These Stour monuments primarily differ from their Medway counterparts in that they have not been built using sarsens, and are thus non-megalithic, unchambered long barrows. The decision by the builders of these Stour Long-Barrows to avoid using stone as a building material was likely deliberate, for sarsens are naturally present in the local area and could have been obtained without too much trouble.
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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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Lamb and sarsens, Piggle Dean Piggledene () is a 4.7 hectare biological and geological Site of Special Scientific Interest in Wiltshire, notified in 1965. Since 1908 it has been owned by the National Trust.
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The field in which Smythe's Megalith was located Another chambered tomb once existed in a large field east of the A229, which is sometimes termed Smythe's Megalith. In 1823 or 1824, the landowner, George Fowle, found that large sarsens beneath the soil were interfering with ploughing. When he tried removing them, he discovered three upright sarsens, and brought Maidstone historian Clement Taylor Smythe to investigate the site. Smythe's excavation revealed a rectilinear stone chamber, containing the bones of at least two adults and a pot sherd.
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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 house was built on the site of a prehistoric stone circle or henge and this has given it its name. The remains of the circle are still visible with one stone incorporated into the south-east corner of the chapel. The stones are a mixture of sarsens and puddingstone.Stonor stone circle Stonor estate website.
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The chamber of West Kennet Long Barrow The stone chamber has been characterised as being "more elaborate" than most other examples in the Cotswold-Severn group. The chamber is built from sarsens. It extends for 12 metres inside the barrow. The roof is set between 1.7 metres and 2.2 metres above the chamber floor.
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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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A thick layer of Chert gravel from the Purbeck Strata can be found on Blackdown Hill near Portesham, but it is not known whether it was carried there or whether it is the remains of an earlier deposit.Ensom (pp.71–72) Blocks of Quartzite can be found across the downlands of Southern Dorset and these sarsens have been used in some of the local prehistoric monuments.Ensom (p.
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Passmore related that an old man had recollected seeing other stones in this field being broken up many decades previously. The old man thought that there had once been a full circle of stones in the field, although Passmore considered this testimony "not sufficiently strong to build upon". Passmore also related finding flint tools and crude pieces of pottery in the field near these sarsens. Passmore also observed a third feature in the vicinity.
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It is also recorded that at some point between 1939 and 1945 human remains that had been found at the site were reburied in the churchyard at Trottiscliffe. This excavation revealed all the existing sarsens surrounding the monument, several which had previously been buried. The stones of the chamber were shored up with concrete foundations where Filkins deemed it necessary. Although Filkins' excavation was comprehensive, it ignored stone holes, packing stones, and their relationship to the mound.
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He briefly mentioned it in an article published in The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine while detailing it in greater depth in his unpublished notebooks. He recorded the circle as consisting of eight stones at that time, with a possible avenue or stone row emerging from it and facing in the direction of the circle at Coate. Later archaeologists have noted that some of the sarsens used as building material in Hodson were once part of the circle.
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He is progressing with his plan to construct a simulated Stonehenge with eight uprights and two lintels. Alexander Thom was of the opinion that the site was laid out with the necessary precision using his megalithic yard. The engraved weapons on the sarsens are unique in megalithic art in the British Isles, where more abstract designs were invariably favoured. Similarly, the horseshoe arrangements of stones are unusual in a culture that otherwise arranged stones in circles.
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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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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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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 archaeologists speculate that the stones represented supernatural entities for the circle's builders. Positioned in a dry valley, the circle was erected on the southern end of a field that contained a range of natural sarsens. It is possible that the megaliths were erected very close to where they were naturally found.
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Before its diversion, this river and its tributaries formed a river system draining the Welsh mountains and bringing some of their characteristic volcanic rocks into this area. The evidence for this is a substantial thickness of what is called Kesgrave Sands and Gravels which represent the bed of the river. These old Thames gravels contain a variety of distinctive pebbles from as far away as North Wales, evidence of the ancient drainage catchment. The gravels also contain large boulders of puddingstone and sarsens, which are very hard conglomerates and sandstones respectively.
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Chesnuts Long Barrow Chestnuts Long Barrow is located around 100 metres north-west of Addington long barrow. The mound itself no longer exists, although the eastern end of the barrow is still marked out by sarsens, some of which have been re- erected to their original positions. Although the earthen mound no longer exists in any form, it has been estimated that it would have been 20 metres long and around 15 metres wide. The chamber would have been 12 ft long, 7 ft wide, and 9 ft high, thus being described by Paul Ashbee as being of "huge and unusual proportions".
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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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A collapsed, broken slab lies at the chamber's opening, eastern end. It is also possible that a largely rectangular slab at the bottom of the slope had once been part of the chamber's eastern end. Excavation has revealed that flint masonry was used to pack around the chamber and support its sarsens; 20th-century renovation has seen this largely replaced with cement, allowing the stones to continue standing upright. It is possible that there was a facade in front of the chamber, as is evident at other chambered tombs in Britain, such as West Kennet Long Barrow and Wayland's Smithy.
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Others have seen it as a womb of the Great Goddess, and as a sort of living entity. The winter solstice has been a particularly popular occasion for Pagans to visit. Modern Pagan visitors have often left items, including tea lights, incense, flowers, fruit, and coins, in the long barrow, often regarding these as offerings to "spirits" which they believe reside there. Various fires lit within the long barrow have left scorch marks and damaged the stones; one of the sarsens had to be glued back together after having been fractured by the impact of fire.
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The decision by the builders of the Stour long barrows to not use stone was likely deliberate, for sarsens are naturally present in the local area and could have been obtained had they wanted them. Archaeologists recognise the Stour long barrows as a distinct regional grouping of this form of monument. The archaeologist Paul Ashbee thought that there was a typological link between Julliberrie's Grave and the long barrows on the chalk downlands of Sussex, despite the fact that they are over fifty miles apart from each other. The three tumuli are located within eight kilometres of each other, high up on the North Downs between Canterbury and Ashford.
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A concave line of abrasion and polishing can be found both on one of the central kerb-stones on the western end of the monument and on a kerb-stone on the south-east of the monument. These have been attributed to the sharpening of flint and other stone axe-blades on these sarsens. It is possible that these tools were sharpened for use in cutting and carving the timber levers and struts which would have been used in erecting the stones and constructing the tomb. Similar evidence for the sharpening of tools has been found at West Kennet Long Barrow, as well as later prehistoric monuments such as Stonehenge.
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The remains of the Day House Lane Stone Circle, which Passmore suggested might have connected to the Hodson Stone Circle with a stone avenue In an 1894 article published in The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, the antiquarian A. D. Passmore related that he was aware of "a number of sarsens" which he thought might have been part of a stone circle. He noted that from these, a line of stones appeared to emerge and head in the direction of Coate. Passmore also produced two notebooks during that decade in which he wrote down observations deriving from his archaeological fieldwork in the region. Here he recorded more about the circle.
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These are within of each other, high up on the North Downs between Canterbury and Ashford; Jacket's Field is on the western side of the River Stour and the other two on the eastern side. Unlike the Medway Megaliths, the Stour Long Barrows do not appear to have used stone as a building material. Their builders' decision against stone was likely deliberate, for sarsens are naturally present in the local area and could have been obtained had the builders wanted them. The presence of the long barrows suggests some sort of settlement nearby in the Early Neolithic period, and two polished flint axes from the period have been found at Soakham Farm, not far from Jacket's Field Long Barrow.
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All the surviving megalithic tombs from the Early Neolithic period have suffered from neglect and the ravages of agriculture. Ashbee noted that the Coldrum Stones represent "Kent's least damaged megalithic long barrow", however it too has suffered considerable damage, having become dilapidated and fallen apart over the six millennia since its original construction. Most prominently, the eastern side has largely collapsed, with the stones that once helped to hold up the side of the barrow having fallen to the bottom of the slope. Conversely, it is possible that the sarsens at the bottom of the slope were not part of the original monument, but were stones found in nearby fields which were deposited there by farmers.
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J. F. S. Stone felt that a bluestone monument had earlier stood near the nearby Stonehenge Cursus and been moved to their current site from there. If Mercer's theory is correct then the bluestones may have been transplanted to cement an alliance or display superiority over a conquered enemy although this can only be speculation. An oval-shaped setting of bluestones similar to those at Stonehenge 3iv occurs at Bedd Arthur in the Preseli Hills, but that does not imply a direct cultural link. Some archaeologists have suggested that the igneous bluestones and sedimentary sarsens had some symbolism, of a union between two cultures from different landscapes and therefore from different backgrounds.
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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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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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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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The contents of Passmore's notebooks and their references to Fir Clump Stone Circle were not published until 2004, after they had been purchased by the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society. In an 1894 article in The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, Passmore briefly mentioned the presence of "a number of sarsens, which may or may not have formed part of a circle", existing at Hodson, which is adjacent to Burderop Wood. He added that a line of stones appeared to emerge from this putative circle and head in the direction of Coate. In 2000, Burl listed this description as a reference to the Fir Clump ring, although in Passmore's notebooks, published in 2004, the antiquarian differentiated the Fir Clump and Hodson examples as separate circles.
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The barrow survives on the south side of the road as a low mound with small sarsens The antiquarian John Harris mentioned Addington Long Barow in his History of Kent, published posthumously in 1719. He noted that the area where the barrow stood was known locally as "the Warren", and that an "old clerk" informed him that an oak tree had formerly grown in the centre of the stones. The monument was next recorded by the antiquarian Josiah Colebrooke in a short article for Archaeologia, the journal of the Society of Antiquaries of London, in 1773. Aided by the minister of the parish, the Reverend Buttonshaw, Colebooke enquired among elderly locals as to whether they knew of the oak tree mentioned by Harris, but none had.
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To achieve this, workmen removed two of the sarsens from the revetment kerb and placed them in the corner of the wood to the south of the monument. In the early 1840s, the Reverend Beale Post conducted investigations into the Medway Megaliths, writing them up in a manuscript that was left unpublished; this included Addington Long Barrow and Chestnuts Long Barrow, which he collectively labelled the "Addington Circles". Thomas Wright recorded that in 1845 a local parson, the Reverend Lambert Blackwell Larking, dug into a chamber at Addington, discovering "fragments of rude pottery". From the context in which Wright wrote, it seems that Addington Long Barrow is referred to, although it remains possible that Chestnuts was the barrow in question.
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These are located within of each other, high up on the North Downs between Canterbury and Ashford; Jacket's Field is on the western side of the River Stour and the other two on the eastern side. Unlike the Medway Megaliths, the Stour long barrows do not appear to have used stone as a building material. Their builders' decision not to do so was likely deliberate, for sarsens are naturally present in the local area and could have been obtained had they wanted them. The presence of the long barrows suggests some sort of settlement nearby in the Early Neolithic period, and two polished flint axes from the period have been found at Soakham Farm, not far from Jacket's Field Long Barrow.
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Alternatively, he suggested that the stones inside the circle may simply have been dumped there by farmers wanting them out of the way. Here, he also suggested that the circle was about 250 feet (76m) in diameter, and was thus of a similar size to the Day House Lane Stone Circle. He identified "4 distinct lines of stone" emerging from the circle, suggesting that if this line continued all the way to Coate then it may have attached to the row of stones he also thought emerged from the Day House Lane ring. In their 2017 book on prehistoric Wiltshire, the archaeologists David Field and David McOmish noted that a stone circle was "thought to have been present" in Hodson, and that any stones once part of it might now be found as some of the sarsens lying loose around the village or incorporated into the fabric of various buildings.
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The design of the horse was James Smith' design from 1954 except reversed so the horse faced right. The design was also a horse depicted as moving (the other Wiltshire White Horses are in a stood position) A committee was set up to oversee the project, the 'Cavaliers of the Devizes Millennium White Horse', and members of the public were invited to join. The group was also formed to support its future maintenance. Alan Truscott, of Sarsens Housing, joined the committee as the member in charge of the surveying and pegging out of the figure of the horse on the hill, alongside did Keith Saunders of Pearce Civil Engineering, who joined to provide the machinery and manpower to complete the clearing of the top soil and the infilling of the chalk following the cutting of the outline, the cutting of which was done by hand by various groups and individuals from the local community.
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