The Cuckoo Stone

The Cuckoo Stone is a fairly modest standing stone around a mile from Stonehenge. The sarsen is one of many which once littered the landscape, left here long ago by glacial action, and the stone was simply raised in its original, natural location. It has long since fallen again. 

A pit near the stone contained cattle bone, flint, pottery and an antler pick, perhaps the tools used to raise the stone and the subsequent feast to consecrate it. The pick dates to 2900BC, the earliest phase of Stonehenge which at this point comprised a circle of bluestones but none of the huge sarsens.

Bronze Age burial urn from the Stonehenge area.

The Cuckoo Stone remained a revered site for the next three thousand years. Several Bronze Age cremation urns were interred around the stone, with dates ranging from 2000BC to 1260BC. Much later still, a Roman-era village with large farms and a wide spread of fields grew up around the stone, and burials from this period were inserted into a Bronze Age barrow a short distance away near Woodhenge. Almost certainly this village was the home of people whose ancestry stretched back to the Neolithic and Bronze Age inhabitants of the area, despite their adaptation of Roman ways in the early centuries CE, and they were successors to the ancient traditions of the still-sacred Stonehenge landscape.

The Cuckoo Stone looking towards Woodhenge

Why was the Cuckoo Stone so important? It lies on gently sloping grassland on the eastern edge of Salisbury Plain, with wide views in all directions but the west, where Stonehenge itself is hidden by the slope. The stone is on the same alignment as the Stonehenge Cursus, an enigmatic ditched enclosure 3km long and 100m wide, which seems to commemorate an ancient routeway. This route, and perhaps the cursus if it had been continued, would have incorporated the Cuckoo Stone, at the time recumbent but eventually raised, and continued to Woodhenge a few hundred metres to the east.

We will probably never know the reason for the importance of this alignment of natural features, but they remained respected in people’s memories as the Neolithic was succeeded by the Bronze Age, as Celts and then Romans swept across Britain and the country’s way of life changed beyond recognition, again and again. Eventually the Cuckoo Stone succumbed and became a mere rock in a field, but thanks to recent archaeology, its importance has been rediscovered.

The Burton Dassett Hills

The Burton Dassett Hills in Warwickshire lie just north of the Edgehill ridge, along the course of an ancient routeway which passes sites such as the Rollright Stones, and are associated with a range of strange phenomena.

The hills are a beautiful place with wide views across the countryside in all directions, and have a particularly powerful atmosphere which most visitors consciously or unconsciously sense and draws them back over and again. Ley hunters attest to a powerful current of earth energy flowing through the area.

The view from Bonfire Hill

The hills have long been associated with fiery apparitions, once identified as angels or saints, and in more scientific times as geoplasma or earthlights, which appear as person-sized orbs or columns of light in darkness or as misty clouds in daylight. These apparitions float across the ground, spiral into the sky, and can disturbingly set fire to wooden buildings. Their appearance clusters around periods of heavy rain, and scientists believe the ironstone bedrock combined with underground flowing water creates the phenomena.

Burton Dassett Holy Well

The hills in Roman times were known as the Phoenix Hills, a legendary bird born of fire, which perhaps links to their eerie apparitions. The northernmost hill, Bonfire Hill, was the site of Twelfth Night bonfires in the Middle Ages and was perhaps used as a beacon site long into pre-Christian times. Surprisingly, there are no remains of any prehistoric settlement or ritual sites on the hills, although it certainly seems as if the hills were of special significance.

Some of the stone carvings in the church

A holy well – where an orb of geoplasma once appeared and set light to a gatepost – and a Medieval church known as the ‘cathedral in the hills’ stand beside the ancient route to the hills. The church is popularly described as an especially powerful location, and its pillars are adorned with intriguing carvings including a green man, a winged beast with a human face, a fighting dragon and lion, and other more ordinary animals. Some people would link them to the hills’ tradition of fiery apparitions, but their explanation remains a mystery.  

Woodhenge

Woodhenge looking from the entrance. The remains of the ditch are visible.

Woodhenge was a timber monument built on Salisbury Plain and a key part of the Stonehenge complex. Nothing now remains except concrete markers denoting the wooden posts. It has no alignment or view of Stonehenge itself, but it lies around half a mile from the Stonehenge Cursus, following the same alignment, suggesting the two monuments were (or were to have been?) linked. It also overlooks the vast henge of Durrington Walls and would have been clearly visible beyond the henge banks.

Woodhenge is on the edge of a prominent ledge of the plain, which drops away to the south and east and has far-reaching views. It would also have been clearly visible dominating the high horizon. It comprised six concentric circles of timber posts, reminiscent of the timber circles in Durrington Walls itself. The posts, ranging from fairly modest trees to substantial mature trees, were raised then left to decay. The outer circle comprised small, closely placed posts; then two circles of increasingly larger posts; then three inner circles of smaller posts. The monument was enclosed by a circular ditch and bank with an entrance facing north-west, towards the midsummer sunset.

The Stonehenge tenon joints which may represent experience in timber-building.

Unlike stone-built monuments, it is impossible to know what Woodhenge looked like. The tree trunks may have been left with bark and perhaps branches, resembling an artificial forest or wilderness. They may have been stripped and decorated, or had ritual offerings pinned to them. They may have had horizontal lintels, rather like Stonehenge itself. One point supporting this is the rounded mortice-tenon joints on Stonehenge’s sarsens, added to stop the lintels slipping free. The weight of the stone, in hindsight, made this unnecessary, so were the builders using their experience of building timber-lintelled structures, where these precautions were essential? It may be that all these ideas were incorporated into the timber circles: perhaps a lintelled enclosure contained a microcosm of the forested wilderness which children feared and adults were forced to learn to master.

The Woodhenge posts date to around 2500BC, the time Stonehenge was radically restructured, but like many monuments Woodhenge had a much longer heritage, which began as veneration of a natural feature. Four standing stones once formed a three-sided cove in the southern part of the monument. These had been raised around a tree throw-hole: a huge mature tree had once stood here, perhaps long venerated by the local people, and when it fell the stones were raised to commemorate it. Pottery and flints placed in the hole date to around 3800BC, over a millennium before the timber circles were raised.

 

The cairn in the centre of Woodhenge

A child’s burial was found at the centre of the timber circles, its location now marked by a cairn. It is often stated that this was a sacrifice to consecrate the monument, but many archaeologists now refute this. The burial was probably in fact from the Bronze Age, long after the site had decayed into a mass of rotten stumps and fallen logs, and the skull damage, once attributed to an executioner’s axe, was probably simply damage from 4000 years in the ground.

Today Woodhenge is little known and little visited. Perhaps the concrete posts which are its sole survival tell us the message it was built to convey, five millennia ago. Even the most enduring of life will decay and vanish, and nobody will ever know it was there.