts the zircon, rutile and apatite ages of Clarke et al. and a Laurentian source for the heavy minerals. The argument is that the same age pattern can be shared by several basins, so ages alone cannot identify an outcrop, and that once chrome spinel, clays and barium are added the Orcadian candidates fail. Bevins and Ixer co-authored the 2024 Nature paper, so this is in part a team revising its earlier interpretation. The authors also regard the glauconite reported in one fragment by Clarke et al. (2026) as probably a misinterpretation of SEM-EDS spectra, and caution against relying on a single youngest zircon age.

Caveats

• Three fragments. The new analyses are on three small museum fragments, and the Sr–Nd data on two. Their attribution to the Altar Stone rests on earlier pXRF and petrographic comparison, because the stone itself cannot be sampled.
• Comparison data. The Pembrokeshire CZi value is from unpublished data, and the Orkney, Tarbat and Shetland values come from earlier compilations.
• Elimination, not identification. "No match found" covers only the ground that has been sampled. Large areas of ORS have no modern heavy-mineral or zircon data.
• Coarse Ba screening. National stream-sediment Ba maps are low resolution and can be distorted by historic mining.
• Sr/Ca. Surface pXRF Ca on the in-situ stone is lower than on debitage, which the authors attribute to weathering of the calcite cement. Sr/Ca from the surface pXRF data is therefore biased upward and should be treated with caution.

Why it matters

The origin of the Altar Stone determines the journey and the contacts it implies. A Moray Firth or Caithness source suggests a long coastal voyage; a Lanark Basin source, routes via the Clyde and the Irish Sea; Fintona, a crossing from Ulster. Until a source is identified, the origin is a variable in route modelling, not a fixed point.

The characteristics reported in the paper define the tests a candidate source must pass: high Ba with baryte cement, CZi of about 36–39, illite/smectite about 20% expandable with tosudite, plagioclase far exceeding K-feldspar, and an ORS-type Nd isotope signature. Those are the tests for the next field campaign.

Figures and short quotations are from Pirrie et al. (2026); see the paper and its supplementary tables for the data.

Four Young Officers, Stonehenge 1938

This post is the companion to the short film Four Young Officers, made for Remembrance Sunday 2026: the four Royal Artillery subalterns who painted Stonehenge green in June 1938, and what became of them.

The night of 16 June 1938

By the summer of 1938 the four were serving with anti-aircraft and coast-defence units — Sherrard and Skinner at the School of Anti-Aircraft Defence, Biggin Hill; Peirce with the 22nd Anti-Aircraft Battery at the Royal Artillery experimental camp at Watchet; and Shearme at the Coast Artillery School, Shoeburyness — and had gathered at the School of Artillery, Larkhill, three miles north of Stonehenge, for a gunnery course. On the night of Thursday 16 June, after a mess guest night, they took green line-marking paint from the Larkhill tennis courts and daubed the monument, several of the upright sarsens and the Heel Stone among them, together with road signs nearby. The damage was found on Saturday 18 June. The Times of 20 June reported that Stonehenge “was found on Saturday to have been daubed with green paint” and that “signposts in the vicinity were similarly daubed”. Mike Pitts assembled the fuller sequence from the contemporary press.

Summons and sentence

The four were identified and summoned. The Times reported in July that “four Army officers were summoned for damaging Stonehenge on June 16” and that the hearing “was adjourned until August 9”. On 9 August they pleaded guilty at Salisbury County Petty Sessions. Each was fined £1 and ordered to contribute towards the repair and costs, and the General Officer Commanding, 3rd Division, admonished them. The American weekly TIME, reporting the case on 22 August under the heading “Druidical Sacrilege”, quoted the prosecutor's warning that “It may take 1,000 years for Stonehenge to regain its old weathered appearance”.

Four young officers

They had been commissioned as second lieutenants in the Royal Regiment of Artillery from the Royal Military Academy, with seniority dated 27 January 1938 (London Gazette 34477, p. 587). The Gazette gives the surnames as Peirce and Shearme, where the 1938 newspapers printed Pierce and Shearne:

• William Laurence Sherrard
• William Howard Skinner
• John Edward Passingham Peirce
• John Lambert Shearme

They stood among fifty-two gunner cadets in a single passing-out list. Sixteenth on it was Robin Horace Walford Dunn, winner of the Academy's Sword of Honour, who would be evacuated from Dunkirk, fight in the Western Desert and Normandy, be wounded three times and appointed MC, and in civilian life become a Lord Justice of Appeal; his memoir Sword and Wig records the war into which the cohort was commissioned. Dunn and Sherrard had both come to Woolwich from Wellington College.

What became of them

Captain William Laurence Sherrard served with 12 Battery, 6th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery. In 1942 the regiment was among the anti-aircraft units defending the oil refineries at Palembang, in southern Sumatra. On 14 February 1942 Japanese paratroops were dropped on the refineries and the nearby airfield, and the gunners, the only regular troops in the area, fought them at close range. Sherrard was killed that day at the Pladjoe refinery. He was 24. He was mentioned in despatches, is buried in Jakarta War Cemetery, and is named on the war memorial at Ditchling, Sussex, where his parents lived. His batman wrote to his mother that his son “gave his life at a place called Pladjoe … taking on odds of fifty to one” (Ditchling History Project).

The other three survived the war. The London Gazette records that Peirce, Shearme and Skinner were all promoted major on 27 January 1951, thirteen years to the day after their commission (London Gazette 39132). Shearme was placed on retired pay on 29 September 1958 (41508). Peirce rose to lieutenant-colonel and was appointed OBE in the New Year Honours of 1962 (42552, 1 January 1962). Their wartime postings have not yet been traced.

Notes on the film

The newspaper reports are retyped in the film rather than shown. The photographs of the Heel Stone and the 1938 snapshot (photographer unknown) are from the author's collection; the map of Sumatra is drawn from the NOAA GLOBE land mask. The music is original.

Sources

The London Gazette, issue 34477, 28 January 1938, p. 587 (commission); issue 39132, 23 January 1951 (promotions to major); issue 41508, 30 September 1958 (Shearme's retirement); issue 42552, 1 January 1962 (Peirce OBE).

The Times, 20 June 1938, p. 16, “Stonehenge daubed with green paint”; The Times, July 1938, “Officers charged with Stonehenge damage”.

TIME, 22 August 1938, “Foreign News: Druidical Sacrilege”. time.com

“A night out” (London, 11 August 1938), Waipawa Mail, 14 September 1938, p. 1. Papers Past

Commonwealth War Graves Commission, casualty record of Captain W. L. Sherrard, 12 Bty, 6 HAA Regt RA.

Ditchling History Project, “For the Fallen”. ditchlinghistoryproject.org

Dunn, R. 1993. Sword and Wig: Memoirs of a Lord Justice. Quiller Press. (Dunn's place in the commission list: London Gazette 34477, p. 587.)

Moody, F. 2024. Bygone Salisbury: History of protest at Stonehenge. Salisbury Journal, June. salisburyjournal.co.uk

Pitts, M. 2016. How the Magpie Musicians came to stand for free Stonehenge. Digging Deeper, 5 April. mikepitts.wordpress.com