Also featured this Friday: the return of the core of one of Stonehenge's sarsen blocks.
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In 2015, researchers confirmed the source of the bluestone to be a quarry in Wales, but the provenance of the sarsen has not yet been identified.
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Citing the book's authors, The Telegraph reports that a rectangle of four Sarsen stones, or sandstone blocks, when split in half diagonally, forms a perfect Pythagorean 3700:12:13 triangle.
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"Conventional wisdom suggests that the big sarsen stones are local to Stonehenge," Professor Nash said, considering that they had to be transported to the site and laid out in a circle.
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Some historians believe that the circle in Wiltshire, England, may have been built for some sort of ritual more than 4,000 years ago, using sarsen for the bigger blocks and bluestone for the smaller ones.
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"To my knowledge, it's the only piece of sarsen stone that we can definitively link to Stonehenge," David Nash, a professor of physical geography at the University of Brighton, who leads the research, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.
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The Sarsen stones date to 2,750 B.C. One of the book's contributors, Robin Heath, also proposes the existence of a great Pythagorean triangle in the English landscape link Stonehenge, the site in Wales from which its bluestones were cut, and Lundy Island, a prehistoric site in England's Bristol Channel.
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The monument has two main stone types that come from different places: The larger sarsen stones in the outer ring — which stand up to 21 feet (21.6 meters) tall and weigh an average of 25 tons (22.6 metric tons) — likely come from Marlborough Downs, located about 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of Stonehenge.
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He commented on the presence of some "big fragments" of sarsen lying around the vicinity and an area of sarsen paving, suggesting that these stones had once been part of the circle before being removed and repurposed. Passmore noted that in a field to the southwest of the farmhouse stood three large sarsen boulders. One, which was lying on its side, measured at least and long. The other two were smaller.
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The builders of Stonehenge used these stones for the heelstone and sarsen circle uprights.Bruce Bedlam The stones of Stonehenge Avebury and many other megalithic monuments in southern England are also built with sarsen stones.Stone ring of Avebury at Places of Peace and Power website Fire and in later times explosives were sometimes employed to break the stone into pieces of a suitable size for use in construction. Sarsen is not an ideal building material, however.
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The site features an area of scattered sarsen stones which are now extremely rare on the Berkshire Downs.
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Hertfordshire Puddingstone East Herts Geology Club, Dr. Steve Perkins , August 2005. Most of the stones at Stonehenge and Avebury are sarsen stone.
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People have prayed here for centuries and three sarsen stones remain, as possible evidence there was pagan worship there before Christian times.
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He placed fourth at the 2010 and 2014 World Championships, also with the team. Khodos studied at the Sarsen Amanzholov East Kazakhstan State University.
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Noble (2006) pp. 128-31. The great Orcadian Neolithic monuments were constructed almost a millennium before the sarsen stones of Stonehenge were erected.The sarsens of Stonehenge were erected c.
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The Victorian era phrase "Indo-Saracenic Architecture" is an example of this. In the Wiltshire dialect, the meaning of "Sarsen" (Saracen) was eventually extended to refer to anything regarded as non-Christian, whether Muslim or pagan. From that derived the still current term "Sarsen" (a shortening of "Saracen stone"), denoting the kind of stone used by the builders of Stonehenge Bruce Bedlam The stones of Stonehenge \- long predating Islam and all monotheistic religions.
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At the bottom of the rectangle, various grey boulders are marked out, but are sprawled around in an irregular fashion. The Coldrum Long Barrow originally consisted of a sarsen stone chamber, covered by a low earthen mound, which was bounded by prostrate slabs. As such, Ashbee asserted that the monument could be divided into three particular features: the chamber, the barrow, and the sarsen stone surround. It had been built using about 50 stones.
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William Stukeley wrote that sarsen is "always moist and dewy in winter which proves damp and unwholesome, and rots the furniture". In the case of Avebury, the investors who backed a scheme to recycle the stone were bankrupted when the houses they built proved to be unsaleable and also prone to burning down. However, despite these problems, sarsen remained highly prized for its durability, being a favoured material for steps and kerb stones.
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A number of these circles were built in the area around modern Dorset, typically being constructed from sarsen stone and being smaller than those found elsewhere. The Kingston Russell ring is the largest of those in Dorset, measuring 24 by 27 metres (79 feet by 89 feet) in diameter and containing eighteen sarsen stones arranged in an oval shape. The site has not been excavated or been subject to in-depth archaeological investigation.
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Pitts, M. W. (5 March 1981). "Stones, Pits and Stonehenge". Nature 290: 46–47. The presence of later cremation burials and sarsen stone chips in the holes' upper fills supports this.
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Altay Sarsenuly Amanzholov (, Altaı Sársenuly Amanjolov; February 6, 1934 - August 10, 2012) was a Kazakh SSR, Kazakh Turkologist. He followed his father Sarsen Amanzholov's steps continuing in this field of study.
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The outside walls are of flint and limestone with some chequer work and sarsen, and are crenellated. The roofs are lead and slate. Inside are a number of monuments and monumental brasses.
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The Cuckoo Stone was recorded by Richard Colt-Hoare on his 1810 map of the Stonehenge landscape. The nearest other known sarsen stone is that found within Woodhenge during excavations in 1926-28.
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In July 2020, it was announced that West Woods was the most likely origin of most of the sarsen stones used to create Stonehenge. Archaeologists analysed a core from one of the stones, taken in 1958, and compared it to samples from 20 sarsen outcrops around the country. The whereabouts of the core was unknown until it was returned from the USA by Englishman Robert Phillips in 2019. West Woods also contains a Neolithic long barrow, near the village of Clatford and is bisected by an ancient earthwork known as the Wansdyke, dating back to the 5th or 6th Century BC. Hugh Newman has recently conducted a search of the West Woods area discovering more details about the long barrow as well as the sarsen stones within the area, including evidence at Clatford Farm.
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Other finds included two pendants of chalk, multiple flint tools and fragments, including a leaf-shaped flint arrowhead, and a piece of sarsen used to grind grain.Curwen (1934), p. 131.Curwen (1934), pp. 121–122.
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There is a sarsen stone in the church which may have pagan origins. The parish is part of the benefice of Mells with Buckland Dinham, Chantry, Great Elm and Whatley within the Diocese of Bath and Wells.
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Kaletaev was born in the village of Priozyornoe (now Tugyl). In 1994, graduated from the Sarsen Amanzholov East Kazakhstan State University with a degree in history and attended the Academy of Public Administration from 1996 to 1997.
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3) imply a shift from an angular splay of 9 degrees (i.e. 40 settings) to 12 degrees, the same as that of the later 30 Sarsen Circle. How long the bluestones remained in the Q and R settings before they were removed (if indeed this early structure was ever completed) is not known. However the dates suggested from the 2008 excavation (above) implies the Q & R arrays were perhaps no earlier than 2,400 BC, presenting a challenge to the recently accepted Late Neolithic date for the construction of the iconic sarsen monument.
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Pevsner states "Nave and chancel externally all Ponting's". Other work in the 19th century included the replacement of the south porch, re-roofing of the chancel, and rebuilding of the top section of the tower. Today the tower is in limestone ashlar, with a stair-tower to the southeast; the nave is sarsen and greensand rubble with limestone quoins and dressings, on sarsen foundations; and the chancel is flint with limestone banding. The plain octagonal font is from the 13th or 14th century, and the pulpit, also octagonal, is from the 17th.
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Falkner's Circle is located at the southern end of a natural scatter of sarsen stones; this scatter was recorded by the antiquarian William Stukeley in the eighteenth century, although they were later removed by farmers. Because of this location on the edge of the sarsen scatter, the archaeologist Mark Gillings and his team proposed that the circle's builders may have understood this as a "liminal" space that was worthy of monumentalisation. If this is the case, Gillings et al. argued, Falkner's Circle might have constituted "a monument to stones as opposed to one for people".
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He suggested that the long barrow's builders kept the megaliths in place by filling the chamber with sand. Once the capstone was placed atop and the chamber was stable, he thought, the builders would have removed the supporting sand. In 1950, it was stated that 14 stones survived, however full excavation revealed that 18 large sarsen boulders were extant, alongside four smaller sarsen stones used in the dry stone wall and pavement of the tomb. The chamber had a pavement set in yellow sand, onto which human remains were placed.
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This in-fill was marked by sarsen slabs covering the original inhumations, followed by layers of chalk rubble, earth and sarsen, and both human and animal remains. Many of these remains were of immature individuals; the south-east chamber for instance included the bodies of at least five infants. It is possible that these human remains were collected together over a period of centuries outside the long barrow and only placed within it as part of a single event. The secondary burial deposits also included artefacts alongside the human remains.
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Hardy would write about the stone in his poem "The Shadow on the Stone". It was only when the enclosure was discovered in the 1980s that it was realised that the sarsen stone came from a larger monument.
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These generally consist of long, precisely built trapezoidal earth mounds covering burial chambers. Because of this they are a type of chambered long barrow. The chamber, made of sarsen stones, contained partial human skeletons. An arrowhead was also recovered.
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Morrisons supermarket is the only shop on the estate along with its petrol station.Morrisons There is also a church, clinic, dentist, medical surgery, petrol station and three pubs/restaurants, the 'Crab and Anchor', 'The Sarsen Stones' and the 'Monkey Puzzle'.
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Apparently also made from sarsen, the stone was broken up prior to 1834. It is possible that the Lower White Horse Stone was part of a former chambered long barrow, although Philp and Dutto noted that any such link was "uncertain".
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However, it has been suggested that the site is not a stone circle at all, but is instead made up of kerbstones from a Bronze Age round barrow. A number of stone circles were built in the area around modern Dorset, typically being constructed from sarsen stone and being smaller than those found elsewhere. The Hampton Down ring was erected on an open downland ridge overlooking the coast. It originally contained either eight or nine sarsen stones and had a diameter of 20 feet (6.5 metres) across with a track leading to it from the north.
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In 1936, the archaeologists Stuart Piggott, Cecily Piggott, and W. E. V. Young came upon what they suggested was a ruined Bronze Age stone circle near to the village. This feature consisted of a circular area measuring 47 feet in diameter that was encircled by a shallow ditch. A single sarsen stone was located on the southeast of the ditch, which the Piggotts suggested may have been the last surviving stone in a circle. A further three sarsen stones were located 90 feet to the south of the circle, but their relation to it was deemed "problematic" by the Piggotts.
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View of Silbury Hill from West Kennet Long Barrow During the third millennium BCE sarsen boulders and earth were used to partially block the forecourt. In the late third millennium BCE, a façade of three large sarsen stones was erected across the forecourt, blocking any further entrance to the chamber. This act may have been roughly contemporary, or slightly later, than the main stone phases at the Avebury stone circle and the Sanctuary. This is the period in which archaeologists begin referring to the end of the Late Neolithic period and the start of the Early Bronze Age.
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Over 20 researchers and 170 students and volunteers were involved in excavations around Durrington Walls and investigations into the Stonehenge landscape. Among other things, new dating suggested that the sarsen phase of Stonehenge was contemporary with Durrington Walls at around 2640–2480 BC.
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Tower Hill, Cove: There is substantial evidence'Parishes: Farnborough', A History of the County of Hampshire: Volume 4 (1911), pp. 15–18. Date accessed: 1 October 2008. that many years ago a large accumulation of Sarsen stones existed upon what later came to be known as Tower Hill.
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The Oxford Don and author J. R. R. Tolkien lived nearby and travelled to the downs with his family and friends. He was impressed by the downs with their sarsen stones, barrows and hill forts and painted pictures of Lambourn in 1912."Tolkien Art" Verizon.net blog.
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Knowledge of Winterbourne Bassett Stone Circle derives almost entirely from antiquarian sources. Stukeley recorded two concentric sarsen rings, with an outlying stone to the west of these. Smith's plan, produced in the 1880s, proposed a diameter of c.71m for the outer circle and 45m for the inner circle.
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The Coffin Stone, in a vineyard The Coffin Stone is located about 400 metres north-west of Little Kits Coty House, and is also around 250 metres away from the Pilgrims Way. The Coffin Stone is a rectangular sarsen measuring about 4.40m by 2.80m, and is at least 50 cm thick. Archaeologists Brian Philp and Mike Dutto thought that this stone marked the chamber of a chambered long-barrow, noting that an outline of a mound could be seen. They highlighted that two smaller stones exist nearby, and that another sarsen was also located close by; in 1980, a farmer shifted that latter stone atop the Coffin Stone, where it still resides.
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He probed the earth around the standing stone and then removed the turf wherever he encountered a submerged stone. In doing so, he found 22 sarsen stones, all of them of small size, believing that they had once formed parts of the stones in the circle. He related that while "the northern, southern and eastern segments are tolerably well-defined" by this sarsen scatter, he could "find scarcely a single stone on what should be the western segment to complete the circle". In August and September 2002, the archaeologists Mark Gillings, Joshua Pollard, David Wheatley, and Rick Peterson led a four-week archaeological investigation of the circle, as part of which they carried out both geophysical examination and excavation.
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They were, he noted, "not at all conspicuous", with none protruding for more than 18 inches above the turf and some barely visible. Passmore probed the ground with an iron bar to ascertain the location and dimensions of various stones in the circle. He also dug into the space between those stones he numbered four and five, discovering a piece of burnt sarsen and patch of white ash beneath the ground, evidence for the burning and cracking of sarsen on the site. He observed that the western part of the circle was largely occupied by cow yards and rick yards and suggested that most of the stones in this area had been broken up or removed.
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Sarsens in a garden in Wiltshire Sarsen stones are sandstone blocks found in quantity in the United Kingdom on Salisbury Plain and the Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire; in Kent; and in smaller quantities in Berkshire, Essex, Oxfordshire, Dorset, and Hampshire. They are the post-glacial remains of a cap of Cenozoic silcrete that once covered much of southern England – a dense, hard rock created from sand bound by a silica cement, making it a kind of silicified sandstone. This is thought to have formed during Neogene to Quaternary weathering by the silicification of Upper Paleocene Lambeth Group sediments, resulting from acid leaching. The word "sarsen" is a shortening of "Saracen stone" which arose in the Wiltshire dialect.
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Sarsen Amanzholuly Amanzholov (; ; on December 27, 1903 - January 28, 1958), was a noted Turkologist, and one of the pioneers of Kazakh linguistics. He developed the foundations of Kazakh grammar, and helped create the current form of the Cyrillic Kazakh alphabet. Amanzholov also helped to create Russian-Kazakh military and agricultural dictionaries.
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The back slab of the megalith, engraved with much graffiti. The surviving part of the monument represents three stones covered by a capstone. The H-shaped entrance to the tomb survives. It is made of sarsen (a fine- grained, crystalline sandstone) and consists of three orthostats supporting a horizontal capstone.
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Timber posts stood on the ramparts. Later the ditch was deepened and the extra material dumped on top of the ramparts to increase their size. A parapet wall of sarsen stones lined the top of the innermost rampart. It is very close to the Uffington White Horse on White Horse Hill.
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Sarsen stones, Bronze Age features, are in the bounds of Leckhampstead at Hill Green and a flint arrowhead of this period has been found. A small round barrow is in the south-east. Round barrow 670m east of Rowbury Farm, Scheduled Ancient Monument. Roman finds include a 2nd-century earring and Samian ware.
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Cambridge University Press. To the south east end of the mound are four enormous Sarsen stones, three standing and one lying flat. Another horizontal slab behind the tomb is believed to be the capstone of the collapsed burial chamber. There are several small upright stones positioned at the perimeter of the mound.
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In his 1927 book In Kentish Pilgrimland, William Coles Finch included a plate of the Coffin Stone; the photograph featured his son standing on it and shows various broken sarsens piled up at the monument's eastern end. Finch's plate was the first published photograph of the megalith, and was likely also the last published depiction of it before another large sarsen was placed over it. Finch measured the sarsen and found it to be wider than Thorpe had reported, also making note of plough damage and breakages. In a 1946 article on the folklore involving the Medway Megaliths, Evans noted that the Coffin Stone, like several other megalithic features in the area, was associated with a burial following the fifth-century Battle of Aylesford.
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Fir Clump Stone Circle was rediscovered in 1965 by the borough surveyor Richard Reiss, who noted that at the time the sarsen stones were fallen. He produced a plan of the site as it then existed. In 1969, these stones were removed during construction of the M4 motorway. Burl called this destruction "a megalithic tragedy".
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Falkner's Circle was a stone circle near the village of Avebury in the south- western English county of Wiltshire. Built from twelve sarsen megaliths, it measured 36.6m in diameter, although only one of these stones remains standing. The remaining stone is a Scheduled Ancient Monument under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979.
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The final phase was of 42 sarsen stones forming a boundary ring across, which replaced all the timber structures. This may have been built at a similar time to the Avebury stone circle, and had an entrance way that led into the Kennet Avenue, two parallel lines of stones running the from The Sanctuary to Avebury.
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18 of the Y Holes have been excavated and 16 of the Z Holes. Further evidence of the Y and Z Holes being late in the sequence of events at Stonehenge is demonstrated by the fact that hole Z 7 was found to cut into the backfill of the construction ramp for stone 7 of the Sarsen Circle.
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Fir Clump Stone Circle consisted of coarse sarsen megaliths, arranged as a double concentric circle. The archaeologists David Field and David McOmish noted that the circle appeared to be "slightly oval in outline". The outer ring, which was found to be fragmentary, measured by in diameter. The inner ring measured by and was flattened on the northern side.
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Lead isotope analysis of the men's teeth has indicated that they grew up in the areas either of modern Wales or in the Lake District, but left in childhood. This was thought to be contemporary with the major building work of erecting the Sarsen Circle and the trilithons at Stonehenge but new research indicates that these burials occurred shortly after Stonehenge Phase 3ii.
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Few prehistoric artefacts have ever been found on Silbury Hill: at its core there is only clay, flints, turf, moss, topsoil, gravel, freshwater shells, mistletoe, oak, hazel, sarsen stones, ox bones, and antler tines. Roman and medieval items have been found on and around the site since the nineteenth century and it seems that the hill was reoccupied by later peoples.
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Plan of the monument. Rectangular in shape, Addington Long Barrow is on a northeast to southwest alignment. In 1950, Evans described the monument as having twenty- two sarsen stones, eight of which, at the northeast end, would have originally formed the burial chamber. In 1981, investigators from Kent Archaeological Rescue Unit expanded that number, identifying twenty-five sarsens in the monument.
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The down has the best assemblage of sarsen stones in England. The stones are known here as the Grey Wethers, for their likeness to sheep when seen from a distance. They were noted by Col. Richard Symonds in his diary for 1644: "They call that place the Grey-wethers, because a far off they looke like a flock of sheepe."E.
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Cunnington (1912), pp. 59–60. Most of the relics obtained from the ditches were found in clusters, and were usually within of the bottom; they included some sherds of pottery, flint flakes and burnt flints, fragments of animal bones, and pieces of sarsen stone. The only human bone found was a small jaw bone with worn teeth.Cunnington (1912), pp. 60–61.
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Part of the Outer Circle Within the henge is a great outer circle. This is one of Europe's largest stone circles, with a diameter of , Britain's largest stone circle. It was either contemporary with, or built around four or five centuries after the earthworks. It is thought that there were originally 98 sarsen standing stones, some weighing in excess of 40 tons.
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The house is isolated, and the view from the roof includes park-like grounds and gardens, and beyond, woods and pastures. Nearby is a large group of sarsen stones and Alfred's Castle, an Iron Age hill fort. At least one of the woods of Ashdown Park predates the house. Glastonbury Abbey held the manor of Ashbury until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539.
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In March 2009, work overseen by the Highways Agency revealed two large sarsen boulders opposite Day House Farm. Commenting on the state of the circle in 1980, the archaeologist Aubrey Burl stated that the circle was "almost completely overgrown", an assessment he repeated in 2000. The Historic England listing for the site nevertheless considered it to be a "comparatively well preserved example of its class".
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Standing stone and gallop, Overton Down. The gallop covers a mile of the down, which has a scattering of sarsen stones though not as many as areas just to the east of the gallop. Overton Down Experimental Earthwork (often referred to simply as Overton Down) is a long-term project in experimental archaeology in Wiltshire, England. In 1960 an earthwork was built to simulate such ancient structures.
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Ashdown Park is a biological Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) south of Ashbury in Oxfordshire. The SSSI is part of the park of Ashdown House. The park has been designated an SSSI because of the lichens on its many sarsen boulders. These are in parkland which is heavily grazed to ensure that the lichens, which have taken centuries to grow, do not become shaded.
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All but one—Rempstone Stone Circle on the Isle of Purbeck—are located on the chalk hills west of Dorchester. The Dorset circles have a simplistic typology, being of comparatively small size, and that at Kingston Russell is the largest. All are oval in shape, although perhaps have been altered from their original form. With the exception of the Rempstone circle, all consist of sarsen stone.
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Quartzite is composed wholly of quartz, which has a density of . Therefore, the above- ground mass of the stone is ca. . For comparison, the sarsen (also a kind of silicified sandstone that resulted from Cenozoic acid leaching) stones of Stonehenge only weigh ca. . The weak, originally-horizontal bedding planes of the quartzite are now vertical, which rules out the stone being in a natural position.
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The Coronation Stone The Coronation Stone is an ancient sarsen stone block which is believed to have been the site of the coronation of seven Anglo-Saxon kings. It is presently located next to the Guildhall in Kingston upon Thames, England. Kingston is now a town in the Royal Borough of Kingston Upon Thames in Greater London, but remains the seat of the administration of the county of Surrey.
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Harvel is a village in the civil parish of Meopham in the west of the county of Kent, England. It is sited on the southern edge of the North Downs. The village's name may derive from the names Halifield (Holy Field) or Heorot Field (Hartfield) mentioned in a Saxon charters. A collection of sarsen stones north of the village may be a prehistoric tomb but is more likely a natural group.
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The Blowing Stone in its modern setting The Blowing Stone is a perforated sarsen at in Kingston Lisle, Oxfordshire (Berkshire until 1974). The stone is in a garden at the foot of Blowingstone Hill just south of the Icknield Way (B4507), about west of Wantage and about east of White Horse Hill. Blowingstone Hill is part of the escarpment of the Berkshire Downs, at the crest of which is The Ridgeway.
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There is a red brick Georgian portion, with parapet and hipped tile roof. The Victorian wing, of yellow brick, is of two storeys with a low pitched slate roof and sash windows. Opposite the driveway to the church is a dew pond which was repuddled in the 1990s. Nearby, on a triangle of grass between Newton Lane and the track to Selborne Common, is a small sarsen stone.
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The plaque, which features a copy of Osmaston's 1965 tracing, is fixed to a large Sarsen stone. Following its collapse, a crane was used to help make the tree safe but the much decayed trunk disintegrated. A few days later a tribute of flowers including gladioli were left anonymously on the shattered trunk. The remains of the tree have been left in situ to form a natural habitat.
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The stone, facing the east The Stone, facing the west The Cuckoo Stone is a squat sarsen stone which lies on its side. It is the same type of stone as the largest stones used in the Stonehenge circle. The site of Woodhenge is around 500 metres to the east of the Cuckoo Stone, with Durrington Walls to the northeast. Stonehenge is around 2.5 kilometres to the southwest.
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In March 1891 workmen were digging under the lawn at Thomas Hardy's house at Max Gate when they discovered a large sarsen stone three feet underground. It took seven men with levers to raise the stone which had been lying flat. Around the stone was a quantity of ashes and half-charred bones. Hardy called it "The Druid Stone" and had it erected at the edge of the lawn where it still stands.
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Within a decade, the trust owned nine more reserves, had received its first legacy gift and membership had grown to 800. As it reached its 20th anniversary, the trust owned 30 nature reserves and had 2,000 members. In 1989, the first Sarsen Trail & Neolithic Marathon was held, raising £21,500 which was used to buy Morgan's Hill nature reserve. For its 30th anniversary, in 1992, the trust formally changed its name to Wiltshire Wildlife Trust.
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Of the Dorset circles, Rempstone is the only example that is not located on the chalk hills west of Dorchester. The Dorset circles have a simplistic typology, being of comparatively small size, with none exceeding 28 metres (92 feet) in diameter. All are oval in shape, although perhaps have been altered from their original form. The Rempstone circle is exceptional among these, as it is the only one which does not consist of sarsen stone.
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Manor Farmhouse, opposite the church, is dated 1630 with extensions added in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The older part is constructed from the local sarsen sandstone. East Kennett Manor House is a three-storey brick house from the late 18th century, extended in the 19th century and again in 1925. Christ Church The Church of England parish church, Christ Church, was built in 1864 on the site of a 12th-century church.
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The church was restored, and the north-east aisle rebuilt, in 1899–1900 by John Oldrid Scott. The church is built of flint rubble, with sarsen stone footings and some dressings, some roughcast, other dressings in ashlar. The writer Roald Dahl, who lived in Gipsy House in Great Missenden, is buried in the churchyard. There are two Commonwealth War Graves Commission memorials in the churchyard, marking the burial place of two British soldiers.
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Burl 1979. p. 46. The majority of the standing stones that had been a part of the monument for thousands of years were smashed up to be used as building material for the local area. This was achieved in a method that involved lighting a fire to heat the sarsen, then pouring cold water on it to create weaknesses in the rock, and finally smashing at these weak points with a sledgehammer.
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The Piggotts suggested that while the circle retained its full number of original megaliths, some of them might have been moved from their original positions. It is possible that the ring was graded in height, with the tallest stones being located on the north. The stones are made of sarsen or conglomerate. Some of the stones are broken, and it is impossible to tell which fragments are bases and which were originally upper parts.
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Southwest face of Heel Stone in May 2016 The Heel Stone is a single large block of sarsen stone standing within the Avenue outside the entrance of the Stonehenge earthwork. In section it is sub-rectangular, with a minimum thickness of 2.4 metres, rising to a tapered top about 4.7 metres high. Excavation has shown that a further 1.2 metres is buried in the ground. It is 77.4 metres from the centre of Stonehenge circle.
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The stones are sarsen. Commenting on the site in 1939, the Piggotts opined that ten stones in the eastern half of the ring were likely in their original position. They expressed the view that "owing to [the stone's] rough cube-like shapes it is impossible to decide whether they are upright or recumbent". Based on what they believed to be the stones in their original position, they estimated the circle's original diameter at 35 feet (11–12 metres).
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The western entrance was later blocked off and the eastern one may have been lined with sarsen stones. A palisade of wooden posts may have lined the top of the bank. During a later phase the bank and ditch were improved and a rampart of dumped chalk, excavated from the enlarged ditch, increased the height of the bank. Excavation within the hill fort revealed a large pit 1.5 m in diameter and at least 2.4 m deep.
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All but one—Rempstone Stone Circle on the Isle of Purbeck—are located on the chalk hills west of Dorchester. The Dorset circles have a simplistic typology and are of a comparatively small size in comparison to other British stone circles, with none exceeding 28 metres (92 feet) in diameter. All are oval in shape, although they perhaps have been altered from their original form. With the exception of the Rempstone circle, all consist of sarsen stone.
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It consisted of a sub-rectangular earthen tumulus, estimated to have been in length, with a chamber built from sarsen megaliths on its eastern end. Both inhumed and cremated human remains were placed within this chamber during the Neolithic period, representing at least nine or ten individuals. These remains were found alongside pottery sherds, stone arrow heads, and a clay pendant. In the 4th century AD, a Romano-British hut was erected next to the long barrow.
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Philp alerted Kent County Council, who arranged for contractors to investigate the reason for the subsidence, which proved to be decades of rabbit burrowing beneath the tarmac. Archaeologists from Kent Archaeological Unit visited the site during the work, discovering a buried sarsen. Comparison with older records revealed that this stone had once been upright but had been buried where it stood in the 19th century by workmen who were replacing the trackway with a paved road.
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Fyfield Down () is part of the Marlborough Downs, about north of the village of Fyfield, Wiltshire. The down is a 325.3 hectare biological and geological Site of Special Scientific Interest, notified in 1951. The down has the best assemblage of sarsen stones in England, known as the Grey Wethers. The site is to be distinguished from another Fyfield Down also in Wiltshire, east of Pewsey and on the edge of Salisbury Plain, near another place called Fyfield.
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The White Horse Stone located in a small stretch of woodland The Upper White Horse Stone () is in length, in height, and about thick. It is sarsen. The White Horse Stone is situated in "a narrow strip of woodland", known as Westfield Wood, which is adjacent to the Pilgrim's Way. The megalith lies to the east of the A229 dual carriageway, and can be reached by going behind the nearby petrol garage and following the Pilgrim's Way.
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Local folklore holds that the stones arrived in their position after being thrown at Corfe Castle by the Devil. A number of these circles were built in the area around modern Dorset, typically being smaller than those found elsewhere. Most of these Dorset circles are made of sarsen stone, although the Rempstone circle is unique in being made from local sandstone. The southern half of the circle has been destroyed, with five upright and three recumbent stones remaining extant.
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Of these, it is part of a cluster of around thirty centring around Avebury in the uplands of northern Wiltshire. Built out of earth, local sarsen megaliths, and oolitic limestone imported from the Cotswolds, the long barrow consisted of a sub-rectangular earthen tumulus enclosed by kerb-stones. Its precise date of construction is not known. Human bones were placed within the chamber, probably between 3670 and 3635 BCE, representing a mixture of men, women, children and adults.
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The Leper Stone or Newport Stone () is a large sarsen stone near the village of Newport, Essex, England. The name Leper Stone probably derives from the hospital of St. Mary and St. Leonard (fn. 1156?), a nearby hospital for lepers. Passers by could have left offerings of alms for the hospital residents in a small depression atop the stone; the hospital grounds were sold in the sixteenth century, and only a portion of the wall near the stone remains.
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All are oval in shape, although perhaps have been altered from their original form. With the exception of the Rempstone circle, all consist of sarsen stone. Much of this may have been obtained from the Valley of Stones, a location at the foot of Crow Hill near to Littlebredy, which is located within the vicinity of many of these circles. With the exception of the circle at Litton Cheney, none display evidence of any outlying stones or earthworks around the stone circle.
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The purpose of such rings is unknown, although archaeologists speculate that the stones represented supernatural entities for the circle's builders. At least nine of these stone circles are known to have been constructed near modern Dorset. They are smaller than those found elsewhere in Great Britain and are typically built from sarsen stone. Located in the bottom of a narrow valley, the Nine Stones circle has a diameter of 9.1 metres by 7.8 metres (29 feet 10 inches by 25 feet 11 inches).
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It consists of nine irregularly spaced sarsen megaliths, with a small opening on its northern side. Two of the stones on the northwestern side of the monument are considerably larger than the other seven. This architectural feature has parallels with various stone circles in southwestern Scotland, and was potentially a deliberate choice of the circle's builders, to whom it may have had symbolic meaning. Antiquarians like John Aubrey and William Stukeley first took an interest in the site during the eighteenth century.
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More fieldwork was carried out in the summer of 2005. Excavations were made around the land east of Durrington Walls near the river, and north west outside the west gate. A large amount of digging was done on the eastern banks of the henge, and inside the walls to expose the southernmost timber circle discovered in 1967. A great deal of work was also carried out 2 miles east, around a fallen sarsen stone known locally as the Bulford Stone.
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It is likely to stretch for at least another 0.5m below the ground surface, meaning that the stone is probably 2m in total length. Its long axis is aligned on an east to west direction. The stone is covered in extensive lichen growth and the top has several natural depressions. The grey sarsen stones used at Falkner's Circle were of the same type used in the Avebury stone circle and in the two Avenues (West Kennet and Beckhampton) connected to it.
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Diagram of the Day House Lane Stone Circle as recorded in 1980 Based on his observations in the 1890s, the antiquarian A. D. Passmore estimated that the circle had originally been up to in diameter. He also thought that it would have been of a slightly irregular shape, with its diameter varying at different points. Based on the surviving stones and their spacing, Passmore suggested that the circle would have once contained over thirty stones. The surviving stones used were sarsen.
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In the neighbouring village of Alton Priors, there is a sarsen stone with the design of the Alton Barnes White Horse carved into it. The white horse is part of several tours, including the 90-mile walking tour 'Wiltshire's White Horse Trail', better known as simply the White Horse Trail, which visits all eight of the canonical white horses in Wiltshire. On 10 May 2011, the hill became the starting point for the record- breaking longest hand-gliding flight recorded in the UK.
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Evidence of prehistoric activity includes a Neolithic long barrow, probably a communal burial site, on a hillside south of the present village; this monument is part of the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site. Further south, a circle of sarsen stones is possibly from the Bronze Age. The Ridgeway, an ancient trackway, passes through East Kennet village. Some 600 metres north of the village, at Overton Hill, the trackway becomes the Ridgeway National Trail which runs northeast as far as Buckinghamshire.
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An adult cremation and two child inhumations were found at the bottom of ditch sections, each beneath a slab of sandstone or sarsen. A young man had been buried in a later Early Bronze Age tumulus in the centre of the enclosure. Carbon dating of the remains put the building of the enclosure at around 3486–2886 BC with the central burial dating to around a thousand years later. The central mound seems to have subsequently acted as a focus for much flint-knapping.
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Smythe's Megalith, also known as the Warren Farm Chamber, was a chambered long barrow near the village of Aylesford in the south-eastern English county of Kent. Probably constructed in the 4th millennium BCE, during Britain's Early Neolithic period, it was discovered in 1822, at which point it was dismantled. Built out of earth and at least five local sarsen megaliths, the long barrow consisted of a roughly rectangular earthen tumulus with a stone chamber in its eastern end. Human remains were deposited into this chamber.
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Various black dots mark out the location of Medway Megaliths on either side of the river. The Medway long barrows all conformed to the same general design plan, and all aligned on an east to west axis. Each had a stone chamber at the eastern end of the mound, and they each probably had a stone facade flanking the entrance. The chambers were constructed from sarsen, a dense, hard, and durable stone that occurs naturally throughout Kent, having formed out of silicified sand from the Eocene epoch.
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Of these, it is in the best surviving condition. It lies near to both Addington Long Barrow and Chestnuts Long Barrow on the western side of the river. Two further surviving long barrows, Kit's Coty House and Little Kit's Coty House, as well as possible survivals such as the Coffin Stone and White Horse Stone, are located on the Medway's eastern side. Built out of earth and around fifty local sarsen-stone megaliths, the long barrow consisted of a sub-rectangular earthen tumulus enclosed by kerb-stones.
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There is then an apparent hiatus in the use of the site as a place of burial, probably lasting over a century. Between 3620 and 3240 BCE it likely began to be re-used as a burial space, receiving both human and animal remains over a period of several centuries. Various flint tools and ceramic sherds were also placed within it during this time. In the Late Neolithic, the entrance to the long barrow was blocked up with the addition of large sarsen boulders.
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Romano-British finds are commonly located in and around Early Neolithic monuments in Britain. Six bronze Roman coins were buried into the topsoil near the sarsen façade and recovered during the 1955–56 excavation. Romano-British ritual activity is known from the broader area around the long barrow; several shafts were dug around the Shallow Head Springs near Silbury Hill in this period, into which a range of items were placed. In addition, a building that possibly served a religious function was established south of Silbury Hill.
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Battle of Ethandun Memorial Although the horse is only presumed to commemorate King Alfred's victory at the Battle of Ethandun, an official monument to the victory was erected atop the hill, adjacent to Bratton Camp. The monument does not have an official name but is known as the Battle of Ethandun Memorial. It consists of a large sarsen stone (stone of remembrance) with a "pebbled" base, on which lies a metal commemorative plaque. The monument was unveiled 5 November 2000 by the 7th Marquess of Bath.
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On New Year's Eve 1900, Stone 22 of the Sarsen Circle fell over, taking with it a lintel. Following public pressure and a letter to The Times by William Flinders Petrie, the then owner of Stonehenge, Edmund Antrobus, agreed to some remedial engineering work to be undertaken with archaeological supervision so that records could be made of the below ground archaeology. Antrobus appointed a mining engineer named William Gowland to manage the work. Despite having no archaeological training, Gowland produced some of the finest, most detailed excavation records ever made at the monument.
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Wiltshire is extraordinarily rich in prehistoric antiquities. The Stone Age is represented by a number of flint and stone implements, preserved in the unsurpassed collection at Salisbury Museum. Stonehenge, with its circles of giant stones, and Avebury, with its avenues of monoliths leading to what was once a stone circle, surrounded by an earthwork and enclosing two lesser circles, are the largest and best known megalithic works in England and indeed Europe. A valley near Avebury is filled with immense sarsen blocks, resembling a 'river of stone', and perhaps laid there by prehistoric architects.
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The first known record of the church is in 1100 A.D. when Robert Fitz Suen (Robert d'Essex) gave the chapels of Eastwood, Sutton and Prittlewell to the Prior of Prittlewell. It is evident that there was a church at Eastwood before that date; this was probably the present Norman nave with a small apsidal chancel. The antiquity of the site is borne out by the presence of a sarsen stone built into the walls. There are claims that this is the remains from when the site was used for pagan worship.
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150m south west of Coate Stone Circle. Six stone circles were recorded in the 18th/19th and early 20th centuries, all in the Coate area, and possibly linked, at least in part, by avenues of large sarsen stones. The remains of one of the stone circles probably still lies at the bottom of the lake at Coate Water. Other relevant archaeology listed on the Sites and Monuments Records includes the Coate Mound, excavated with very little record in the earlier 20th c, which is spatially associated with the Mesolithic artifact scatter.
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At the foot of the hills, not far east of the Horse, is preserved the so-called Blowing Stone of Kingston Lisle, a mass of sandstone (a sarsen) pierced with holes in such a way that, when blown like a trumpet, it produces a loud note. It is believed that, in earlier times, the stone served the purpose of a bugle. Several of the village churches in the Vale are of interest, notably the fine Early English cruciform building at Uffington, that has an octagonal tower and is known as The Cathedral of the Vale.
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The outer Y ring consists of 30 holes averaging 1.7 m × 1.14 m tapering to a flat base typically close to 1 m × 0.5 m, the inner Z holes, of which only 29 holes are known (the missing hole Z 8 may lie beneath the fallen Sarsen stone 8), are slightly larger, on average by some 0.1 m. They can be best described morphologically as ‘wedge-shaped’. The diameter of the Y Hole circuit, i.e. the best-fit circle is some 54 m, that of the Z Hole series, around 39 m.
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It represents the remnants of a much higher range of hills that existed hundreds of millions years ago. This has allowed the formation of features such as Cheddar Gorge, Ebbor Gorge and Burrington Combe. There are a wide variety of caves and swallet holes caused by dissolution of the rock by water. Further east there are Silurian volcanoes, Carboniferous Limestone outcrops, Variscan thrust tectonics, Permo-Triassic conglomerates, sediment-filled fissures, a classic unconformity, Jurassic clays and limestones, Cretaceous Greensand and chalk topped with Tertiary remnants including Sarsen Stones.
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St John the Baptist The parish church of St John the Baptist stands next to the main road in the south of the village and is built in flint and sarsen with limestone dressings. A church at Pewsey was recorded in Domesday Book of 1086. The present building has work from the late 12th or early 13th centuries in the four-bay arcades, on foundations of large sarsens; Pevsner suggests the arches were cut through the walls of an earlier building. The plain font bowl is also from the 12th century.
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An earth barrow covered the whole monument with material excavated from two flanking ditches and measured around wide and deep. The later stone tomb consists of two opposing transept chambers and terminal chamber; along with the longer entrance chamber, this gives the burial area a cruciform appearance in plan. At the entrance four large sarsen stones stand (originally six, but two are lost), having been returned to their upright locations following the 1962 excavations.Ancient Britain - Wayland's Smithy It is classified by archaeologists as one of the Severn-Cotswold tombs.
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Plan of the Nine Stones (based on Piggott and Piggott 1939) The Nine Stones circle has been described by Gale as "probably the most well documented of all those surviving in the county". It measures 9.1 metres by 7.9 metres (29 feet 10 inches by 25 feet 11 inches) in diameter, as measured from a north-to-south direction. The stones are of sarsen or conglomerate. A gap between two stones on the side of the circle adjacent to the road may suggest that there was once a tenth stone in the monument.
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The monument underwent a measured survey in 1981 by a team from the Kent Archaeological Rescue Unit (KARU). KARU continued to monitor the status of the monument, and in 2007 archaeologist Brian Philp noted that rabbit burrowing had compromised the road; as the road was being repaired, a previously unknown sarsen was discovered buried on the northern side of the monument. The rabbit burrowing prompted rescue excavations in 2007 and 2010 led by Paul Garwood of the University of Birmingham. This revealed buried sarsens on the north side of the monument, but no dating evidence.
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There may have been a stone façade in front of the chamber, and if so, these may be the stones now found in the Tottington's western springhead. At some point in the twentieth century, another large sarsen slab was placed on top of the Coffin Stone. In Evans' view, the nineteenth-century discovery of human remains at the site "strongly suggests" that the Coffin Stone was the remnant of a destroyed chambered long barrow. Jessup agreed, suggesting that "in all probability" it was part of such a monument.
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Fir Clump Stone Circle was a stone circle in Burderop Wood near Wroughton, Wiltshire, in South West England. The ring was part of a tradition of stone circle construction that spread throughout much of Britain, Ireland, and Brittany during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, over a period between 3300 and 900 BCE. The purpose of such monuments is unknown, although some archaeologists speculate that the stones represented supernatural entities for the circle's builders. A double concentric circle consisting of sarsen megaliths, Fir Clump Stone Circle was oval-shaped.
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Day House Lane Stone Circle, also known as Coate Stone Circle, is a stone circle near the hamlet of Coate, now on the southeastern edge of Swindon, in the English county of Wiltshire. Five partly buried stones remain at the site. A circle of sarsen megaliths, Day House Lane Stone Circle probably had an original diameter of about 69 metres and possibly contained over thirty stones. It was one of at least seven stone circles that are known to have been erected in the area south of Swindon in northern Wiltshire.
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They had internal heights of up to , making them taller than most other chambered long barrows in Britain. The chambers were constructed from sarsen, a dense, hard, and durable stone that occurs naturally throughout Kent, having formed out of sand from the Eocene epoch. Early Neolithic builders would have selected blocks from the local area, and then transported them to the site of the monument to be erected. These common architectural features among the Medway Megaliths indicate a strong regional cohesion with no direct parallels elsewhere in the British Isles.
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The large quantities of Mesolithic material, coupled with its broad spread, indicated that the site was probably inhabited over a considerable length of time during the Mesolithic period. Some trenches excavated in 1957 had Mesolithic flints directly below the megaliths, leading the excavator John Alexander to believe that "no great interval of time separated" the Mesolithic and Neolithic uses of the site. Chestnuts Long Barrow was constructed in particularly close proximity to Addington Long Barrow. The chamber was built with sarsen stones that occur naturally within a few miles of the site.
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Addington Long Barrow is a chambered long barrow located near the village of Addington in the southeastern English county of Kent. Probably constructed in the fourth millennium BCE, during Britain's Early Neolithic period, today it survives only in a ruined state. Built of earth and about fifty local sarsen megaliths, the long barrow consisted of a sub-rectangular earthen tumulus enclosed by kerb-stones. Collapsed stones on the northeastern end of the chamber probably once formed a stone chamber in which human remains might have been deposited, though none have been discovered.
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The Medway long barrows all conformed to the same general design plan, and are all aligned on an east to west axis. Each had a stone chamber at the eastern end of the mound, and they each probably had a stone facade flanking the entrance. They had internal heights of up to , making them taller than most other chambered long barrows in Britain. The chambers were constructed from sarsen, a dense, hard, and durable stone that occurs naturally throughout Kent, having formed out of sand from the Eocene epoch.
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The Medway long barrows all conformed to the same general design plan, and are all aligned on an east to west axis. Each had a stone chamber at the eastern end of the mound, and they each probably had a stone facade flanking the entrance. They had internal heights of up to , making them taller than most other chambered long barrows in Britain. The chambers were constructed from sarsen, a dense, hard, and durable stone that occurs naturally throughout Kent, having formed out of sand from the Eocene epoch.
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He developed the idea that the two Inner Circles were a temple to the moon and to the sun respectively, and eventually came to believe that Avebury and its surrounding monuments were a landscaped portrayal of the Trinity, thereby backing up his erroneous ideas that the ancient druids had been followers of a religion very much like Christianity.Burl 1979. pp. 47–49. Stukeley was disgusted by the destruction of the sarsen stones in the monument, and named those local farmers and builders who were responsible.Burl 1979. p. 49.
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As Gill Sarsen, together with her future husband, Bill Howell, and Stanley Amis, they designed a modernist terrace of six houses at Nos. 80-90 South Hill Park, on the south side of Hampstead Heath, to replace four Victorian houses lost to World War Two bombing. All three were employed by the London County Council's Architect's Department Housing Division, and they ended up living in two of the six houses. Their designs were highly influential and much publicised, and led to them working on the Alton Estate tower blocks in Roehampton.
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The first part, "Sarsen", describes the neolithic structures around Avebury and Stonehenge, beginning at West Kennet Long Barrow. This is followed by "Limestone", which describes the Roman baths of Aquae Sulis and some surviving Anglo-Saxon churches, such as St Laurence's Church, Bradford-on-Avon. "Marble" considers the rise of Gothic architecture, and the influence of Purbeck Marble, which like other types of Purbeck stone is in fact a type of limestone. Finally "Concrete" discusses the influence of the Industrial Revolution on architecture around Bath, Somerset, and particularly the role played by the Kennet and Avon Canal and the Great Western Railway.
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On 31 December 1900, Stone 22 of the Sarsen Circle fell over during a storm, taking with it a lintel. Following public pressure and a letter to The Times by William Flinders Petrie, the owner Edmund Antrobus agreed to allow remedial engineering under archaeological supervision. To manage the job, Antrobus appointed Gowland, who, despite having no formal archaeological training, produced some of the finest, most detailed excavation records ever made at the monument. The only area that he opened was around the precariously leaning Stone 56 (the western stone of the Great Trilithon), an area measuring approximately .
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The best view of the horse is said to be from the nearby B4041 road, whilst the A361 road near Broad Hinton also provides a clear view. At the top of the hill is a car park where the Ridgeway crosses the B4041 road, and a footpath stretches from there down to the horse, making the horse accessible to the public. Ironically, many real horses often roam the field.Walking the Wessex White Horses - Hackpen It has been suggested that the stones for Stonehenge and Avebury may have come from a field of sarsen stones just to the south east of its location.
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The Coffin Stone, also known as the Coffin and the Table Stone, is a large sarsen stone at the foot of Blue Bell Hill near Aylesford in the south-eastern English county of Kent. Now lying horizontally, the stone probably once stood upright nearby. Various archaeologists have argued that the stone was part of a now-destroyed chambered long barrow constructed in the fourth millennium BCE, during Britain's Early Neolithic period. If a chambered long barrow did indeed previously exist on the site, it would have been built by pastoralist communities shortly after the introduction of agriculture to Britain from continental Europe.
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All were associated with pieces of fragmented, burnt sarsen. Projecting this arc into a circle, and considering the location of the five known stone holes, would suggest that – if the stones were evenly spaced – there would have been ten megaliths in the circle, not twelve, as Falkner had claimed. From other surviving examples of stone circles it is nevertheless known that the stones are not always spaced at even intervals throughout the whole circle, indicating that the ring could have once contained twelve megaliths. That excavation also recovered 1074 pieces of worked flint, much of it from the topsoil.
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Of these, it lies near to both Kit's Coty House and the Coffin Stone on the eastern side of the river. Three further surviving long barrows, Addington Long Barrow, Chestnuts Long Barrow, and Coldrum Long Barrow, are located west of the Medway. Now a jumble of half-buried sarsen stones it is thought to have been a tomb similar to that of the Coldrum Stones. The name is derived from the belief that the chaotic pile of stones from the collapsed tomb were uncountable and various stories are told about the fate of those who tried.
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The sarsens found at Little Kit's Coty House are among the largest known from the Medway Megaliths. Using their measurements as a basis, Ashbee proposed that the chamber would have been long, wide, and high. He suggested that, when the monument was viewed from the east, it became clear that the stones had fallen to the north from their original positions. He believed that if the site were fully excavated, the holes in which the sarsen stones originally stood could might be identified, allowing for the chamber to be reconstructed in a manner similar to that at Chestnuts Long Barrow.
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The White Horse Stone is located near to where another chambered long barrow, Smythe's Megalith, was found in 1822. This chamber was found to contain broken pieces of human bone, among them parts of a skull, ribs, thigh, leg, and arm bones. After being discovered buried in a field by farm labourers, the chamber of this long barrow was destroyed, meaning that nothing of this monument can now be seen. Various sarsen stones have been found in the vicinity of both Smythe's Megalith and the White Horse Stone, perhaps reflecting the remnants of since-destroyed long barrows.
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During the Early Neolithic, the site may have been close to other chambered long barrows; the White Horse Stone, for instance, is nearby and may have once been part of the chamber of a long barrow. Various sarsen stones have been found in the vicinity of both, again perhaps reflecting the remnants of since-destroyed long barrows. To the south of the White Horse Stone was a building—termed "Structure 4806" by its excavators in the 2000s—that was constructed in the Early Neolithic period. Radiocarbon dating from the site suggests a usage date of between 4110-3820 and 3780-3530 calibrated BCE.
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Victoria Fountain The Victoria Fountain is located in the centre of the southern enclosure of the Old Steine Gardens.My Brighton and Hove – Old Steine – The Victoria Fountain and the War Memorial – extracted from the Encyclopaedia of Brighton by Tim Carder, 1990 The fountain is thirty-two feet in height and includes a large, cast-iron pool with a rim decorated with egg-and-dart mouldings. Originally, the pool was filled with water lilies and goldfish. Sarsen stones in the centre of the pool were first found in the Steine by workers digging a trench in 1823.
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In July 1910 the first event to be held in the park was a show by the Hanwell and Greenford Horticultural Society, which later became an annual event. The following year in April a two-day celebration of George V's coronation took place, which included music from the local Hanwell Band and a march by children from St Ann's school to Elthorne Park. Although toilets for men were installed in the park from the outset, a toilet for women was not installed until 1912. The Hanwell ‘Sarsen’ Stone can be seen just inside the main entrance to the park.
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A large Sarsen stone can still be seen, split into three pieces, with one being located by the west door of the St Edmund and St Mary's parish church and one each side of the entrance to Fryerning Lane. Ingatestone belonged to Barking Abbey from about 950 AD until the Dissolution of the Monasteries, when it was purchased from the Crown by Sir William Petre. Petre, originally a lawyer from Devon, had risen to become the Secretary of State to Henry VIII. He built a large courtyard house, Ingatestone Hall, as his home in the village, along with almshouses which still exist today as private cottages in Stock Lane.
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The first clear evidence of construction, dated to around 2400 BC consisted of a gravel core with a revetting kerb of stakes and sarsen boulders. Alternate layers of chalk rubble and earth were placed on top of this: the second phase involved heaping further chalk on top of the core, using material excavated from a series of surrounding ditches which were progressively refilled then recut several metres further out. The step surrounding the summit dates from this phase of construction, either as a precaution against slippage, or as the remnants of a spiral path ascending from the base, used during construction to raise materials and later as a processional route.
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With the exception of the sandstone Rempstone circle, all consist of sarsen boulders. Much of this may have been obtained from the "Valley of Stones", a location at the foot of Crow Hill near to Littlebredy, which is located within the vicinity of many of these circles. With the exception of the circle at Litton Cheney, none display evidence of any outlying stones or earthworks around the stone circle. The archaeologists Stuart and Cecily Piggott believed that the circles of Dorset were probably of Bronze Age origin, a view endorsed by Burl, who noted that their distribution did not match that of any known Neolithic sites.
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In late summer of 2007, four weeks of fieldwork was carried out by several hundred students and volunteers. Excavations were carried out at the western end of the Cursus; around the southern, western and eastern gates of Durrington Walls; at the site of Cunnington's digs immediately south of Woodhenge; and around another nearby fallen sarsen stone, known locally as the Cuckoo Stone. Geophysical surveys were also carried out across much of the surrounding area and around Stonehenge Bowl. Residencies for six artists and two graduate art student placements were arranged by Artists in Archaeology to record the processes of uncovering and interpreting this location.
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He related that as well as being known as "The Coffin", it was also called "The Table Stone". He believed that it had once stood upright on that same spot, representing "a sepulchral memorial or mênhir of some ancient British chieftain". Dunkin recorded that human remains—including two human skulls, other bones, and charcoal—had been found nearby during the 1836 removal of a hedge that "concealed more than one-half of the stone". He also noted that fragments of Roman pottery had been found nearby, and that local farmers had been moving sarsen blocks to the adjacent springhead; "more than fifty blocks, large and small, lie about the yard".
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The M4 motorway with Burderop Wood on the right- hand side; the stone circle stood nearby In the late nineteenth century, the antiquarian A. D. Passmore wrote two notebooks in which he discussed archaeological sites in Wiltshire. He recorded a local tradition that there had been a large stone circle near the railway bridge outside Swindon Old Town and the old Marlborough road to Ladder Hill. He also recorded that the circle had been broken up about thirty years prior and that as such he did not know how many stones had been part of the circle. He added that many small pieces of sarsen could be found at the circle.
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The 2002 excavation also revealed a pit at the site of Falkner's Circle that contained both sarsen fragments, which showed evidence of having fragmented under exposure to heat, and a number of carbonised seeds. These were radiocarbon dated, revealing a date between 410-340 BCE and 310-200 BCE (95.4% probability), placing this pit in the Middle Iron Age. The pit was likely a hearth base. A spread of fire-reddened clay and charcoal flecking, covering an area of circa 10m by 4m, was interpreted as having been produced in the post- medieval period during the burning and destruction of some of the stones.
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A large number of surface finds were discovered in both the field and a quarry to the east. In the latter part of the 1950s, with plans afoot to build a house adjacent to Chestnuts Long Barrow, the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments initiated an excavation of the site under the directorship of John Alexander. The excavation, which lasted five weeks in August and September 1957, was funded by Boyle, with the support of the Inspectorate, and largely carried out by volunteers. Following excavation, the fallen sarsen megaliths were re-erected in their original sockets, allowing for the restoration of part of the chamber and façade.
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Given the recorded dimensions of the stones, Ashbee suggested that the chamber may have once measured in length and could have included as many as ten sarsen stones in its original construction. He also suggested that it would have had a height of around , making it one of the smaller chambers in the Medway region; the chamber at Kits Cot House, for instance, reached over in height, and that at Chestnuts Long Barrow reached a height of about . Below these megaliths was a flat stone, measuring in length and in width. Lying atop this stone were human remains, reportedly aligned in an east to west orientation.
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Uffington White Horse and Dragon Hill The downland is part of the Southern England Chalk Formation which runs from Dorset in the west to Kent in the east and also includes the Dorset Downs, Purbeck Hills, Cranborne Chase, Wiltshire Downs, Salisbury Plain, the Isle of Wight, Chiltern Hills and the North and South Downs. The area is a site of scientific interest in numerous fields and has an internationally important habitat for early gentian. Geologically, its chalk downs, dry valleys and sarsen outcrops are of note, the last in the area around Marlborough providing material for many of the Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in the area such as Avebury Henge.
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In the early 1960s, Howard began issuing a correspondence course in a tradition of Wicca that he termed the Coven of Atho; in his position of leadership over the group, he termed himself "The Fish". One subscriber was Valiente, who reached the lowest rank on the course, that of "Sarsen", in 1963. She copied down all of the information provided in the course into a notebook, highlighting that most of it appeared to derive from Dion Fortune's novel The Sea Priestess and Rufold Koch's The Book of Signs. Other possible sources include Gardner's Witchcraft Today, Charles Leland's Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, and Lewis Spence's books on Atlantis.
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The barber- surgeon presented a threat to whoever restarted the events of the First Circle and was crushed under a falling sarsen stone, also engraved with a serpent like the amulet the barber-surgeon carried. The amulet was crushed, along with the barber-surgeon; however, his bones were later removed and the stone that killed him was re-erected within the circle. Whoever caused the barber-surgeon to die did not succeed, and the time circle again reset itself into the modern age. Dai the poacher's life, death and activities are markedly similar to those of the barber-surgeon, suggesting a link between the two characters.
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It was not for shortage of stone: the Romans quarried stone on Swindon hill and although there is no evidence that stone was used at Durocornovium, it remains highly likely as a local resource that it was. There was a unique development at Durocornovium in the 4th century. Whilst it is possible that conventional stone buildings continued to be used, there was a proliferation of wooden buildings built on top of sarsen stone pilings to stay above ground level, a feature that explains the relative bounty of coins dating from that time as coins were dropped and lost through the floorboards. Such a change in architecture reflects what archaeologists believe was an increase in local flooding.
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View from Dragon Hill road The Blowing Stone, a perforated sarsen stone, lies in a garden in Kingston Lisle, two kilometres away and produces a musical tone when blown through. Wayland's Smithy is a Neolithic long barrow and chamber tomb southwest of the Horse. It lies next to The Ridgeway, an ancient trackway that also runs behind Uffington Castle, and is followed by the Ridgeway National Trail, a long-distance footpath running from Overton Hill, near Avebury, to Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire. In 2019, a group of workers laying water pipes near Letcombe Bassett unearthed an almost 3,000-year-old settlement that archaeologists believe to belong to the same community involved in the creation of the Uffington White Horse.
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Kit's Coty House, a chambered long barrow near Aylesford, Kent, was constructed circa 4000 BCE. In about 3000 BC the emergence of Neolithic culture saw the lifestyle of the Mesolithic hunter- gatherers shift to a more sedentary and communal lifestyle that relied upon the keeping of livestock and the growing of crops. There is substantial evidence of Neolithic activity within the North Downs, notably the long barrows concentrated in the Medway and Stour valleys. The Medway long barrows, which include Kit's Coty House and Coldrum Stones, are constructed of sarsen stone, locally found on Blue Bell Hill and in the valleys of the dip slope, whilst the Stour Valley long barrows are constructed of earth.
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The North aisle was built in about 1845. Sir George Gilbert Scott's restoration of the church in 1872-3 involved widening of the chancel arch, inserting a new north side to the chancel, new windows to the nave and east end, and adding the south aisle. The churchyard contains a notable sarsen stone marking the grave of Walker Miles whose work in the early days of the "Ramblers' movement" contributed to the formation of the Ramblers of Great Britain. At the same time, Sir George Gilbert Scott designed St Mary's almshouses next to St Nicholas Church for Mrs Mabel Hunt of Wonham House, in memory of her only daughter who had died at the age of sixteen.
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The Medway Megaliths, sometimes termed the Kentish Megaliths, are a group of Early Neolithic chambered long barrows and other megalithic monuments located in the lower valley of the River Medway in Kent, South-East England. Constructed from local sarsen stone and soil between the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE, they represent the only known prehistoric megalithic group in eastern England and the most south-easterly group in Britain. They remain one of several regionally contained chambered long barrow traditions in Britain, although have certain precise architectural characteristics which mark them out as distinct from other groups. The purpose of these long barrows remains elusive, although some were used as tombs for the remains of a select group of individuals.
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It is not known if they were all built at the same time, or whether they were constructed in succession, while similarly it is not known if they each served the same function or whether there was a hierarchy in their usage. The Medway long barrows all conformed to the same general design plan, and are all aligned on an east to west axis. Each had a stone chamber at the eastern end of the mound, and they each probably had a stone facade flanking the entrance. The chambers were constructed from sarsen, a dense, hard, and durable stone that occurs naturally throughout Kent, having formed out of silicified sand from the Eocene.
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Nevertheless, it has suffered much damage, particularly to its eastern side, where the sarsen boulders have broken away from the monument and fallen down the ridge. The name "Coldrum" dates from at least the mid-19th century, and comes from an adjacent farmhouse, Coldrum Lodge, which has since been demolished. From 1842 to 1844, the antiquarian Beale Post authored an unpublished account of the monument in which he stated that skulls had been found in the terrace, close to the chamber, in 1804 and 1825. The earliest known reference in print to the Coldrum Stones comes from Albert Way 1845, when it was erroneously described as a stone circle with a cromlech.
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West-facing view of the remnant barrow, which extends away from the camera on the left-hand side of the road between the fence and the tree All the surviving megalithic tombs from the Early Neolithic period have suffered from neglect and the ravages of agriculture. Following the demolition of the tomb's chamber, some of the sarsens around Addington Long Barrow had been buried, while others had been left visible. Various buildings in Addington are partly made of sarsen stone, some perhaps removed from the long barrow. Ashbee also suspected that sarsens from the monument had been broken up for use in the repairs and extensions to the local church in the nineteenth century.
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The White Horse Stone is a name given to two separate sarsen megaliths on the slopes of Blue Bell Hill, near the village of Aylesford in the south-eastern English county of Kent. The Lower White Horse Stone was destroyed prior to 1834, at which time the surviving Upper White Horse Stone took on its name and folkloric associations. Various archaeologists have suggested—although not proven—that the stones were each part of chambered long barrows constructed in the fourth millennium BCE, during Britain's Early Neolithic period. If the White Horse Stones were originally components of chambered long barrows, then they would have been erected by pastoralist communities shortly after the introduction of agriculture to Britain from continental Europe.
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By the 19th century, antiquarians were speculating that the Lower White Horse Stone may have taken its name from the White Horse of Kent, which they in turn believed was the flag of the legendary fifth-century Anglo-Saxon warriors Hengest and Horsa. Subsequent historical research has not accepted this interpretation. After the stone was destroyed, the stories associated with it were transposed to a nearby sarsen boulder, which became known as the Upper White Horse Stone. Since at least the 1980s, the latter has been viewed as a sacred site by various Folkish Heathen groups, including the Odinic Rite, because of its folkloric associations with Hengest and Horsa and the Anglo-Saxon Migration.
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However, as a result of what is known of this architectural style from better- recorded sites, it is apparent that this stone chamber would have been located at the eastern end of a long earthen barrow. Ashbee noted that this could have reached a length of 55 metres (180 feet). It may be that kerbstones also lined the sides of this barrow, as is evident at several other of the Medway Megaliths; Ashbee suggested that this could have contained as many as 110 or 120 sarsen stones. The monument may have had ditches flanking its sides, and chalk rubble collected in digging these ditches may have been piled up to help form the barrow.
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The etymological root of the name is "Stony Mere", Old English for "stone pond", referring to the sarsen stones around Stanmer village pond. The stones are not in their original situation, but have been gathered from the Downs and landscaped into the park's appearance. There have been rather inconclusive archaeological excavations at Pudding Bag Wood and Rocky Clump in the north of the park, and in Stanmer Great Wood, producing evidence of occupation from Neolithic times onwards. The village is first recorded in about 765 A.D. when (if the document is authentic) land there was granted by king Ealdwulf of Sussex to Hunlaf in order that he might found a college of secular canons at South Malling near Lewes.
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He used similar methods to cross the South Patagonian Icecap from Chile to Argentina, producing the film, Riding the Tempest. Philips has also skied across icecaps in Iceland (2003) and Ellesmere Island (1992) and in 2008 skied from Ny Alesund to Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen. In 1996-97 Philips worked as a Field Training Officer at Mawson Station for the Australian Antarctic Division and again in 2008-09 as Field Leader of the International Polar Year AGAP North project. In 2006-07 he sailed with his family on board the ice-strengthened ship Sarsen to Commonwealth Bay in Antarctica and in 2009 circumnavigated Greenland on board Greenpeace's icebreaker, Arctic Sunrise as part of their Climate Impacts expedition.
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Russian missionary activity, as well as Russian-sponsored schools, further encouraged the use of Cyrillic in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The alphabet was reworked by Sarsen Amanzholov and accepted in its current form in 1940. It contains 42 letters: 33 from the Russian alphabet with 9 additional letters for sounds of the Kazakh language: Ә, Ғ, Қ, Ң, Ө, Ұ, Ү, Һ, І (until 1957 Ӯ was used instead of Ұ). Initially, Kazakh letters came after letters from the Russian alphabet, but now they are placed after Russian letters similar in sound or shape. The letters В, Ё (since 1957), Ф, Х, Ц, Ч, Щ, Ъ, Ь and Э are not used in native Kazakh words.
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One particular group, known as the Gorsedd of Bards of Caer Abiri, focus almost entirely upon holding their rites at the prehistoric site,Blain and Wallis 2007. p. 48. referring to it as Caer Abiri. In their original ceremony, composed by Philip Shallcrass of the British Druid Order in 1993, those assembled divide into two groups, one referred to as the God party and the other as the Goddess party. Those with the Goddess party go to the "Devil's Chair" at the southern entrance to the Avebury henge, where a woman representing the spirit guardian of the site and the Goddess who speaks through her sits in the chair-like cove in the southern face of the sarsen stone.
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The first use of 3D laser scanning at Stonehenge was of the Bronze Age dagger and axes inscribed on the sarsens, which was undertaken in 2002 by a team from Wessex Archaeology and Archaeoptics. They used a Minolta Vivid 900 scanner to analyse and record surfaces of the prehistoric and post-medieval carvings. The Bronze Age carvings of a dagger and an axehead were first discovered by archaeologist Richard J. C. Atkinson in 1953 on stone number 53, one of the imposing sarsen trilithons. A contemporary survey in 1956 by Robert Newall revealed that the total number of axes on this stone totalled 14, all on the same face of the stone, looking inwards to the centre of the stone circle.
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The chambers were constructed from sarsen sandstone, a dense, hard, and durable stone that occurs naturally throughout Kent, having formed out of sand from the Eocene epoch. Early Neolithic builders would have selected blocks from the local area, and then transported them to the site of the monument to be erected. These common architectural features among the Medway Megaliths indicate a strong regional cohesion with no direct parallels elsewhere in the British Isles. Nevertheless, as with other regional groupings of Early Neolithic long barrows—such as the Cotswold-Severn group in south-western Britain—there are also various idiosyncrasies in the different monuments, such as Coldrum's rectilinear shape, the Chestnut Long Barrow's facade, and the long, thin mounds at Addington and Kit's Coty.
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The chambers were constructed from sarsen, a dense, hard, and durable stone that occurs naturally throughout Kent, having formed out of sand from the Eocene epoch. Early Neolithic builders would have selected blocks from the local area, and then transported them to the site of the monument to be erected. These common architectural features among the Medway Megaliths indicate a strong regional cohesion with no direct parallels elsewhere in the British Isles. Nevertheless, as with other regional groupings of Early Neolithic long barrows—such as the Cotswold-Severn group in south-western Britain—there are also various idiosyncrasies in the different monuments, such as Coldrum's rectilinear shape, the Chestnut Long Barrow's facade, and the long, thin mounds at Addington and Kit's Coty.
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The chambers were constructed from sarsen, a dense, hard, and durable stone that occurs naturally throughout Kent, having formed out of sand from the Eocene epoch. Early Neolithic builders would have selected blocks from the local area, and then transported them to the site of the monument to be erected. These common architectural features among the Medway Megaliths indicate a strong regional cohesion with no direct parallels elsewhere in the British Isles. Nevertheless, as with other regional groupings of Early Neolithic long barrows—such as the Cotswold- Severn group in south-western Britain—there are also various idiosyncrasies in the different monuments, such as Coldrum's rectilinear shape, the Chestnut Long Barrow's facade, and the long, thin mounds at Addington and Kit's Coty.
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The chambers were constructed from sarsen, a dense, hard, and durable stone that occurs naturally throughout Kent, having formed out of sand from the Eocene epoch. Early Neolithic builders would have selected blocks from the local area, and then transported them to the site of the monument to be erected. These common architectural features among the Medway Megaliths indicate a strong regional cohesion with no direct parallels elsewhere in the British Isles. Nevertheless, as with other regional groupings of Early Neolithic long barrows—such as the Cotswold-Severn group in south- western Britain—there are also various idiosyncrasies in the different monuments, such as Coldrum's rectilinear shape, the Chestnut Long Barrow's facade, and the long, thin mounds at Addington and Kit's Coty.
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The section called The Droveway, on which the Goldstone Waterworks was built in the 1860s, had to be maintained as a right of way when Hove Park was built. A long diagonal footpath once known as Dyer's Drove runs for several miles from Portslade-by-Sea on to the Downs, and Drove Road in Portslade village may have been used since Roman times. A large Sarsen stone called the Goldstone stood on farmland northwest of the village, now part of Hove Park. Links with druids were claimed; and some 19th-century sources stated it was part of a ring of stones similar to Stonehenge, and that the others were buried in a pond at Goldstone Bottom, one of the coombes (small dry valleys) between the Downs and the sea.
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Timothy Darvill and Geoffrey Wainwright Stonehenge excavations 2008. The Antiquaries Journal, Published online by Cambridge University Press 21 Apr 2009 Although first encountered by William Hawley in the 1920s, it was Richard Atkinson who formally identified and named these irregular settings in 1954: ‘In choosing this designation, I had in mind John Aubrey’s frequent use, as a marginal note…of the phrase ‘quaere quot’ – ‘inquire how many’ – which seemed appropriate to the occasion.’ Atkinson, R J C, Stonehenge (Penguin Books, 1979) p.58 Their place at the beginning of the stone monument phase has been recognized from their stratigraphic relationships: in places they were cut through by both the settings of the later and still partly surviving Bluestone Circle and also by a stonehole dug for one of the uprights of the Sarsen Circle.
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In the south of the parish is the Valley of Stones, which in 1906 was described by Sir Frederick Treves as "a mysterious glen among the downs, on whose grassy slopes many huge stones are scattered." In prehistoric times it was used as a source of building material for nearby constructions such as tombs and stone circles, and within 4 miles are two-thirds of all such structures in the county. Folklore attributes the origin of the stones to have been two giants playing stone-throwing games, but they are the result of conditions at the end of the last ice age, when freezing and thawing caused sandstone on surrounding hilltops to break up and slump downhill. They form one of the best British examples of a sarsen stone boulder train.
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Valiente learned of the non-Gardnerian Wiccan Charles Cardell from a 1958 article, and subsequently struck up a correspondence with him. Cardell suggested that they pool their respective traditions together, but Valiente declined the offer, expressing some scepticism regarding Cardell's motives and conduct. In 1962, Valiente began a correspondence course run by Raymond Howard, a former associate of Cardell's; this course instructed her in a Wiccan tradition known as the Coven of Atho. At Halloween 1963 she was then initiated into the Coven of Atho in a ritual overseen by Howard, entering the lowest rank of the course, that of 'Sarsen', and beginning to copy the teachings that she received into notebooks, where she was able to identify many of the sources from which Howard had drawn upon in fashioning his tradition.
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The inner stone circle was encompassed by six concentric rings of post holes, marking where timber posts had once stood. The first stage of activity at the site, some time around 3000 BC, consisted of a ring of eight wooden posts across, with a central post, presumed to be a round hut. Within 200 years the first ring was enlarged to 6m and a second ring was added, also of eight posts, but this time , perhaps creating a large hut or an enclosure. Phase three, some time in the later Neolthic, a third ring of 33 posts were added, in a circle across, and at the same time an inner stone circle of 15 or 16 sarsen stones was introduced alongside what was by that point the middle ring, making an almost solid wall of stones and posts.
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The modern distinction between various architectural functions with which we are familiar today, now makes it difficult for us to think of some megalithic structures as multi-purpose socio-cultural centre points. Such structures would have served a mixture of socio-economic, ideological, political functions and indeed aesthetic ideals. The megalithic structures of Ġgantija, Tarxien, Ħaġar Qim, Mnajdra, Ta' Ħaġrat, Skorba and smaller satellite buildings on Malta and Gozo, first appearing in their current form around 3600 BC, represent one of the earliest examples of a fully developed architectural statement in which aesthetics, location, design and engineering fused into free-standing monuments. Stonehenge, the other well-known building from the Neolithic would later, 2600 and 2400 BC for the sarsen stones, and perhaps 3000 BC for the blue stones, be transformed into the form that we know so well.
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This is very significant in respect of the Great Trilithon; the surviving upright has its flatter face outwards (see image on right), towards the midwinter sunset, and was raised from the inside. The remainder of the trilithon array (and almost all of the stones of the Sarsen Circle) had construction ramps which sloped inwards, and were therefore set up from the outside. Placing the centre face of the stones (regardless of their thickness) against markers would mean that the ‘gaps’ between the stones were simply consequential. The study of the geometric layout of the monument shows that such methods were used and that there is a clear argument for regarding other outlying elements as part of a geometric scheme (e.g. the ‘Station Stones’ and the stoneholes 92 and 94 which mark two opposing facets of an octagon).
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St Michael and All Angels Detail on the south side of the church at the exact spot as in a sketch made by J.R.R.Tolkien in August 1912p18, W G Hammond & C Scull, J.R.R. Tolkien Artist & Illustrator, Harper Collins, 1998 > ...the Downs themselves shelter Lambourn's massive Norman w nave.Simon > Jenkins and Paul Barker, England's Thousand Best Churches, Allen Lane, 1999 The large, mainly Norman parish church (Church of England) is in the village centre facing the historic market place, with a surrounding wall built of sarsen stones, and is dedicated to St Michael and All Angels. The road pattern shows an original circular enclosure, suggesting pagan Celtic origins. Alfred the Great, born in Wantage, was also closely connected with this ancient landmark which has been a minster since Saxon times (officially known as Lambourn Minster since as early as 1032) and mentioned it in his will.
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Fig.1 The Q and R Holes, their location in relation to the early earthwork The Q and R Holes are a series of concentric sockets which currently represent the earliest known evidence for a stone structure on the site of Stonehenge. Beneath the turf and just inside the later Sarsen Circle are a double arc of buried stoneholes, the only surviving evidence of the first stone structure (possibly a double stone circle) erected within the centre of Stonehenge (Figs.1 & 2) and currently regarded as instigating the period known as Stonehenge Phase 3i. This phase tentatively began as early as 2600 BC, although recent radiocarbon dates from samples retrieved from one of the sockets in 2008 during excavations by Darvill and Wainwright suggest a date of around 2400 to 2300 BC. The final report is yet to be published, but some interesting results follow from the partial excavation of Q Hole 13 where 'associations with Beaker pottery' were noted.
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A plan of the Y and Z Hole circuits at Stonehenge in relation to the central stone structure The Y and Z Holes are two rings of concentric (though irregular) circuits of 30 and 29 near identical pits cut around the outside of the Sarsen Circle at Stonehenge. The current view is that both circuits are contemporary. Radiocarbon dating of antlers deliberately placed in hole Y 30 provided a date of around 1600 BCE, a slightly earlier date was determined for material retrieved from Z 29. These dates make the Y and Z holes the last known structural activity at Stonehenge. The holes were discovered in 1923 by William Hawley, who, on removing the topsoil over a wide area noted them as clearly visible patches of ‘humus’ against the chalk substrate. Hawley named them the ‘Y’ and ‘Z’ because for a short time he had earlier labeled the recently discovered Aubrey Holes the ‘X’ holes.
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Farnham's history has been claimed to extend back tens of thousands of years to hunters of the Paleolithic or early Stone Age, on the basis of tools and prehistoric animal bones found together in deep gravel pits.Our History on webside of neighbouring Frensham Parish Council The first known settlement in the area was in the Mesolithic period, some 7,000 years ago; a cluster of pit dwellings and evidence of a flint-knapping industry from that period has been excavated a short distance to the east of the town. There was a Neolithic long barrow at nearby Badshot Lea, now destroyed by quarrying. This monument lay on the route of the prehistoric trackway known as the Harrow Way or Harroway, which passes through Farnham Park, and a sarsen stone still stands nearby, which is believed to have marked the safe crossing point of a marshy area near the present Shepherd and Flock roundabout.
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