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About six miles west of Oxford is a ruined circle-henge known as the Devil's Quoits at Stanton Harcourt (OS reference SP 411 048). Within a bank once around two metres high and around one hundred and fifty metres in diameter was a ditch and a circle of around thirty-five megaliths. The stone circle was around eighty metres in diameter. Assays from the ditch have yielded radiocarbon dates of 2060 +/-120 B.C.E. and 1640 +/-70 B.C.E., and suggest use from the later Neolithic until well into the Bronze Age. Late Neolithic grooved ware was found in a posthole[1].
The site has been largely destroyed, from Romano-British agricultural use, the construction of an airbase runway in 1940 and extensive gravel quarrying ever since. Now only part of the ditch fill remains, along with two buried stones and fragments of another.
In 1940, Grimes excavated the site, leading to the scheduling of one of the three remaining stones which he left buried for safety. Further excavations in the early seventies and late eighties enabled the plan of the monument to be ascertained "with sufficient detail to allow a reconstruction of the stone circle and associated earthworks". Further stones were recovered during the investigations, although most have been lost during quarrying[2].
The Brief for Reconstruction Works[2] submitted by the waste company Greenways (now Hanson), which operates the site, to Oxfordshire County Council was approved in October 1998. Three specific aims were stated:
Firstly, the open workings at the south east are to be backfilled to allow room for the destroyed berm and bank to be reinstated. The surface of the ditch and berm is then to be finished with topsoil and seeded with grass and flowers of a type prevalent in the prehistoric period. The same is to be done to the bank when built up to its original height, and the central area after it has been infilled to pre-excavation level. There is a possibility that this central area may be domed to assist drainage, a point to which I shall return later. Returning to the ditch, it will not be returned to its original depth except where it has been completely destroyed. Where this is the case, a section will be provided to show the probable profile and depth, but elsewhere prehistoric deposits will be conserved beneath a layer of later plough soil.
The remaining stones are to be re-erected and set in concrete and surviving fragments are to have pins drilled into their bases to ensure that enough of the stones project through the surface. Repairs to damaged stones will also involve phosphor bronze pinning. The stones will be erected by archaeologists using "experimental methods". The scheduled stone will require Scheduled Monument Consent to be removed and re-erected (under instruction from English Heritage). Where no stones survive, marker posts set in concrete will be used. The design for these is yet to be agreed - let us hope for better than the unsightly concrete plinths used at Avebury.
The immediate surroundings will also be seeded with an appropriate grass and flower mix, and hedges will obscure the gravel quarries. Existing silt ponds will be retained for wildlife conservation, and other land will be restored to grazing purposes. Information boards will be provided to inform the public of the significance of the monument.
The planning agreement requires a five year aftercare period, and management of the site for a further twenty years. Public access will be guaranteed for twenty five years after the completion of the restoration works[3].
In our present situation, when the Monuments at Risk Survey tells of the destruction of a Scheduled Ancient Monument every day[4] and Government policy is putting local archaeological units under pressure (Worcestershire almost lost theirs recently), anything which protects our ancient heritage and raises public interest is good news to a point.
But surely prevention is better than cure. This reconstruction should not have been necessary in the first place - we ought to respect and conserve what we've got. Is a tourist model of the Eiffel Tower the Eiffel Tower? No. Is a reconstruction of the Devil's Quoits ever going to be an adequate replacement for the great henge our Neolithic ancestors built? No, not even if we could be sure of the accuracy of the present work. Stones have been lost or damaged and their original size and shape is largely unknown. Antiquarian records from the past are not reliable - just look at Stukeley's exaggerated pictures of Stonehenge, Avebury and Stanton Drew (were the stones really that big or were he and his men all midgets?). The size and shape of stones may affect how the monument relates to the surrounding landscape, as we will see.
Such sites are often viewed by the public, archaeologists, and planners alike as single points in space, but this is a grave mistake. The monument builders wouldn't have thought like this: I have discussed this subject elsewhere[5] and pointed out that stone circles often encompass views of hills and lie close to water sources - they draw in the surrounding landscape and make it comprehensible, yet also reach out into it. The area around the Devil's Quoits once contained an important ritual landscape:
"This ceremonial complex consists of a cluster of Neolithic mortuary enclosures, long barrows, Late Neolithic and Beaker burials, [and] two rows of round barrows represented now by ring ditches since they have been flattened by the plough..."[6]
Most of this is now lost, and with it much that could have allowed us a better understanding of the circle-henge. So now we are left with an imperfect reconstruction of the lonely Devil's Quoits gazing over a river plain decimated by gravel pits.
The site was not made to just be looked at, but looked from. Without knowing the shapes of the stones we cannot be sure whether they mirrored the shape of higher ground on the horizon, which is the case at other sites, and much more that could have increased our knowledge of how the monument builders saw their environment.
From drawings of the site prepared from details from the excavations, I have noticed a possible astronomical alignment. To the south-east, stone 215 outlies the stone circle. A line drawn through this and stones 220 and 146 marks the angle to the midsummer sunset to the north-west and the midwinter sunrise to the south-east. For a latitude for 51.4 degrees, the azimuths are 131 and 311 degrees, which are pretty spot on. Viewed along each direction from within the henge the bank would cut out views of lower ground and focus the eyes upon about the highest points of the horizon. Declination calculations have been carried out but are not very accurate, yielding 25.8 degrees to the north-west and -21.3 degrees to the south-east. An accurate value would be more like +/-24 degrees. There would be a considerable error due to my rather basic technique, and total accuracy probably would not have been as important as the symbolism to the builders. Such ideas may help us to get closer to an understanding of our ancestors' view of time and space - showing the importance of considering a site's surroundings as well as the site itself.
Considering the surroundings a little more, we see that the circle-henge stands on low ground close to the River Windrush. Some recent research has confirmed that this is a typical location for henges, and a symbolic link with water seems likely[7]. It may well be that seasonal rainfall may have flooded the ditches of at least some henges, and they may have been located thus for just this reason. The discovery of water dwelling snails in the silts in the henge ditch dating back to the late Neolithic seems to confirm that the ditch of the Devil's Quoits was flooded regularly[6]. It has even been suggested that timber henges may have been an attempt to recreate the conditions found in a wet woodland grove of the type where ritual deposits of early metalwork have been discovered[8].
So reconstruction plans aiming to "protect" the site by altering it to assist drainage may actually seriously distort the picture we could gain from a more realistic and informed project. I hope that the information about the site's surroundings and how the reconstruction may differ from the original will be included in the public display boards erected at the reconstruction. It would indeed be a wasted opportunity if the public and researchers alike were denied a fuller picture of the Devil's Quoits and its environs. If such a picture was put into the minds of public and planners, we may be able to start to turn back the tide of uninformed destruction that M.A.R.S. has so graphically revealed. Let's hope that the dawn of a new millennium will herald a new and sensitive attitude to our ancient heritage.
1 Aubrey Burl (1995) A Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany Yale University Press.
2 Stanton Harcourt: Devil's Quoits. Brief for Reconstruction Works Application to Oxfordshire County Council No.0293/93
3 Amanda Ford, Planning Officer (minerals & waste), Oxfordshire County Council Environmental Services, personal communication, 1999.
4 See Place 6 (Spring 1999).
5 Liam Rogers (1999) Circles & Cycles: Mercian Stone Circles in Landscape & Mindscape White Dragon 24.
6 John Steane (1996) Oxfordshire Pimlico County History Guides
7 The low-lying sites of henges have long been recognised, but drawing a direct link between location and water and deliberate flooding has only recently been discussed again (Michael Dames probably made the link first, in his 1977 The Avebury Cycle Thames & Hudson, London - second edition, 1996, pp. 132- 5). There are a handful of recent references, including O’Sullivan[8], an unpublished paper by Colin Richards at the Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference in 1996, and my own research into Midlands henges, which postulates a symbolic link with water and suggests deliberate flooding5.
8 A.O'Sullivan (1996) Exploring Ancient Woodlands Archaeology Ireland 10 (2).
COPYRIGHT © LIAM ROGERS AND PLACE, 2001
