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.