|
I noticed this site on one of my periodic trawls through some aerial photographs housed at the National Monuments Record Centre in Swindon. Studying aerial photographs in libraries, or even better, taking them yourself, is a wonderful way of getting to know an area. I am constantly amazed at how new sites and information continue to appear even when conditions are seemingly unhelpful for crop or soil marks. I never tire of the thrill of spotting a new site from the air, capturing it on film, and adding another small piece of information to the gigantic jigsaw.
| Image 1. |
Image 2. |
Image 3. |
|
The site in question appeared as a crop mark consisting of a clear ring of pits, some 35m across, which enclosed a massive central feature. I was most excited by this as I knew there were few, if any, parallels for such a monument. It lay in an area just south of the Cursus that through our continued fieldwork was beginning to reveal a major new complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments. Following my visit to Swindon I persuaded Mike Allen to visit the site and auger the central feature. After much effort we eventually succeeded in auguring through it to a depth of 1.5m before natural chalk was reached. Confident I was not going to be dealing with a very deep feature, I commenced excavations the following year (1997) and uncovered a site which exceeded even my high expectations.
The outer perimeter was defined by a ring of 14 unevenly spaced oval pits broken by wide entrance gaps to the East and West (see images 1 and 2). Eight were selected for excavation and revealed considerable variability in depth from 38 to140cm and it was clear they had never held posts or stones but had been allowed to silt up naturally. Finds were few but included occasional large blocks of chalk deliberately placed at the pit bases together with, in one instance, a large cattle bone. Occasional finds within the upper fillings included a fine, kite-shaped arrowhead and scraps of Peterborough pottery. Lying just outside the Eastern entrance a partially surviving line of eight shallow postholes may have formed a fence that screened this entry point to the monument. Beyond the fence lay two larger postholes which could have acted as markers to those approaching the site from the East. One contained a chiselled arrowhead.
|
