Woodhenge

[wood-henj]

Woodhenge is a Neolithic Class I henge and timber circle monument located in the Stonehenge World Heritage Site in Wiltshire, England. It is 2 miles north-east of Stonehenge in the parish of Durrington, just north of Amesbury.

Discovery

Woodhenge was identified in 1925 after an aerial archaeology survey by Alexander Keiller and OGS Crawford.

Crawford credits the discovery to an aerial photograph taken by Sqn Ldr Gilbert Stuart Martin Insall VC in 1925 (Crawford, Air-Photography for Archaeologists, 1929). Maud Cunnington excavated the site between 1926 and 1929.

Date

Pottery from the excavation was identified as being consistent with the Grooved ware style of the middle Neolithic, although later Beaker sherds were also found. So, the structure was probably built during period of cultural similarities commonly known as the "Beaker". The "Beaker culture" spans both the Late Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age and includes both the distinctive "bell-beaker" type ceramic vessels for which the cultural grouping is known as well as other local styles of pottery from the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age.

Structure

The site was believed by Cunnington to consist of a central burial, surrounded first by six concentric rings of postholes, then by a single ditch and finally an outer bank, around 85m wide. The burial was of a child which Cunnington interpreted as a dedicatory sacrifice although it was destroyed in The Blitz (bombing by the Germans during World War II) and re-examination has not been possible. Cunnington also found a skeleton of a teenager in one of the ditch sections she dug. Another theory is that the site is the burial location of a Celtic royal family (although the site actually predates the appearance of Celtic culture in Britain by almost 2000 years).

Most of the 168 post holes held wooden posts, although Mrs Cunnington found evidence that a pair of standing stones may have been placed between the second and third post hole rings. Recent excavations (2006) have indicated that there were, in fact, several standing stones on the site, arranged in a "cove". The deepest post holes measured up to 2m and the height of the timber posts they held has been estimated at up to 7.5m above the ground. The posts would have weighed up to 5 tons and the arrangement was similar to that of the bluestones at Stonehenge.The positions of the postholes are currently marked with modern concrete posts which are a simple and informative method of displaying the site.

Further comparisons with Stonehenge were quickly noticed by Cunnington; both have entrances oriented approximately on the midsummer sunrise and the diameters of the timber circles at Woodhenge and the stone circles at Stonehenge are similar making the reasons for the name more understandable.

Others

Subsequent to the discoveries of Mrs Cunnington, two further timber circles of comparable scale were later discovered no more than 500 metres away within the Durrington Walls henge.

There are various theories about possible timber structures that might have stood on the site and about, that they may have been aligned on positions of the Sun on the horizon. For many years work on the study of Stonehenge had overshadowed any real breakthroughs in the understanding of Woodhenge. However, recent ongoing investigations as part of the Stonehenge Riverside Project are now starting to cast new light on the site.