Revealed Mike Pitts' Plastic Stonehenge Secret

Mike Pitts teases us with:

in a few days, I’ll be writing about another exhibit that’s certain to get megalith obsessives talking. I’m sworn to secrecy about it, but you can get an idea of what might be coming from this post by the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art.

I think the secret is out...

Turner Prize winning artist Jeremy Deller will be creating a plastic version of the iconic prehistoric monument Stonehenge as part of Glasgow’s International Festival of the Visual Arts.
The work, entitled “Sacrilege”, will be revealed on Glasgow Green later this week. After the exhibition, which runs from 20 April to 7 May, it will be moved to London for display during the Olympic Games. This will echo a visit of the Olympic Flame to the real Stonehenge during its progress round the country. Sacrilege will be Deller’s first major public project in Scotland.
Unlike the real Stonehenge, the public will enjoy unrestricted access to Deller’s plastic version. It was possible to walk among and even climb on the standing stones on Salisbury Plain until 1977, when they were roped off to counter serious erosion – a decision that provoked protests.
Deller comments: “The public can go on [Sacrilege], as it were. The public can interact with it. It’s a big public thing in a public place. … It’s meant to be a celebratory thing. … Hopefully people will respond to it in a Glaswegian manner.”

Stonehenge - The Timetable

From: The metaphorical first turf « Mike Pitts – Digging Deeper

And the exhibition looks like the only thing worth seeing in London this year.

Was Marden Henge the builder's yard for Stonehenge? | Science | guardian.co.uk

Was Marden Henge the builder's yard for Stonehenge? | Science | guardian.co.uk

........If it wasn't a village, or a temple, or a farm, or a cemetery, what was Marden for? Leary suspects the answer may be emerging in stone working tools, and flakes of sarsen, turning up all over the site. If you were going to drag sarsens the size of double decker buses from their original site to Stonehenge, he said, the obvious route is straight through a natural gap in the hilly landscape, which would take them through Marden.

The evidence that Marden was a sort of builder's yard for the most famous prehistoric monument in the world may have been in the mud under the boots of Leary's puzzled predecessors.

So why did the site's temporary occupants leave? Maybe with Stonehenge complete, the sarsens shaped into the giant trilithons that still fill the hordes of modern visitors with awe, their job was done. They tidied up nicely, turned out the lights, and left.

Airman's Cross - The Accident

Click for much bigger version

Captain Eustace Lorain and his passenger Staff Sergeant R H V Wilson were flying a Nieuport Monoplane out of Larkhill on a routine morning practice sortie. They were executing a tight turn when the aircraft fell towards the ground and crashed. Wilson was killed outright and although Loraine was speedily transported to Bulford Hospital in a horse-drawn ambulance, he succumbed to his wounds only a few minutes after arriving at the Hospital.[5][6] Loraine and Wilson were the first Flying Corps personnel to die in an aircraft crash while on duty. Later in the day an order was issued which stated "Flying will continue this evening as usual", thus beginning a tradition.
The site of the crash at Greenlands Bottom, near the intersection of the A344 and the A360 roads and less than a mile west of Stonehenge, is now known as 'Airmen's Cross'. There is a stone cross memorial in middle of the grass island at the junction and its inscription reads:
'To the memory of Captain Loraine and Staff-Sergeant Wilson who whilst flying on duty, met with a fatal accident near this spot on 5 July 1912. Erected by their comrades'.


(The postcard seems to have been posted on 18th July 1912 from Rollestone Camp - The message doesn't mention the crash -

Another Temperature Proxy Record

I recently stumbled over a proxy temperature record for the North East Atlantic - from Waelbroeck et al., 2001
The data along with many other proxy records is in an Excel spreadsheet at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7392/extref/nature10915-s2.xls

This a very rough and ready graph of the data of the last 10,000 years according to this proxy, the nearest one they had to the UK.
Remember the years on the horizontal axis are increasing in the number of years before 1950 so if we take the start of building Stonehenge as the orange line the period of the building is to the left of the line.

Lovely and warm, no sliding the stones down frozen rivers.

Stones the Colour of Aishwarya Rai's Eyes

An example of a Sarsen that was worked in 2000, exposing the pale stone beneath. The lichens are colonizing the cut surface and giving it the more usual mottled colouration we see on the stones of Stonehenge.

(There is a whole research project waiting on the how different lichens have colonized the stones of Stonehenge, especially where graffiti was cleaned off and the different species now grow in ghostly shapes of the letters.)

What Made Wiltshire Archaeology So Interesting In The 1870s?

Mike Pitts has been looking at the frequency of the word Stonehenge in old books. There are some interesting unexplained peaks. Go and see what he says.

It was suggested that other Wiltshire Archaeological words might have similar peaks, and so they do:

Click to enlarge.

Source: Google's Ngram Viewer which displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books.