stonehenge - English Heritage

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ditch cut to support upright timber posts which can be
interpreted as a palisade or stockade. Dating is uncertain, but
there is late Bronze Age pottery from the upper fills and in the
1967 cutting it can be shown that the palisade pre-dates a
crouched inhumation burial dated to the mid first millennium
BC (Cleal et al. 1995, 157). When this feature was excavated
there was little by way of comparable sites known that could
provide a wider context. However, since the later 1970s a
number of very large later Neolithic palisaded enclosures have
been discovered and sampled (Gibson 1998b), including a
notable group of such monuments in the valley of the River
Kennet south of Avebury (Whittle 1997b, 53–138). A thirdmillennium
BC date is consistent with the evidence from the
Stonehenge Palisade Ditch although whether it should be
seen as a full enclosure or simply a linear boundary remains to
be determined. Whichever, its impact on the appearance of
Stonehenge during Phases 3i–3v of its existence must have
been considerable. It is possible that Stonehenge was simply
a small monument immediately outside a much larger
enclosure in rather the same way that Woodhenge lies just
outside the henge-enclosure of Durrington Walls.
A second possible enclosure, just as poorly understood
as the Stonehenge Palisade Ditch, is the so-called North
Kite. This lies south of Stonehenge on the eastern side of
the Till/Avon interfluve. The site was recognized by Colt
Hoare (1812, map op. 170) and recorded from the air by
Crawford and Keiller (1928, 254) as a large three-sided
earthwork enclosure of about 123ha, roughly trapezoidal in
plan, which they regarded as being Romano-British in date.
Since the 1920s the North Kite has been badly damaged by
ploughing and it lies amid a series of later prehistoric
boundaries and fieldsystems that rather confuse attempts
to understand the earlier features. Two early Bronze Age
barrows in the Lake Group stratigraphically overlie the
southwestern boundary earthworks of the North Kite (RCHM
1979, 26), while small-scale excavations undertaken in 1958
suggested a date in the later third or early second
millennium BC and confirmed the absence of a fourth side
(Annable 1959, 229). Further excavations in 1983 as part of
the Stonehenge Environs Project yielded Peterborough and
Beaker pottery from the buried soil below the bank broadly
confirming the previously suggested date (Richards 1990,
184–92). The scale of the enclosure is impressive: the axial
length is at least 400m (north–south) by 150m at the narrow
northern end, expanding to 300m wide at the southern end.
An unexcavated ring-ditch (Wilsford cum Lake 93) lies
roughly in the centre of the open southern end. The only
comparable excavated monument is the early fourthmillennium
BC three-sided trapezoidal ceremonial structure
at Godmanchester, Cambridgeshire, with an axial length of
336m and a maximum width of 228m (McAvoy 2000).
Flint mines were recorded east of the Stonehenge Inn in
1952 (Illustration 34). Three were shallow open-cast scoops
about 0.6m deep while three others were rather deeper
Illustration 34
Flint mines at Durrington:
plan and section of shafts
4 and 5. [After Booth and
Stone 1952, figures 1
and 2.]
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