Is the Bulford Post Alignment to the Midwinter Sunset?

Look along the posts: https://timdaw37.github.io/bulford-posts-3d/

Set Midwinter, Sunset, Full orb. Then Midsummer, Sunrise, First gleam. The question is which of those two pictures you trust.

Midwinter Sunset

Midsummer Sunrise

Stonehenge has the same argument. The axis works both ways, and for a generation the tourist photograph has been midsummer sunrise up the Avenue. Parker Pearson and others have put the weight on the other end: you walk in from the north-east and watch midwinter sunset drop through the Great Trilithon. Ruggles has been careful to say the architecture is precise enough to pick the solstice in space, and that first or last gleam is the closer convention, not that one festival owns the monument.

Harding, Leivers and Silva, in PAST 113, publish the Bulford posts as a solstitial pair — midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset, about 120 m apart, around 2950 BC. Harding found the two structural pits first and only then asked what they pointed at. That is the right order. The question here is only which way the line is better.

The 3D model is the published plan, not the Wessex GNSS. From that plan the posts run 48.31° / 228.31° true. On Bulford’s own skyline, 2950 BC, the six like-for-like events are:

Event	Convention	Azimuth	Miss from the posts
Midwinter sunset	Full orb	228.55°	+0.23°
Midsummer sunrise	First gleam	48.90°	+0.58°
Midwinter sunset	Half orb	229.03°	+0.72°
Midsummer sunrise	Half orb	49.29°	+0.97°
Midwinter sunset	Last gleam	229.53°	+1.22°
Midsummer sunrise	Full orb	49.72°	+1.41°

Full orb at midwinter sunset is the closest of the six — a quarter of a degree, inside a solar radius. First gleam at midsummer is next, half a degree, one disc. The rest are worse.

Two warnings, which do not cancel the table.

You must not mix conventions. First gleam at one end and full orb at the other are different ways of watching. If the same limb is used both ways, winter last gleam is worse than summer first gleam. Reciprocity was never going to give a second bullseye on one straight line: refraction and the solar radius push rise and set apart, and the south-west horizon is not high enough to cancel that.

The picture also flatters the winter disc. The south-west skyline is a local rise at about 880 m, so the sun sitting on it looks planted. The north-east gleam is 5.7 km out. Your eye and the azimuth are not quite the same measurement.

Ruggles’ published rule of thumb is that claimed sightlines of half a degree and better in the old lists were the ones most easily explained as selection, that British prehistoric orientations show no evidence of precision much greater than about 1°, and that a couple of degrees is still a fair orientation in a group of sites (Ruggles 1984, 304–306; 1997, 207). On that scale the midwinter full-orb miss is allowed, the midsummer first-gleam miss is allowed, and neither is a prosecution. A single pair in a crowded pit field still has to beat coincidence.

We do not have the GNSS. Two independent digitising jobs of the PAST plan agree to 0.2 m, which is inside the pit and not the solar miss. The miss may move when the survey comes out. Until then, the model says: if you have to pick one, pick the sun standing on the south-west ridge at midwinter.

Have a go with the table in one hand and the model in the other.

Harding, P., Leivers, M. and Silva, F. 2026. A newly discovered solstitial post alignment in the Stonehenge landscape at Bulford. PAST 113, 2–5.

Ruggles, C.L.N. 1984. Megalithic Astronomy. BAR British Series 123. Oxford.

Ruggles, C.L.N. 1997. Astronomy and Stonehenge. Proceedings of the British Academy 92, 203–229.

3D plan: https://timdaw37.github.io/bulford-posts-3d/

The Bulford posts in 3D

Open this to understand this post: https://timdaw37.github.io/bulford-posts-3d/

Drag to rotate, right-drag to pan, scroll to zoom. Click a pit for its name and coordinates.

Figure: live viewer, along the posts, midsummer, first gleam, 2950 BC.

In PAST 113, Phil Harding, Matt Leivers and Fabio Silva publish two Late Neolithic post-pits at Bulford, about 120 m apart, and argue that they mark the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset of around 2950 BC. Harding’s excavation is the reason we have the pits at all. Out of dozens of ordinary scrapes on that hilltop he picked the two that were actually built as structural post-holes — a metre across, thirty inches deep, ash in the fills — and only then asked what they pointed at. That is the right order. The PAST paper is a proper account of a real discovery, and Silva’s insistence that a claimed solstice has to be tested against the local skyline, not a round number from Stonehenge, is the right question.

In June, before PAST was out, I put down some sceptical notes on the news reports: a crowded pit field, a topographic grain that favours certain orientations, and not enough published geometry to tell coincidence from design. The article now gives the plan, the azimuths they used, and the argument. The next thing I wanted was to stand on that plan and look.

So here is a 3D model of the published figure. All 39 pits from the Wessex plan are marked. The two alignment posts stand in their holes, 8647 at 2 m and 9019 at 4 m, as the paper draws them. The ground is OS Terrain 50 with a 1 m LiDAR inner patch; you can switch to map or aerial. The sun sits on Bulford’s own skyline, with first gleam, half orb and full orb as alternatives, at 2950 BC, 2500 BC or today.

Figure: the Terrain 50 landscape with the post-line.

From the plan the posts run 48.12° grid, 48.31° true. On this horizon, midsummer first gleam in 2950 BC comes up at about 48.88°; midwinter last gleam goes down at about 229.5°. Neither sits on the timbers. First gleam is the closer of the two, about half a degree off. Sunset is further. We do not have the Wessex GNSS coordinates of the pit bases — they have not been released — and every position in the model is digitised from the published 1:1000 plan. Two independent readings of 8647 and 9019 agree to 0.2 m, which is good enough to look and not good enough to prosecute a fraction of a degree. The miss may be in the plan, in the skyline, or in my arithmetic. I would rather put the model out than pretend otherwise.  Ruggles’ working rule is that half a degree is as tight as a two-post solar line can be, about a degree is a fair prehistoric axis, and two degrees is the chance envelope

Have a go. Start with Along posts, Midsummer, 2950 BC, first gleam. Then Midwinter. If the sun and the posts do not agree on your screen either, we are looking at the same thing.

Harding, P., Leivers, M. and Silva, F. 2026. A newly discovered solstitial post alignment in the Stonehenge landscape at Bulford. PAST 113, 2–5.

Earlier notes: Bulford: pits, double henges and a claimed solstice alignment. Code: github.com/TimDaw37/bulford-posts-3d.

Terrain: OS Terrain 50 and EA 1 m LiDAR © Crown copyright (Open Government Licence). Map: © OpenStreetMap contributors. Aerial: ESRI World Imagery. Drafting with Grok; the errors are mine.

The 52 Hillforts of Wiltshire Map

My 2022 list of the 52 hillforts of Wiltshire now has a map. The 52 Hillforts of Wiltshire is a standalone interactive gazetteer: the same 52 sites, numbered north to south, with Oxford Atlas notes and 1 m LiDAR.

Each entry carries its Atlas classification — univallate, bivallate, multivallate; contour, promontory, hilltop — graded by how far the sources will bear. The class is morphology, not date. A single rampart and ditch, as at Oliver's Castle, is typical of the earlier Iron Age on the downs; the multiple circuits at Yarnbury, Battlesbury and Barbury are the regional centres of the middle and later Iron Age, their banks still walking as separate lines. Reuse is common. Old Sarum holds a Norman castle and a medieval city inside an Iron Age circuit, and Vespasian's Camp carries a Roman name it has no claim to.

The working part is the LiDAR. The layers are the Environment Agency LIDAR Composite 1 m hillshade, DSM and DTM. A swipe control sets Esri World Imagery against the DTM hillshade, stripping the tree canopy: Wick Ball Camp and The Earldoms, near-invisible on the ground and on satellite imagery, resolve as bare earthworks. Pick a fort, then drag the gold bar along the bottom of the map.

Also on the page: search by name, parish or grid; filters for type, confidence and access; GPX, GeoJSON and KML downloads; and links out to OS Maps, the Atlas record and the NLS six-inch.

The Standing Stones of North West Devon

There is a corner of Devon that the megalith books skip. Dartmoor gets its rows and circles, Exmoor gets its miniliths and stone settings, and between and west of them lies a stretch of country — North Devon and Torridge, the Hartland peninsula round to Ilfracombe, the Taw–Torridge estuary, Lundy — that barely appears at all.

I have put together a map and gazetteer of what is actually there: 

nw-devon-standing-stones.netlify.app

It is not a long list. That is the point.

What's on it

Forty-eight records. A handful are unambiguous: the Whitestone above Ilfracombe, the three scheduled Damage Barton stones on the coast, the Mattocks Down pair, nine granite uprights on Lundy, and the Yelland double row on Isley Marsh — excavated in the 1930s and buried under estuary silt since the 1990s, which is the only lowland stone row in the county and the one monument here that would be famous anywhere else.

Most of the rest are quartz. That is the local signature: vein quartz and white quartzite blocks, the Gospel Stone above Woolacombe Bay, the Konk Stone in the next field, the scatter along Lee Downs. Whether some of those are set stones or quarried-out bedrock left standing is a live argument, and I have not tried to settle it.

Then there is a long tail. M.G. Palmer walked the Ilfracombe district in 1937 and published a list of standing stones; the Ordnance Survey went back in the 1950s and decided a good many of them were rubbing-stones, bound-stones or hedge clearance. Both readings are on the map, graded. And there are stones that are not standing stones at all but keep getting counted as such — the Devil's Stone at Shebbear, which is a recumbent sarsen with a folk custom attached, and West Middleton, which is scheduled as forty-eight post-medieval staddle stones and has been mistaken for a stone row more than once.

Everything is graded: certain, probable, possible, doubtful, lost, folklore, rejected. The rejected records stay in deliberately, so nobody rediscovers them.

The tithe layer

The pale diamonds are something else again: field-names from the 1830s tithe apportionments. Long Stone, Grey Stone, Hoarstone, White Stone, Broad Stone, Quoit.

A name is not a date. Some of these will record a prehistoric stone that has since gone into a hedge; many will be medieval boundary markers; some will be nothing at all. But in a region this thin on surviving monuments, the place-name evidence for stones that are no longer there may matter as much as the ones that are. Four fields called Long Stone west of Georgeham, with Longstone Lane running south from them, and no upright to be found — that is worth recording even though it proves nothing.

Toggle the layer separately. Where a grid reference is known the diamond sits on the field; otherwise it sits at the parish centre, which means it is a label, not a location.

Why bother

Two reasons.

The first is that absence is data. If you want to understand what the megalith builders of the south-west were doing, it helps to know where they were not. Mattocks Down, on the last downs before Exmoor, has a fallen menhir, a standing companion, a stone row recorded by Westcote in 1630 and destroyed since, and lost circles planned by Chanter and Worth. There is nothing remotely like that anywhere west of the Taw. The blank is real and it has a shape.

The second is more practical. Scattered across the HER, Palmer's paper, National Trust records and nineteenth-century notes, this material is effectively invisible. On one map with consistent grading, you can at least see what the questions are — and most of the remaining questions need boots and a tape measure, not another database.

A hat-tip to the Megalithic Portal

Anyone who has looked for a stone in the last twenty years owes a debt to the Megalithic Portal. Andy Burnham and a couple of decades of contributors have built the standing general resource for prehistoric sites in these islands, and it is the place most people start — including me.

This gazetteer is not drawn from it. The records here come from Historic England, the Devon HER, National Trust heritage records, Palmer 1937, Chanter and Worth, and the tithe apportionments, which makes the two independent where they overlap. That is useful in itself: two catalogues built from different sources that broadly agree are worth more than one.

It is also a much narrower thing. The Portal covers the world and does what a general gazetteer should — photographs, visitor logs, condition and access ratings, comments from people who have actually stood next to the stone and argued about whether it is bedrock. This site does none of that. It covers one district, west of Exmoor, and it grades records by how much confidence the sources will bear. That is the specialist job, and it only makes sense on top of the general one.

So: complementary, not competitive. If you want to see what a stone looks like, who has visited it and what they made of it, go to the Portal. If you want to know what the documentary record will and will not support for this particular corner of Devon, this map is the narrower tool.

Caveats

Almost nothing here is dated. Historic England's formula for standing stones is Late Neolithic to the end of the Bronze Age, for the few excavated examples — and none of the few excavated examples is in this area. "Neolithic" on this map is a possibility, not a result.

Many of these stones are on private land. Inclusion is not an invitation; the Yelland stones are on a tidal RSPB reserve and are, in any case, under the mud.

Corrections and additions welcome. Particularly from anyone who has walked Palmer's list.

The chalk has eaten my homework

Brian John has now put numbers on the claim that the Salisbury Plain we walk on is not the Salisbury Plain an Anglian ice sheet would have stood on. In today’s post the land surface is said to have fallen by 8–10 m over the last half million years. That piece sits on a run of earlier arguments: that the southern glacial limit is farther south than the mapped evidence (February 2022); that Salisbury Plain itself shows no traces of ice action; that sarsens and solution hollows are a long-standing dilemma (December 2016; August 2016); that periglacial processes have done much of the work (January 2023; Murton et al. in the Lyell volume); that Newall’s Mound is a solution hollow inverted into a hummock capped by 1.5 m of clay-with-flints, likened to a kame (28 August); and that the chalk downs are a “serene landscape but lethal geochemistry” in which any till would be destroyed.

The Paleogene silcrete that became the sarsen scatter is given 30–100 m of subsequent lowering, with a conservative 50 m used as a working figure. Quaternary rates are lined up from several places: 15–30 mm per millennium on modern UK chalk, 20–25 mm/ka from the Norber pedestals, 10–15 mm/ka in the Driftless Area, ~20 mm/ka on the Normandy chalk plateau. The conclusion offered is that “the landscape as it was at the time of the Anglian Glaciation … is simply not there any more. End of story.”

The rates are in the right order of magnitude. Chalk does dissolve. Solution pipes, coombe rock, head and clay-with-flints have been mapped across Wessex for more than a century. Jukes-Browne already knew that pure chalk does not contain enough insoluble residue to make the plateau clays we see. None of that is new, and none of it requires a Pleistocene ice sheet on the Wiltshire downs.

What the new numbers do not do is make a till sheet disappear without leaving the fraction that chalk chemistry cannot touch.

Alkaline water does not eat silicates

White Chalk is often more than 98% CaCO₃. Meteoric water charged with carbonic acid removes that matrix. The porewaters and rendzina soils that result are alkaline to circumneutral, buffered by excess carbonate. They are not an acid bath. Quartz, zircon, rutile, tourmaline and dense igneous clasts do not dissolve on Quaternary timescales. Frost shatters a dolerite. Periglacial attrition turns it into gravel, sand and heavy-mineral grains. It does not vaporise the silicate cargo into thin air.

Eight or ten metres of surface lowering on a carbonate plateau concentrates that residue; it does not erase it. Clay-with-flints is exactly that sort of remanié — chalk gone, insolubles left, later mixed with Palaeogene cover and cryoturbated. John now says as much of Newall’s Mound: an old hollow whose flanks have lowered while the fill stayed put, so the sink becomes a low hummock under 1.5 m of clay-with-flints. That is ordinary downland inversion. It is not a vanished Irish Sea till sheet, and dressing it as a kame analogue is a mountain made from a molehill. If ice had dumped even a thin and patchy till, the same logic still applies. After the carbonate matrix had gone you would still expect quartz, zircon, rutile, tourmaline, micro-lithics of dolerite and rhyolite, and far-travelled pebbles in residual soils, in those inverted caps, and in the river gravels that drain the Plain.

That test has been run.

The grains are local

Stream sands draining Salisbury Plain carry detrital zircon suites whose age spectra match recycled southern British Mesozoic and Palaeogene sources — the London Basin / Thanet Formation pattern — not a first-cycle dump from the Lower Palaeozoic of Wales or a crystalline northern shield. In the 2026 U–Pb study, 550 zircon analyses produced a single concordant grain at 464 ± 16 Ma, the Darriwilian age that characterises the Mynydd Preseli / Fishguard Volcanic Group sources of the Stonehenge rhyolites. One grain in hundreds is the opposite of the Welsh igneous signal required if ice had carried dozens of multi-tonne bluestones and ground the rest into rock flour. The apatite record is dominated by a Cenozoic reset (~60 Ma), not Palaeozoic basement.

Clast counts in the Wiltshire Avon terraces are the same story at pebble scale: local flint, sarsen and Greensand chert, not the exotic suite an Irish Sea or Welsh ice stream would impose. Field survey still fails to produce a bluestone erratic in an undisturbed Quaternary context away from the monument and its debitage. The Newall boulder matches Craig Rhos-y-felin rhyolite of the Stone 32d group and was moved by people. Coastal patches in North Devon or Somerset do not put a grounded lobe on the Wiltshire chalk plateau.

If 8–10 m of the old land surface has gone, those minerals and clasts are what should have been concentrated into the modern drainage. They are present. They do not show a Welsh ice sheet.

Models are not deposits

Numerical ice-sheet models are not a substitute for sediment on the ground. A model can be made to grow ice almost anywhere if the climate forcing, sliding law and bed friction are generous enough. That is why older, lightly constrained experiments are still cited as showing it was “perfectly possible” for ice to reach east of the chalk scarp. Possibility in a sensitivity run is not a reconstruction.

The reconstructions actually tied to mapped margins and dates — BRITICE-CHRONO and the later ensemble tests against flow geometry and deglaciation timing — put Devensian Irish Sea ice to the Celtic Sea shelf edge and onto parts of the north Devon and Somerset coasts. They do not put a grounded lobe over the Wiltshire chalk plateau. The Anglian ice sheet, the one usually invoked for a 450-ka till on Salisbury Plain, is even less a creature of those high-resolution Devensian models. Its limit of preserved evidence remains well north of Wessex.

And even if a future ensemble were forced across the downs, the prediction would still be a first-cycle Welsh and Irish Sea mineral load in the Avon sands and terrace gravels. That load is not there. A model that contradicts the grains is a discarded run, not a hidden ice sheet.

The loop has a new rung

The argument has retreated through a closed set of auxiliary hypotheses:

1. Missing moraines and till → cold-based ice.
2. Need large megaliths moved → warm-based basal plucking.
3. Missing gravel-sized erratics across the Plain → corrosive chalk chemistry (27 August).
4. Why the bluestones survive at one later monument → left unexplained.
5. New: the land surface itself has been lowered by 8–10 m (29 August), so the original deposits “must long since have disappeared.”

Each failed prediction is reclassified as a feature of the model. The fifth step is the same move as the third, only taller. Surface lowering is not in dispute. What it does not licence is the claim that durable silicates vanished with the carbonate. After 150 years of stratigraphy, terrace clast surveys and grain-scale U–Pb geochronology, the record across Salisbury Plain is not silent. It is negative.

A stranger in the family grave

Thirty new genomes from southwestern Britain: Bronze Age newcomers burying their dead in thousand-year-old Neolithic tombs — and why we still can't say whose ancestry the last seven per cent was.

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Around 3200 BC four people were buried together at Monkton-up-Wimborne in Dorset. Close family — two first-degree pairs, one mitochondrial lineage between them. Either four siblings, or a woman and three children aged about five, nine and ten. The grave was sealed.

Fifteen hundred years later somebody opened it, laid a man in the middle of the earlier cut and capped him with flint. Not related to them. Not descended from them. From a population that didn't exist in Britain when they were buried.

The same at Sisters Long Barrow, where a young woman was placed in a scoop cut into the top of the mound two millennia after the three men beneath her — and at Sale's Lot, where the secondary burial is also a woman. Two of the three reused monuments in the new paper by Vuković and colleagues received women. The authors are right that three burials prove nothing. It is a well-timed three, six weeks after aDNA showed the Upton Lovell "shaman" — goldworking toolkit, ceremonial cloak, battle axe — was female.

(a) Map of southwestern England showing the location of each of the investigated burial sites. Black square on the inset map indicates the location of the study area. (b) Radiocarbon-dated individuals in the study per site (y-axis). For each individual, the 95.4% calibrated probability interval is shown in grey. Individual labels on the x-axis are coloured blue (male) and red (female). The orange dotted vertical line represents the point estimate for the Amesbury Archer; its 95.4% calibrated probability interval is 2470–2239 BCE. - Fig 1 from Vuković et al.

The paper covers thirty individuals from twelve sites in Gloucestershire and Dorset, c. 3800–1400 BC. Everyone before about 3100 BC looks like a European Neolithic farmer; everyone after about 2550 BC looks Bell Beaker. The archaeological reading — monuments keeping their meaning for people with no ancestral claim on them — is careful and, I think, right.

I'm interested in a different part.

The question they tried to answer

British ancestry changed by something like ninety per cent between 2450 and 2000 BC (what that number measures). The interesting remainder is the seven to nine per cent of Neolithic-farmer ancestry in English Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age people.

Everything turns on where it came from. Descended from Neolithic Britons, and some Neolithic families had descendants. Carried across the Channel by incomers who already had farmer ancestry, and it says nothing about British survival at all. Same number, opposite meanings — at length and formally.

This paper tests it better than anyone has. The usual weak point is the local Neolithic reference, pooled from wherever data happen to exist. Here it is nine individuals from the same regional transect, in some cases the same monuments as the targets.

What came back

The earliest Bronze Age individual — the Sale's Lot woman, c. 2620–2460 BC, buried within a generation or two of the Amesbury Archer — comes back entirely continental. Most of the rest are estimated at zero, or at a positive number whose error bars include zero. Likewise across a further 118 English Bronze Age individuals from the published record.

One exception, which the paper flags as its clearest positive: a woman from Fir Tree Field Ring Ditch, at 45.3 per cent local Neolithic ancestry. The confidence interval runs from 4.2 to 86.3 per cent.

The strongest evidence in the study for Neolithic British ancestry surviving cannot distinguish a trace from most of a genome. It rests on fewer than fifty thousand markers. And she lived around 1400 BC, in the window where farmer ancestry across Bronze Age Britain rises again — a rise generally put down to renewed contact with the continent.

The part that matters

These are whole genomes, shotgun-sequenced and publicly deposited. Every downstream analysis then reduces them to single random base calls at 1.2 million pre-chosen positions — the 1240K panel, the field's common currency for a decade.

Not laziness: it is the only way to talk to the comparative dataset. But the panel discards the rare variation carrying information about specific recent shared ancestors, which is the one thing that could separate a Dorset Neolithic grandmother from a Rhineland one. Sequenced, then thrown away at harmonisation, in a paper published three weeks ago.

The honest qualification is that coverage is thin — median 0.27×, range 0.014–0.78× — so the better analysis probably wouldn't have run anyway. Which makes the constraint structural rather than accidental. (These libraries also mean English Chalcolithic–EBA shotgun data now exist, where when I wrote there weren't any.)

Where it leaves things

The arithmetic is unchanged: seven to nine per cent, well measured, unaddressed. What has changed is that the failure has been reproduced independently, with a better local reference than published data allow, by people with a laboratory.

The man in that Dorset grave wasn't descended from the family whose bones he was laid among. That much is solid, and striking. Whether anyone in Bronze Age Britain descended from Neolithic Britain, we still can't say.

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Vuković, N., Bernhardsson, C., Edlund, H. et al. Diachronic reuse of Neolithic burial monuments by Bronze Age newcomers in Southwestern Britain. Sci Rep 16, 26819 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-66094-z

Rock on a Rope, how to level the lintels

 

In an earlier post on setting out the Stonehenge sarsens I suggested a simple way of establishing a horizontal: https://www.sarsen.org/2014/08/how-to-construct-level-sarsen-circle.html , place two posts either side of a small pool of water (an “Aurochs skin full of water”) and sight across their tops. Adjust the posts so their tops both have the same length of post above the water surface, the line of sight is level and can be transferred around the circle. 

A complementary approach starts from a different but equally basic physical fact: a free-swinging pendulum released from rest reaches essentially the same height on the opposite side of its arc. A tall central timber mast, a long fibre rope, and a heavy stone or timber bob are all materials the Late Neolithic builders already used. Release the bob from one marked position and it will rise to the matching height on the far side; adjust a second post until the bob just reaches it. For more accuracy, you release the pendulum from post A and it marks on post B the end of the first swing. When it comes back to post A the second time, it's going to be just a little bit lower because of air resistance. Halfway between the first and the second mark on post A will be the same as a mark on post B. Subtle and easy to get an accurate reading. Repetition is quick, free and easy so a reliable and repeatable measure can be recorded.  Rotate the plane of swing or shift the mast a short distance and a small set of levelled reference posts can be established around the intended circle. Once three or four reliable points exist, ordinary sighting or taut-string transfer finishes the job.

The two methods form a small family of “gravity levels”:

• Water-pool / skin method – immediate visual reference, excellent for a local datum, but needs a still surface and a reliable container.
• Pendulum method – needs no liquid, generates widely spaced equal-height points from one central mast, and is cheap to repeat when wind deflects the swing.

Neither is attested archaeologically. Both are simply possible with the technology of the time and address the practical problem of creating a consistent horizontal on sloping chalk so that the sarsen uprights could finish with level tops for the continuous lintel ring. And avoid the need for a water filled pig intestine or portable troughs as are often suggested as alternatives.

Pendulum method being tested

Beyond Stonehenge, Treasures in the Landscape - Stonehenge Access All Areas, Ep 9

The Sarsen Transport Routes - A Least Cost Model

A terrain model you can argue with. Open this to understand this post: https://sarsenroute.netlify.app/ 

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Fifty of the fifty-two sarsens at Stonehenge came from West Woods, near Marlborough. That was settled in 2020 by matching their chemistry to the source. It leaves the interesting part open: how thirty-tonne stones travelled 25 km south, across the Vale of Pewsey, to the monument.

Several routes have been proposed over the years, mine among them. None has field evidence behind it. So rather than argue for another line on a map, I set out to ask a narrower question:

If the only things that mattered were the shape of the ground, what it is made of, and the water on it — where would the cheapest road run?

The answer is not a line. It is a corridor: 37 km², about 5% of the landscape searched. Within that band the terrain barely cares which way you go.

Doing it blind

I am one of the people with a published route, which is a problem. So the method was written down and committed before any data arrived, and the published proposals — including my own — were sealed in a file that stayed closed until the result was frozen. No proposed route, mine included, is scored anywhere in the paper.

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https://sarsenroute.netlify.app/ 

What the ground says

Four things came out that I did not expect.

The vale crossings are on sand, not clay. National geological mapping shows the Vale of Pewsey floor as one great smear of Gault clay and greensand. Zoom in to 1:50,000 and the five places where roads actually cross the vale turn out to sit on greensand benches — firm ground — with the real clay lying to the west, between Stert and Urchfont. Across all 360 model runs, not one metre of route touches Gault. The clay is real. Nothing goes near it.

There are only five crossings in eleven kilometres of vale — and adding every footpath and bridleway to the metalled roads adds no new ones. The same five places. When footpaths don't create new crossings, the crossings are being fixed by the ground.

Better data made a question harder, not easier. Two ways down off the Marlborough Downs, 2.8 km apart, are what the model has to choose between. At 50 m resolution they differ by 1.7% in cost. At 1 m, measuring the gentlest line the ground allows, they differ by 1.2 percentage points of gradient. More resolution made them more alike. Huish is not steep ground.

What separates them isn't the slope. It's use. One descent — Walkers Hill — carries a worn way running continuously from 219 m down to 140 m at a steady 6%, with the dished profile of a holloway. Andrews and Dury drew a road down it in 1773 and none down the other. The Huish face has a narrow farm track and nothing else.

Andrews and Dury's map of 1773

The bit I find most interesting

With no thumb on the scale, the model preferred the unused descent.

That isn't a bug, it's a bias — and I suspect it's general. A 50 m terrain model averages a scarp face. A smooth, unwalked hillside averages nicely. A hillside with a deep worn track in it averages badly. So the model kept choosing the easier- looking slope precisely because nobody had ever used it.

Feed in the evidence that one descent was used and the other wasn't, and it moves. But the model needed telling. It could not work that out from the ground alone.

What it can't do

A least-cost path is not a route. It knows nothing about ownership, tradition, season, weather or who you were allowed to walk past. It says what the ground permits, not what people did.

And it doesn't reproduce my own route. I think the stones came down Walkers Hill and crossed the vale beside Honey Street, on a low rise you can see on the ground. The rise is real — 1 m laser survey and the terrain model both find it, standing a couple of metres above the ground either side. What isn't shown is that it was made, or that anyone used it. The model doesn't go that way, and I've left that disagreement in the paper rather than tidy it out. A model that agreed with me would be worth less.

Have a go yourself

The model is online as a set of sliders: sarsenroute.netlify.app

Three hundred and sixty routes, pre-solved. Turn up the fear of hills, or of wet feet, or of river crossings, and watch the corridor move. There is no correct setting — that's the point. The route is a function of what you think a hauling party was most afraid of, and the tool makes that dependence visible instead of hiding it behind one confident line.

The full technical paper, with the method, the data and the things that went wrong, is on https://www.researchgate.net/publication/413532460_Modelling_the_sarsen_transport_route_West_Woods_to_Stonehenge_A_blind_least-cost_analysis_over_layered_open_data and https://www.academia.edu/172184320/Modelling_the_sarsen_transport_route_West_Woods_to_Stonehenge_A_blind_least_cost_analysis_over_layered_open_data.

Data: OS Terrain 50, BGS Geology, Environment Agency LIDAR (all Open Government Licence), OpenStreetMap. Analysis and drafting with Claude and Grok; the errors are mine.

Avebury 3D Fly Through

A 3D topographical fly through of the Avebury Landscape - https://avebury-3d-flythru.netlify.app/ . Play with it and get back to me with comments. It is schematic and only shows a sample of the monuments, but importantly it shows Silbury in relation to its neighbouring hills.

All built with Open Source Data so is freely shareable.

The various periods which you can switch between in the 3d model.

Click to expand

Why We Still Don’t Know Where Britain’s “Missing” Neolithic Ancestry Came From

I’m not a geneticist by trade. I’m an amateur who got stuck on a question that the big Beaker papers leave half-open, and then spent a long time trying to close it with public data only—the same call sets, tables and annotations everyone else can download.

The question sounds small. After the great ancestry turnover in Britain around 2450 BC, English Chalcolithic–Early Bronze Age genomes still carry roughly 7–9% ancestry that looks Middle/Late Neolithic-related. Where did that residue come from?

• Local British farmers absorbed into incoming communities?

• Or continental people who were already mixed before they arrived?

Those are different pasts. One implies survival and incorporation on this island. The other implies the “British-looking” fraction was already baked into migrant groups. Group averages hide the difference. You need to know whether almost everyone carries a thin layer, or whether a few people carry a lot and most carry none.

I thought public IBD, f-statistics, Y/mt labels, and the shape of published ancestry estimates would settle it. They don’t. What I think I have produced—and why I’m bothering to post—is a clearer map of why they don’t, and therefore where the problem has to be solved next. Not a funding pitch. A diagnosis.

What I actually found

1. The residue looks population-wide, not a mosaic of survivors.

On the Booth × Olalde overlap (n = 28), once one extreme individual (I2462) is set aside, the group is statistically homogeneous at about 7.15%. Between-person scatter is small; models where only a minority carry the component and everyone else carries none are excluded. Booth’s gradual rise through time reproduces—and it is a rise in everyone. That is a real result, and as far as I can tell it hasn’t been stated this way with a scripted dispersion bound behind it.

It still doesn’t tell you provenance. An already-mixed import is uniform from day one. A local pulse absorbed over ten to fifteen generations is uniform by the time we sample Early Bronze Age people. Same snapshot. Different histories.

2. The “trace it home” instruments fail on public products.

Long shared segments (IBD), allele-frequency contrasts aimed at British private drift, and uniparental “insular” screens all break under ordinary audits: leave-one-out, site pruning, shared-depth truncation, positive controls. The discriminating information—rare variants, fine Y structure, long-segment continuity at time depth—isn’t reliably in the 1240k / AADR-shaped data we all use. Sometimes the burial still holds it; the assay and the label conventions don’t.

3. Those are two different kinds of failure.

Three instruments fail because information was discarded (capture + harmonisation). The residue-shape instrument fails because information was erased (admixture before these people lived). Collapsing both into “we need more aDNA” is how you waste the next decade.

I also built a Sardinian re-imputation instrument to ask whether public IBD nulls are partly old pipelines rather than ascertainment. It validates within poles; the decisive cross-pole test is specified and not run due to the constraint of my available resources.

Where and how to solve it (not “who should fund it”)

If the goal is provenance of that 7–9%, the map is annoyingly specific:

A. Where the assay threw the information away

Hold the same individuals and change the data product: shotgun (or denser) sequencing → modern imputation → rare-variant / fine-lineage / IBD methods. Especially useful where the same person already exists in both capture call sets and shotgun releases (a clean ascertainment test). Published library-quality metrics for the people I’d prioritise suggest this is practical for most of that set, not all—some look too thin on public annotation alone.

B. Where time erased the information

Don’t keep sequencing well-sampled Early Bronze Age individuals expecting residue structure to reappear. Sample closer to the transition—Chalcolithic / earliest Bronze Age—where an absorbed local pulse might still show heterogeneity. That is a dating-and-excavation problem as much as a sequencing problem.

C. What not to confuse with a solution

More Beaker genomes won’t answer this. Ireland isn’t a free continuity control across the same interval. Collapsing Y strings to “I2” and calling it local doesn’t survive a shared-depth check. And a homogeneous ~7% background is evidence about structure, not a passport stamp for “British Neolithic survival.”

Why post this as an amateur?

Because the literature often states the residue, then slides past the provenance question—or treats every failed test as “low power” instead of “wrong information class.” I’m not claiming a final β. I’m claiming a usable negative architecture: four instruments, two kinds of limit, and a concrete split in where the next honest attempt has to go.

The draft paper: 

https://www.academia.edu/171955479/The_last_seven_per_cent_a_known_unknown_in_the_British_Beaker_transition_Four_instruments_two_kinds_of_limit_why_the_provenance_of_Neolithic_ancestry_in_Early_Bronze_Age_Britain_cannot_be_resolved_on_published_data

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/412356174_The_last_seven_per_cent_a_known_unknown_in_the_British_Beaker_transition 

Full deposit (pre-registrations, results, code, audit trail):

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21995822 (https://zenodo.org/records/21995822)

https://github.com/TimDaw37/british-neolithic-ibd-audit-supplement

If I’ve got something wrong in the genetics, I want to hear it. If the diagnosis is roughly right, the next useful work isn’t another average—it’s either denser data on the right people, or older people on the right dates.

───

• “Uniform at 7% is a result. It just isn’t a provenance result.”

• “Some missing answers are missing chips. Some are missing centuries.”

• “I’m an amateur. The deposit is public. Please break it if you can.”

The Plain Truth About Wildfires

 

Chalk downland has three available trajectories, and only one preserves the habitat as designated. It can be grazed to a standard. It can burn. Or it can be under-grazed, in which case succession returns it to coarse grass, scrub and ultimately wood — though the route to wood runs through a long phase of high fire hazard, so the third option tends to collapse into the second. The largest chalk grassland in north-west Europe has been demonstrating what the second produces for the better part of a century.

The habitat is semi-natural, a product of clearance and sustained grazing rather than undisturbed succession. The sheep-and-fold system held the downs open by grazing the hill and folding the flock on valley arable, exporting nutrients from hill to field year on year. That impoverishment is the basis of the botanical interest: low herbs persist because nothing vigorous can establish to shade them out. The habitat therefore has no equilibrium of its own.

Prescriptions have shifted over the last two decades from a uniformly short sward with zero tolerance of scrub toward structural mosaics, on the sound grounds that short turf serves a narrow suite of species and little else. Marsh fritillary and Duke of Burgundy, both notified features of Salisbury Plain, require tall tussocky vegetation and successional scrub margins. Structural diversity, however, means standing dead material — upright brome and tor-grass, unpalatable past early summer, accumulating a dense basal layer annually, and favoured by nitrogen deposition into a system whose interest depends on being nutrient-poor. In spring the taller sward retains moisture; in drought the same material cures into fuel.

The uncontrolled experiment

Salisbury Plain Training Area holds roughly 390 square kilometres of chalk under military control since 1897, with the SSSI, SAC and SPA covering 19,690 hectares and notified for twenty-five features. Grazing is logistically constrained: stock must be enclosed and moved around firing schedules, and research on the Plain has largely had to work on ungrazed swards. In the impact areas the constraint is absolute. Unexploded ordnance excludes the fire service from range danger areas, and the standing position on impact-area fires is to suspend firing, monitor, and let them burn out; water cannot be dropped directly, since low flying risks detonating ordnance by heat. Figures obtained under Freedom of Information put wildfires linked to MoD training sites at 1,178 between 2020 and August 2025.

Fire as a management agent

Natural England's Integrated Site Assessment of the SSSI (2014–15) records that wildfires in the Central Impact Area help produce species-rich swards in places by removing thatch build-up, and that Centre for Ecology & Hydrology work there has shown pronounced cyclicity in devil's-bit scabious — the marsh fritillary's foodplant. The feedback is straightforward: undergrazing accumulates dead material, dead material carries fire, fire removes it, herbs recover. The revegetating shell craters produce short-sward grassland supporting rare plants including early gentian, and are thought to act as fire refugia for marsh fritillary. The ordnance provides the firebreaks.

Fire and grazing are not equivalent instruments. Grass fires remove biomass without discrimination — work on grassland invertebrates on the Plain characterised burning and mowing as indiscriminate in what they take, against the selective defoliation a grazing animal provides. Fire takes tussocks and anthills along with the thatch, and anthills do not resprout, nor do the twelve nationally rare and scarce bryophytes for which the Plain is notified, nor the lichens. Woody growth, by contrast, is only top-killed: hawthorn and blackthorn survive at the root and return.

What the regime selects for

The same assessment describes the fires as an unreliable and potentially hazardous management tool that possibly promotes tor-grass. It records tor-grass as having increased substantially on the Central Impact Area since the mid-1990s, with no control available other than grazing and vehicle compaction along tracks; a CEH aerial-photograph study commissioned alongside it found the extent of Brachypodium rupestre significantly expanded there over the preceding decade. Natural England classes tor-grass as a negative indicator species.

Tor-grass is rhizomatous, unpalatable, litter-forming and a vigorous resprouter — a grass optimised for precisely this regime. The trajectory in the impact area is therefore not toward scrub but toward a fire-maintained monoculture: structurally open, botanically impoverished, and self-sustaining, since each burn returns the ground to the species best placed to reoccupy it.

This is the grass–fire feedback operating as expected. Fire is a weapon of grasses, implicated in the expansion of open grassy biomes through the late Miocene, but a weapon for grasses carrying the requisite traits — and on the chalk the grass holding it is the one under suppression. The prairie and steppe analogy fails for a further reason: those systems are grassland because the climate will not carry closed forest. The Wessex chalk sits within the woodland envelope, which is why the downs require management at all, and lightning in oceanic Britain largely arrives with rain. The chalk flora carries no fire-adapted traits of consequence — no serotiny, no fire-cued germination. Against the 2002 condition assessment, the proportion of grassland parcels passing all mandatory attributes rose from 43% to 62%, an improvement Natural England attributes principally to scrub management rather than to any natural process.

Prescription, not abandonment

The term for the third trajectory matters. Withdrawal of grazing on the chalk is not usually abandonment in the economic sense; it is frequently prescribed. On the Plain, grazing runs through Farm Management Plans with some forty-five tenant farmers, which require long grass margins, specify maximum rather than minimum stocking levels, and in special-restriction areas limit grazing to a mapped proportion of the area per year. The basic stocking rate on the chalk grassland is 0.3 livestock units per hectare per year. Natural England's own assessment notes that the plans emphasise avoiding over-grazing but do not adequately emphasise avoiding under-grazing or litter removal — and it identified under-grazing as the principal threat to the chalk grassland, flagged on 83 of the 282 parcels surveyed.

The standing fuel load is therefore not simply what happens when farming retreats. It is in substantial part a consequence of prescription, and graziers reducing numbers are often doing what they have been asked to do.

The transitional hazard

Reduced grazing is no safer a route than fire, for structural reasons. Succession from open sward to closed canopy passes through a phase carrying both fuel types at once: a continuous fine fuel bed of rank grass and litter, and above it establishing hawthorn, blackthorn and dogwood holding fine dead material. Fine fuel governs ignition and rate of spread; woody fuel governs intensity and residence time. The transition holds the maximum of both, and the hazard falls away only at canopy closure, when shading suppresses the sward and fine fuel continuity breaks. On chalk that window opens once scrub establishment is underway, which is the phase under-grazed downland and much recent rewilding now occupies.

The general finding is well supported: withdrawal of grazing drives woody encroachment, encroachment increases flammable biomass, and increased fuel load raises both wildfire probability and intensity, with herbivore grazing identified as the corresponding mitigation.

The choice

Grazing to a standard maintains the notified interest, at cost and with continual attention. Under-grazing leads to woodland, but only across two decades of elevated hazard during which the transition is liable to be interrupted — and interruption returns the ground to the fire-adapted grass. Fire holds it open indefinitely and without expense, and converts it to something structurally similar and botanically far poorer.

Fire is not a third route to preserving chalk grassland but a third outcome, and the one that arrives by default. That it arrives partly by prescription is the part worth examining.

How big a pit was 10067?

 

When the A344 was lifted in 2013–14, Wessex Archaeology examined what was left beneath the road bed. Seven and a half metres north of the Heel Stone they found a feature, 10067, surviving 0.06 m deep, three finger widths. It took some skill to notice it at all, and there was not a lot to record. Powell et al. interpreted it as a shallow tree-throw hollow.

The interesting question is not what survives but what was cut. Nobody digs a hole six centimetres deep. Whatever 10067 was, what was found is the very bottom of it, and how big a pit it was depends entirely on how far below the contemporary ground surface that bottom sits.

Hawley's photograph, 10067 is the dark mark just this side of the motor car

10067 is marked with a dark mark this side of the Heelstone

The road makes that hard to establish. Until it was tarmacked in 1935, a chalk road was maintained by scarifying, watering and rolling. That takes out the ruts and gives a remarkably smooth surface, at the cost of removing chalk each time, so roads of this kind sank slowly. The early photographs show a dark patch where 10067 lies — a soft spot in the road surface, which is what you would expect from a deep feature with looser fill compacting under traffic. The looser top surface was removed before the road was tarmacked taking it down to a firm surface. On top of all that, the corridor was machine-stripped for the watching brief. The surface Powell recorded from is not the surface 10067 was dug from.

The 2013 excavation - 10067 is marked with the metal stakes, note the section revealed at the bank.

Levels

Two Ordnance Survey benchmarks are cut into the Heel Stone. The lower one is a broad arrow with the levelled bar above it, about 0.1 m above the turf, published at 100.70 m OD. Pitts tied his 1979–80 levels to it, so his sections can be read directly against the stone.

That gives a run of comparable figures for the entrance zone:

• Pit 97 — about 1 m deep, base 1.60 m below the mark, so about 99.1 m OD. Pitts's fig. 7 is contoured in centimetres below the benchmark, which is why this one is solid.
• Heel Stone ditch — cut about 0.8 m into the chalk, base just touching below 99 m (Pitts fig. 8).
• Avenue ditches — 0.75–0.80 m deep, base near 99 m, and consistent between the Vatchers, Pitts and Powell.

Three features, two campaigns, all bottoming out around the same horizon.

Pitt's Fig. 7 - Stonehole 97

Pitt's Fig. 8  Heelstone Ditch - note 99m OD mark

Pitt's Fig. 13 - Avenue Ditch - note 99m OD mark

Click to enlarge.

Where 10067 sits

Not, unfortunately, from the published levels. Powell's GPS heights do not reconcile with the earlier work. He records the natural at the edge of the Heel Stone ditch, inside the road-line, at 102.13 m — that is 1.43 m above a benchmark cut just above ground level at the stone a few metres away. It is not merely an offset, it is the wrong way round: the road ran below the ground at the stone, not above it. Powell notes the inconsistency and leaves it unresolved. So do I.

Which leaves the photographs. The verge in my photograph of the stripped corridor shows the old road in section with the turf line above it, and the perimeter fence for scale — standard chain-link, probably1.8 m. Reading the drop against that, the surface Powell was working from lies something like 1.2 m below the turf beside the Heel Stone, so around 99.4–99.5 m OD. The base of 10067, a further 0.06 m down, comes out somewhere in the region of 99.3–99.4 m.

That is a reconstruction from photographs, not a survey, and it is worth a couple of tens of centimetres either way. But it is enough for the point. The base of 10067 sits close to the level at which Pit 97, the Heel Stone ditch and the Avenue ditches all stop. And it was cut from a surface a metre or so above where it was found, which makes it a substantial pit rather than a scrape.

So what was it?

I am not going to claim it is definitely a stone-hole. The evidence will not carry that, and even if we knew the actual OD of the surface it was found in, and the archive might be able to reveal that, we would still only be able to improve its comparison to the other pits.

But a pit of that size, seven and a half metres north of the Heel Stone, bottoming at much the same depth as 97, is not obviously a tree throw either. It sits in a zone already full of holes nobody can explain: 97, B, C, the A holes, the Heel Stone's own ditch. Stones put up and taken away? The Heel Stone shifted about like a pawn from one hole to the next? Whatever was going on here, 10067 and the other holes deserve deeper scrutiny.

Rows around the Heel Stone

Stone and timber settings, linear arrangements, and the limits of the archaeological record north-east of Stonehenge

Introduction

The north-eastern approach to Stonehenge is the most frequently viewed and least systematically excavated part of the monument. The solstitial axis, the proximal Avenue, and the Heel Stone all occupy a narrow wedge of chalk that also contains a dense concentration of recorded features: approximately a dozen stone positions, more than sixty post-holes, at least one sarsen working floor, dwelling pits, and four earthworks. Despite this density, the ground has never been examined as a research excavation. Every intervention since Hawley’s 1923 cuttings has been salvage work conducted ahead of infrastructure.

This paper sets out the recorded features, presents measurements from published plans that identify a previously unremarked linear arrangement of stone-holes, and examines one feature from the 2014–15 road-removal works whose published interpretation remains under-determined.

 

Hawley’s plan with 97 and 10067 added

 

History of investigation

The A344 constrained all work from the 1760s until 2013. Hawley (1923) cut across the Avenue but stopped approximately 3 m short of the Heel Stone. Subsequent interventions (Atkinson et al. 1953–56; Vatcher 1968; Pitts 1979–80) were linear trenches cut for services. The combined 1979–80 exposure amounted to a ribbon roughly 50 m long and 0.5–0.65 m wide. The 2014–15 mitigation following road removal remained a watching brief with targeted slots rather than an area excavation (Powell et al. 2019).

Recorded features

Stone positions include the standing Heel Stone (96), the recumbent Slaughter Stone (95), and emptied settings: Stonehole 97, Stonehole B (WA 3606), Stonehole C (WA 3609), Stoneholes D–F at the entrance, WA 3603 (Hawley’s chip-dump crater), WA 3610 and 3611, and an unlabelled feature near WA 3721.

Timber settings fall into two distinct groups. Across the causeway Hawley recorded some fifty-three post-holes arranged in six roughly parallel rows; these are comparatively slight features that he interpreted as the remains of a palisade. In addition, three substantially larger post-holes were found immediately adjacent to the Heel Stone. These measured 43, 35 and 32 inches deep (approximately 1.09 m, 0.89 m and 0.81 m), were spaced roughly six feet apart in a straight line and showed traces of a fourth. The Avenue bank had been thrown over them, and at least one appears to lie within the zone later occupied by the Heel Stone ditch. They are visible on Plate X of the 1925 report. Despite their size, comparable in depth to several of the stone settings in the same area, these larger post-holes have received almost no subsequent attention.

Earthworks consist of the Avenue ditches and banks, the enclosure-ditch terminals, and the Heel Stone ditch (approximately 1.2 m deep, with an antler pick sealed beneath silt).

Hawley’s 1923 cutting

Hawley cut across the Avenue beside the Heel Stone in a strip perhaps thirty feet wide. Within it he recorded a dump of 3,760 sarsen chips overlying a bed of sarsen sand, accompanied by five small hammerstones but no large mauls (WA 3617/3618). Some fragments retained the natural crust of a boulder; others were reddened by burning. His diary notes that the debris lay beneath the Avenue bank, placing the working before the construction of the earthwork.

Partly beneath the chip dump lay a crater-shaped hole 5 ft across and 4 ft 6 in deep (WA 3603), with one or two smaller holes beside it that Hawley interpreted as footings for a timber frame used to move a stone (WA 3604, 3605). Half-way across the cutting was a second, rougher hole with irregular sides, 3 ft 9 in to 4 ft 6 in across and of similar depth (WA 3606, Stonehole B), surrounded by hard grey sarsen but without a chip dump. From it a trench approximately 9 ft wide with sloping sides (WA 3607) ran towards the Heel Stone, backfilled with chips of every stone type present on the site. Further west lay a third large hole (WA 3609, Stonehole C).

The same cutting produced the line of large post-holes described above and, around the Heel Stone itself, a ditch 4 ft deep and 3½ ft wide. An antler pick lay on the bottom beneath eighteen inches of silt that contained no stone chips; chips appeared only in the higher fills.

  

Hawley Plate X - click to enlarge. I think hole 10067 shows as a dark mark as does the further avenue ditch in the unsealed road.

Geometry from published plans

Distances and bearings measured from the Heel Stone on Cleal et al. (1995, fig. 156), with an estimated uncertainty of ±0.3 m, are as follows:

Feature	Distance (m)	Bearing (°)
Stonehole 97	3.8	336
WA 3605	6.4	198
WA 3604	6.8	192
WA 3603	7.6	185
WA 3606 (Stonehole B)	8.3	253
WA 3611	9.0	194
WA 3610	9.5	191
WA 3609 (Stonehole C)	16.2	237

 

Stoneholes 97, B and C form an approximately straight, evenly spaced line (spacings 8.7 m and 8.5 m; segment bearings 227° and 222°). Looking north-east along the same line yields bearings of approximately 42–47°. This places the row in the general sector of the horizon occupied by both the Neolithic summer solstice sunrise (approximately 49.5–50°) and the major northern lunar standstill moonrise (approximately 40°), but several degrees from either extreme. It is therefore not a close match for the principal solstitial axis of the monument or for the major lunar limit.

Stonehole 97 lies 0.8 m off the line through B and C, within measurement error given its truncated outline. The Heel Stone itself projects 4.2 m south-east of this line. WA 3603, 3610 and 3611 form a separate cluster offset from the axis.

A second, shorter alignment of Stoneholes D, E and the Slaughter Stone socket lies near the entrance, oriented roughly perpendicular to the axial row, with the Slaughter Stone socket falling on the extended 97–B–C line within error.

Implications

The long-standing debate has treated Stonehole 97 as an isolated feature—either the original socket of the Heel Stone or the setting of a paired companion. The measured geometry indicates that 97 is the north-eastern member of a row of three emptied settings. The simplest reading is therefore that it held one of those three stones, not the Heel Stone.

The moved-stone hypothesis (Hawley 1928; later variants placing the Heel Stone originally in 97) requires the stone to have been extracted from a member of the row and re-set 4 m beside it. It also conflicts with Hawley’s own 1925 assessment that WA 3606 was too small for the Heel Stone—an objection he did not reconcile when he later proposed that the stone had come from that hole.

The alternative reading, that the Heel Stone is a survivor of an earlier group of unshaped sarsens (Hawley 1925; Pitts 1982), is strengthened by the presence of an axial row, a transverse group at the entrance, and additional emptied pits, one of them sealed by a dressing floor and the Avenue bank.

Portable XRF data indicate that the Heel Stone shares its chemistry with the majority of the other sarsens and is consistent with a West Woods source (Nash et al.). Its undressed state is therefore a deliberate choice rather than evidence of local origin.

The 2014–15 works and feature 10067

Powell et al. (2019) confirmed that the Avenue ditches survive to depths comparable with sections outside the former road line and that periglacial features are present both within and beyond it. Road construction does not appear to have caused wholesale truncation of deeper features.

A shallow hollow 0.06 m deep (context 10067), located within the Avenue immediately north of the Heel Stone ditch, was interpreted as the base of a tree-throw. No section, fill description or morphological argument is published. The feature lies on the previously inaccessible northern side of the stone. Approximate measurement from the published plan places it roughly on the projected line of the 97–B–C row, but the data are too imprecise for secure geometric conclusions.

Absolute levels recorded in 2014–15 sit more than a metre above the traditional Heel Stone benchmark values used by Pitts (100.70 m OD, Newlyn datum) and, apparently, by earlier excavators. Hawley’s Fourth Report cites the upper benchmark (B.M. 332.5 ft = 101.346 m, Liverpool datum). The discrepancy remains unresolved in the published literature and prevents direct comparison of absolute heights across campaigns.

Whether 10067 represents a truncated artificial socket or a natural hollow cannot be determined from the published record. The critical missing datum is the depth of the road cut at that specific point, which exists in the project archive.

Conclusions

Measurement of published plans identifies an evenly spaced axial row of three emptied stone-holes (97, B and C), with the Heel Stone standing 4 m off the line. Stonehole 97 is therefore better understood as one end of that row rather than as the unique former position or partner of the Heel Stone.

Feature 10067 remains under-determined. Both the geometric arrangement and the status of 10067 can be tested by reference to existing archives. The principal constraint is not the absence of evidence but the limited extent to which the evidence already recovered has been examined.

References

Cleal, R.M.J., Walker, K.E. and Montague, R. 1995. Stonehenge in its Landscape: Twentieth-century Excavations. English Heritage.

Hawley, W. 1925. Report on the excavations at Stonehenge during the season of 1923. Antiquaries Journal 5, 21–50.

Hawley, W. 1928. Report on the excavations at Stonehenge during 1925 and 1926. Antiquaries Journal 8, 149–176.

Nash, D.J., Ciborowski, T.J.R., Ullyott, J.S., Pearson, M.P., Darvill, T., Greaney, S., Maniatis, G. and Whitaker, K.A. 2020. Origins of the sarsen megaliths at Stonehenge. Science Advances 6, eabc0133.

Parker Pearson, M., Pollard, J., Richards, C., Thomas, J., Tilley, C. and Welham, K. 2012. Stonehenge remodelled. Antiquity 86, 1021–1040.

Pitts, M.W., Howard, H., Bartlett, A. and David, A. 1982. On the road to Stonehenge: report on investigations beside the A344 in 1968, 1979 and 1980. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 48, 75–132.

Powell, A.B., Barclay, A.J., Mepham, L. and Stevens, C.J. 2019. Along the road to Stonehenge: investigations of the Stonehenge Avenue and within the World Heritage Site. Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine 112, 197–216.