I will arise now and go, and go down into the secluded west. And a small cabin place there, of tools and finds boxes filled: A camping stove will I have there, a tent for sleep. And live alone…but only in the evening when the diggers go home.

The water fills the bucket slowly. There is time to re-visit the trench, around the hedge corner and down the grassy slope. We found the burials today. The trench is deep and needs to be accessed by a ramp. Crossing the site, I enter the pipe trench that disturbed them. We have returned after some years for DNA and to try to understand why they are here.

Kneeling to see. A row of white molars barely fully formed. The bones small and light. A jumble.. pinned down by large stones. At least three people here but the area of stones we have uncovered today suggests that there may be several more.

Who were these children who lived over 2700 years ago in this beautiful place. I hear the trickle of the stream below me and look up to the green rounded hills. This was their home.. unless they were brought here. Did they work and play on this land? Why did they die so young?

The trench-talk was of the joys of prehistory. Ancestors who were greener, more environmental. A religion which valued mother earth …but we know so little. So many British prehistoric religions over thousands of years. Wedding bells merged with the conversation. They would have been so pleased with my plastic bucket gradually filling so conveniently.

Who knows what the Late Bronze Age/ Early Iron Age belief structure was. Human remains from this period are incredibly rare but sometimes archaeologists find bits of body mixed up with other debris in huge middens. As I looked at these young bones… life at that time seemed hard, brutal and nasty. How to interpret?

The specialists will come, examine, analyse but next Friday we will leave them here. Put the stones back in place. This was their home where there were people who cared for them (I want to believe they did) and left them to rest.

The bucket is overflowing. I carry it across the field to the cabin.Make tea. Watch the long evening sun highlight the earthworks of the village’s stepped medieval field system.

I will take the short footpath to the parish church beside the field nestled against the hill slope. Enjoy the quiet prayers of the generations.

A full moon is coming and.. through a clear sky, this lovely landscape will be washed silver.

And I will have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings. WB Yeats The Lake Isle of Innisfree

How to choose a favourite hillfort……

A difficult decision. Particularly in Dorset…..a county adorned with the finest hillforts in the land.

But if you were to choose.

Drone photo of Hambledon Hill after light snow

Perhaps it would be Hambledon. A huge, beautiful earthwork… curled like a sleeping beast. Walking along its spine is like flying out over the Blackmore Vale.

Or would it be Eggardon, along the Roman road from Dorchester, A to B to Minor… barely a track when it reaches the hillfort. A routeway into time.

The view west across the Marshwood Vale from Eggardon Hillfort

Here, the chalkland ends. The landscape drops away. Falling out into Marshwood’s deep green network…. hazing out into Devon.

Perhaps Hod Hill, two in one. The largest hillfort in Dorset with a Roman camp stamped into its highest corner. From here, all the surrounding country is visible.. where the rivers Stour and Iwerne meet. Straight lines over rounded Iron Age contours.

Nick Skelton’s drawing of Hod Hill for the NT Dorset Hillforts Guide. Showing the hillfort after the Roman fort had been constructed.

The Roman soldiers, a unit of infantry and a unit of cavalry, occupying long rectangular lines of barracks and stables. Invading foreigners, evicting the natives from their thatched round house homes. A torn place, converted into so much debris, levelled by the occupying forces.

An archaeological choice. Partly excavated in the 1950s by Sir Ian Richmond. From the things he found, the soldiers were here for about 20 years. Long enough for the locals to begin to accept their new situation…. within the Empire.

Before that, people had occupied Hod for about 300 years. Quite a place. Imagine the scale of work involved in making it.. and the organisation required.

Dave’s geophysical survey data from Hod is exceptional. Like an x-ray through the grass. It shows a network of streets spreading out from the hillfort gateways, lined with hundreds of round houses. Here were the patterns of post-holes, the many square granaries and the black blobs from hundreds of grain storage pits. The wealth of this warrior agricultural community.

David Stewart’s magnetometer survey of Hod Hill showing the density of round houses and storage pits within the hillfort and the trackways fanning out from the gateway (bottom right)

No wonder the Romans occupied this important location. A settlement of such scale.. it spilled out of the hillfort and down along the the Iwerne Valley.

If you go there, particularly in winter, when the grass is short and the sun casts low shadows.. the hollows of the round houses are clear. Walk down a 2000 year street.

If you go there in June, walk the ramparts and watch the clouds of butterflies rising from the orchids along the southern slopes.

Perhaps the choice was Hod Hill…

But… last week…. I arranged to take the new curator round… 6 hillforts in a day. Coney’s, Lambert’s, Pilsdon….

By mid-day we had climbed the narrow road from Askerswell, parked in a lay-by and followed the hedge-lined path to Eggardon’s earthwork gateway.

Such a quiet place, the three rings of ramparts stepping down over a curving valley and the grassland twinkling with yellow flowers.

Aerial photograph of Eggardon Hill looking south-west. Parish boundary bank dividing the hillfort in two. The National Trust half is on the left.

In the distance was a man with something spread out in front of him.

As we approached, we could see that he had a large canvas and beyond lay the sweeping bowl of Marshwood and the Golden Cap coast. How to capture the vast deep green wonder of it? His painting was a fine attempt.

We sat amongst the flowers on the middle battlement and had our lunch…. looking back along the escarpment edge to Pilsdon, Lambert’s and Coney’s

And in the afternoon we went on to Hod and Hambledon…. though I left my heart at Eggardon…. Why had I stayed away so long?

Sometimes we are surprised by moments but we cannot take them for granted. I went back early yesterday to share the experience….but there was deep fog and torrential rain..

Information on Eggardon:

Nick Skelton’s reconstruction drawing of Eggardon Hill for the NT Dorset Hillforts booklet. It shows the fort after the landslip through the ramparts on the southern slope and all the Iron Age round houses within seen as earthwork hollows and on Dave Stewart’s geophysical survey of the site.

• Crossed by parish boundary Powerstock/Askerswell. Trust owns the best preserved southern half.
• Like Badbury this place gave its name to a Saxon Hundred (district court) meeting place
• There are two barrows in the hillfort, that to the north has been levelled by past ploughing and that to the south is still an earthwork but was dug in antiquarian times and again in 1965 by George Rybot. He found the cremated remains of an adult and child c.3500 years old.
• He excavated the long linear banks that criss- cross the hillfort interior and dated them to the Early Iron Age about 500 BC. He excavated the hollows and circular banks and found them to be round houses and storage pits.
• There has been massive collapse of the southern ramparts… later partly repaired… so the land slip is thought to have taken place in the Iron Age.
• The entrances are at the east and west ends where the land is level and needs strong defences. The fenced land ownership along the parish boundary runs through the gateways.
• A 70m wide octagonal earthwork enclosure on the summit marks the position of a tree clump.. is said to have been planted by Isaac Gulliver in 1776, the owner of Eggardon Farm and a notorious smuggler. The plantation was used as a mark for ships to bring contraband to the Dorset coast.

One of the occasional posts written for the NT SW site.

How did you sleep last night? Did you have a nice quiet room to yourself? A comfy mattress?

Such luxurious solitude we take for granted but if we look back through National Trust properties we glimpse an older, more communal lifestyle.

Lodge Farm: Sleeping on the first floor for security. The 15th-century double and single windows, on the left, light the communal hall. The double window on the right is the solar or private chamber of the house where the head forester and park keeper of Kingston Lacy slept.

The open medieval hall of Lodge Farm

In medieval times you needed to be rich to have some sort of privacy. In places like Lodge Farm on the Kingston Lacy Estate, the Treasurer’s House at Martock or even the Gloriette within the great royal castle of Corfe ..almost everyone slept in the great hall.

Treasurer’s House, Martock, Somerset: The late 13th-century great hall is on the left. The kitchen is on the far right and food was brought to the hall through the left doorway into the hall. In the middle is the ornate window on the first floor which was the solar or private chamber of the lord, the Treasurer of Wells Cathedral.

At the end of the meal, the trestle tables were cleared away and the household hit the hay…which covered the floor.. concealing all sorts of debris.

Beyond a timber screen at the end of the hall was a room called the solar. Nothing to do with the sun. This was a place for some solitude and was reserved for the lord and his family and probably a personal servant.

Everyone else was in the hall picking out the best spots close to the hearth, the cleaner hay or perhaps a stuffed straw sack with a log for a pillow. Wrap your cloak around you it’s going to be a long night.

My thoughts turn to crowded hostel dormitories. People turning up late, or going to the loo in the middle of the night, banging doors, the earthquake snorers and long whispered conversations.

Corfe Castle: Standing at the centre is the tower of the 12th century keep. The great hall was on the first floor, The king’s chamber and chapel were in the floor above. To the right is  open gothic window part of the ruin of King John’s first floor hall house known as the ‘Gloriette’

Now we take our central heating for granted.. but for most of us, before the 1970s, either you had a pile of blankets and an eiderdown or you found some bodies to snuggle up to.

An early 19th-century reconstruction drawing of the ‘Gloriette’ of Corfe Castle. Once the trestle tables were stacked away, plenty of room to sleep.

On Brownsea Island, there was once a large brickworks with a purpose-built labourers’ settlement called Maryland. The density of accommodation seems extraordinary. Maryland was built in 1853 and consisted of 20 dwellings each with two bedrooms. The 1881 census records 117 people living there. At 4 Maryland, Mr Whittingham his wife and four children also provided accommodation for four pottery labourers….rather cramped!…. all in a two up, two down tenement….apparently quite normal for Victorian times.

Maryland village on Brownsea Island: An arc of five buildings each containing four homes but with lots of occupants.

So, count your blessings and enjoy your sleep tonight

In our globe trotting tour to try and locate the source of the glass bottle fragment we found at Chedworth in 2017.

Here is one I found in the Capital Museum on a hill at the heart of Amman, Jordan.

Similar pattern but not quite right. It is thought to have been from a fish shaped bottle much like the one to the right of the fish-scale pattern decorated bottle.

The Roman ruins are rather more impressive in this eastern part of the Empire. Our piece of glass is very rare for Britain and travelled a long way west to become buried in Gloucestershire.

One of the National Trust’s volunteer Heritage Rangers contacted me. He queried an entry on our public database….National Trust Heritage Records Online (try it!) .

‘Martin, what date are the flints found at Francis Court Farm’ ? I googled the site and there were no clues in the text so I contacted Isabel.

‘Oh dear you have reminded me of an unfinished piece of work’ she said ‘I have lots of bags of finds together with distribution maps of the Killerton Estate fields at home. The archaeology volunteers walked the arable fields in 1990 to 1992 and I have never found time to put everything together’

The view west of the memorial cross across the farmland of the Killerton Estate from Killerton Park

We arranged a meeting and she promised to sort the archive and bring the finds….

I had driven from Wiltshire to Killerton two days in a row. Unusual. Yesterday had been a Knightshayes meeting at the Regional Office but today I was seeing Isabel who had prepared the boxes of finds for me.

Yesterday, I had headed for the M5 junction at Taunton and ground myself into a massive tailback…today I would try a different approach. The plan was to cruise west along the mighty A303 until Honiton and then strike into the Devon heartlands.

But Devon’s a foreign country…it’s beyond Wessex.. and I was being over confident. A sign directed me to Collumpton and then the waymarkers abandoned me.

Lost on the outskirts of town, I tried various narrow roads. Half an hour later I retraced my steps and realised that I should have headed towards Sidmouth then jinked onto Honiton High Street.

I almost missed the side turning beside the traffic lights …but at last… I had ducked under the A303 and was heading for Killerton behind a very slow truck.

I passed under famous Hembury hill… Neolithic causewayed enclosure, Iron Age hillfort and Roman fort superimposed.

From Collumpton it was a short distance to the National Trust’s Killerton Estate.

I met Isabel in the car park and we carried the trays of finds into the meeting room. Bryn, Fi and Phil joined us and we immersed ourselves in Devon Archaeology.

Early Bronze Age barbed and tanged arrowhead from Yarde Farm, Killerton Estate

Archaeology is very regional. Pottery, particularly prehistoric, and to a lesser extent Roman pottery changes significantly as you head west. In fact, finds are more scarce it seems and this is not classic flint country.  I had no great expectations of Isabel’s flint.

Though… what would I know… Devon is a foreign land… Wessex archaeologists beware.

There was the bag of Francis Court Farm flint. A few good flakes and a scraper or two. Pretty average Neolithic, Bronze Age. Nothing to write home about. Any average Dorset chalkland field would have this sort of stuff..except flint is more difficult to come by in Devon so it had been traded over a distance.

Then we came to a collection from a field south of Newhall Farm. A huge amount of flint and long sinuous blades alongside spalls and microliths. This looked older… Neolithic and Mesolithic 6-10 thousand years old. What sort of site did this indicate beneath the ploughsoil?

A concentration of microliths and blades from a field just south Newhall Farm buildings

As we looked at what had been found 25 yrs ago..it described an arc of prehistoric sites in a vale lying south east of Killerton Park and south west of Ashclyst Forest.

Then Isabel showed us another bag of finds.

‘We collected these from wheel ruts on Dolbury Hillfort’.

The flint from Dolbury hillfort. The prepared core is the larger flint top left.

Dolbury has never been excavated and the earthworks occupy a high point.. which now overlook the park and Killerton House. The hill is an upward thrust of volcanic rock. A natural strategic location.

The flints told a new story about this place. Dolbury was thought to just date from the period 500 BC to AD 43 but these flints included a prepared core. This is something typical of the Mesolithic and the long blades and microliths were similar to those we had just seen from Newhall.

The time depth of Dolbury started to compare with the excavated Hembury hillfort which I had passed on the road that morning. No Roman fort on this hill-top though….

Then Isabel showed us an aerial photograph. It was of a field on a spur of land jutting south-east of Dolbury… just above Budlake Farm.

The playing card shape of a Roman fort? near Budlake Farm.

The photo clearly showed a playing card shaped triple ditched enclosure of about 4 hectares. The inner ditch thickest just like the Roman fort we had excavated at Shapwick… on the Kingston Lacy Estate in Dorset.

‘Isabel, did you fieldwalk these fields?’

Bags full of red pottery were passed across the table. ‘They all look like fragments of flower pot’ Isabel said. We picked over it all and nothing obviously Roman presented itself.

The red flower pot pottery from the ‘fort’ field.

Phil said that one of the fields had just been ploughed and harrowed. He phoned the tenant farmer to check whether it would be OK to visit.

Inspired! We jumped into cars and headed out there. We parked in the yard at the NT rangers’ base, crossed the high bridge over the M5 and climbed up to the site. Clear views to the hillfort and out across the landscape. A typical broad sloping high point often chosen by Roman military commanders. I had seen this type of topographic location repeated over and over again while walking Hadrian’s Wall …and …the site of Knightshayes fort near Tiverton is much the same.

The fort site itself was in grass but the field to the east had been freshly cultivated and its red Devon soil was exposed. Heads down, the four of us walked in a row in the sunshine hoping to see something Roman. Every so often we bent to retrieve something from the ground.

Generally…just an interestingly shaped stone had caught our attention. Fi found a piece of Victorian willow pattern ware. Phil found a sherd with yellow glaze that could be 17th century. My find was a prehistoric? struck piece of chert. Nothing even vaguely Roman…. but Isabel’s aerial photo looked so good.

We parted …excited by the hidden archaeology of the Killerton Estate. Bryn will add the information to the Historic Landscape and Archaeology Survey he is writing for National Trust and I will return in August with the geophysics equipment. We needed to know what the air photograph is showing.

The view to the north east across the red Devon field we fieldwalked next to the Killerton ‘fort’ site.

Always dangerous to jump to conclusions without proper evidence…and my life is strewn with such mistakes…

…the Roman road at Dyrham which proved to be a 1970s gas pipeline is particularly embarrassing.

Sometimes when we were working at Chedworth Roman Villa… in Gloucestershire.
We were asked about mosaics…where do the bits…the tesserae come from?

Occasionally my mind returned to 1984… and a small trench in Dorset.

2 years and about 50m from the National Trust.

I am in a wood. There are three of us there. We are checking what remains of the Roman archaeology in an area… riddled with 18th century clay pits.

It is Spring. The dappled light filters through the trees. I have worked all morning and am deep down in my 1.2m square test trench. We will meet up at lunch-time but for now I have filtered out the sound of the occasional cars travelling from Wareham to Corfe. The unfolding leaves and flowers of late March are above me.

Down here I have a finds tray, a bucket, a hand shovel..and my trowel.

The soil is light, sandy… and black…enriched by the activity of ancient lives. I am crouched down, contained in a square world. There is not much room here but this is definitely a Roman place… unmolested by the old clay diggers.

The trowel blade skims the soft earth surface and catches… sending a familiar vibration through to the handle. A brown cube flicks out of the ground and I pick it up and put it in the finds tray.

It joins the others, typical of this Isle of Purbeck … This whole area was an industrial centre in the Roman period. So in my tray there are colours  that reflect the varied rock types across this landscape.. a mini geological world, A mosaicist’s dream.

My latest find is a purple-brown gritty Heathstone from the land bordering Poole Harbour…north of where I am crouching. Then there are white cubes dug out of the chalk ridge behind me……there’s an old quarry… just a short distance away. There are also brown mudstone tesserae and various Purbeck limestone ones… dug from the land out beyond the ridge to the south.

You can imagine the patterned floor makers coming to this place and picking up these coloured cubes in carts.. in their thousands.

Norden was the heartland town of Industrial Purbeck. Three lesser villas surround it. High above me are the picturesque ruins of medieval Corfe Castle guarding the gap through the chalk ridge (like a natural rampart dividing Purbeck). The church and Corfe town now lie to the south… but the Roman town lay here at Norden.

Here in my trench are baked clay fragments…briquetage….remains of containers for evaporating brine to make salt from the Poole Harbour shoreline.

There are pieces of a black, greasy, wood-like stone. I find fragments and circles with chuck-holes in (‘coal money’). These are the waste from Kimmeridge shale, turned on a lathe. It outcrops on the south-west coast of the Island. A cottage industry across Purbeck … making bangles, vessels and furniture from this easily worked …unusual material.

The best thing…. I concentrate on making the sides of my trench vertical… is the Black Burnished pottery.

So much of this distinctive pottery was made here that the army took out a contract and used it to supply the troops on Hadrian’s Wall.

My trowel sweeps and defines a curve where the black soil stops and black ceramic begins. In my tray are many small fragments. Some are remains of jars, straight sided bowls, jugs and lids but this find is almost complete… a dish with oval base and a curved handle at each end.

It still has the wavy decoration inscribed by the potter…. 1700 years ago…it resembles a simple spirograph design.

I dust it down and place it on the floor of my trench as though setting a table….

A few years later… I was in the neighbouring field …part of the National Trust’s Corfe Castle Estate. A water pump was leaking and I watched the trench. Here was Roman Norden again two chalk and gravel yard surfaces… one above the other.. laden with Black Burnished pottery fragments and oyster shells.

And later still.. across the road above the NT Castle View visitor centre we geophysed the field and found a Roman temple site.

This whole area is covered in traces of Roman activity…though now only farmers’ fields and modern Corfe has retreated …to the south side of the gap.. towards one of the villas.

Overlooking Norden and Corfe… we found that the high ruins of the Castle were built on another Roman site…at the deepest level against the chalk…we found pottery in the West Bailey but can only guess what type of site it relates to.

Perhaps there was once a Roman watch tower here, its guards gazing out across the activities of the craftsmen of Norden town towards Poole Harbour.

Yesterday,  the four of us sat at a table outside the Red Lion. George and Erica had just shown us an extraordinary walk. I felt  a little embarrassed… but to be fair I don’t know Avebury very well. Nick and Briony are the NT archaeologists here.

Amazingly, you just cross the road from the NT car park and a path leads you beside a little stream with fantastic views of Silbury Hill,

then turn left, walk up and over the southern curve of Waden Hill and you arrive at the megalithic West Kennet Avenue

which guides you northwards into great Avebury Henge. ..Wow!

We climbed the bank and walked the south-east quadrant (a place of buried megaliths) until the road into the enclosure… which we followed to its centre …where lies the Red Lion Inn.

We drank tea in the weak sunshine, sheltered from the wind, watching the people in this busy place. George asked what motivates us to write. I thought… not necessarily for others….because you want to…because you have to… to capture a moment. You must understand… that for most of the time I write scientific reports…..reference evidence to past papers…filter the strands of the past to move understanding on.. a little..

I remembered my first visit here…

15th May 1976

‘Went to Avebury Stone Ring and Donnington Castle and Stonehenge. We got lots of booklets.

The weather was windy with intermittent rain but it was great walking along the top of the huge earth banks of Avebury, the steep drops to the ditch on one side and the countryside stretching for miles on the other.

The sun shone through the clouds showing moving patterns of shadows flowing across the green wheat fields. The wind blew hard and you could almost lean on it and not fall over.

Walking along a double row of stones that lead from Avebury through the fields of sheep and rough grass.

It started to rain. It was almost horizontal so we sat behind one of the big stones and watched the cars go by, as dry as you like. We waved at the cars and they waved back.

On arriving at West Kennet, we were intent on finding the long barrow. At last, we ran across a huge field of wheat and came to it in the middle of nowhere. I entered first and walked past the side chambers to the back of the tomb and sat down to read the guide book and wait for the others.

Shocked a stranger as they entered to see me there.

Stonehenge was commercialised and festooned with tourists. We sat by the concrete kiosk and ate hot dogs in the biting wind.’

So, Avebury won pretty convincingly over Stonehenge..reduced to two lines in my page a day diary. No consideration at all for the freedom we then had to walk amongst the trilithons …

during that first visit ….but you never know what you’ve got till its gone.

We needed to go to a meeting and I hate having to dodge the traffic on the A303.

‘Ever walked the King Barrow Ridge?’

Paul said ‘no’ so we risked it.

A dodgy place to be at the end of January. I’ve done it in thunder and lightning… which is not recommended.

This time the weather was gentle, sun and high cloud.. and the light.. low and revealing, teasing out the earthworks.

We parked by the generator and walked from MoD land into the National Trust Estate.

The view west along the 2.8km of the Cursus. The trees have been cut back to reclaim the view. The fence line follows the south line of the bank and ditch of the Early Neolithic monument. In the far distance can just be seen the gap in the Fargo Plantation at the west end.

Just past the gate, I pointed out the Cursus… From this vantage point you can seen the entire length of it. The ends picked out by gaps cut through the trees. Fargo Plantation 2.8km to the west had been cut back in the 1980s and at the east end, where we were now standing…the 100m width of the cursus has been opened up in the last decade.

‘Now we are walking over the Cursus long barrow which marks its east end’

Paul couldn’t see it.

‘the barrow was undamaged until WWI but then the military set up bases here and the barrow was almost levelled for a trackway’

The 1877 Ordnance Survey maps shows the east end of the Cursus and the long barrow before it was damaged for a trackway in the  early 20th century.

We looked back along the track and could just make out the vague swelling of the ground which is nearly all that can be seen of it. On the OS 1877 map it is shown over 100m long. I pointed over the fence ‘the side ditch is still visible. The Early Neolithic people quarried the chalk to heap up the mound from here’

I remembered 1999 when the National Trust first acquired this land. Simon the ranger and I took the Landrover out towing a trailer full of fencing stakes and we enclosed out the burial mounds to protect them from further ploughing.

‘The Stonehenge Riverside Project dug a trench here in 2008, they were lucky and found a piece of antler pick at the bottom of the long barrow ditch, dated it to about 3,500 BC…matched the date of bones found in the Cursus ditch itself’

The excavation of the east side ditch of the Cursus long barrow in 2008 . The line of the trackway follows the trees on the right hand edge of the picture.

Paul asked me what a ‘Cursus’ was

‘Don’t know, William Stukely named it in the early 18th century because he thought it looked like a Roman race track. Processional way some people say but who knows. This one’s a tiddler compared to the Dorset Cursus on the Cranborne Chase which is three times the length’

We walked on past Early Bronze Age round barrows under clumps of beech trees, part of the designed landscape planted for the Marquess of Queensbury.

It is said that the clumps of trees commemorate the positions of ships that fought in the Battle of the Nile in 1798. This may be true but the trees prevented Sir Richard Colt Hoare and William Cunnington digging here in the early 19th century and so these tombs remain. Some were disturbed by the storm of 1990 when falling trees tore up Bronze Age cremation burials in their roots.

One of the round barrows which still has its c.1800 beech tree planting.

We turned the corner and could see little Stonehenge far below us.. etched sharply in winter sunlight. Stopping by a sign and pedestrian gate I told Paul that this was the true way to the Stones.

Why?…because this is the route of the Avenue.. its route was deliberately set out to dramatic effect. The way leads down into the valley bottom where the monument is hidden and then turns and leads you up.. and the trilithons rise from the ground in front of you as you are drawn towards midwinter. The days can only get longer once the high trilithon has caught the sun.

The line of the Avenue pointing towards Stonehenge with ditches on either side as revealed during excavation, part of the Stonehenge Riverside Project in 2008. 

Now, we were almost there… and we walked beside the line of high King Barrows..alive and etched by low light filtering through the army strands of long grass…amber pink flicking in the wind.

On a mound top, a black silhouette appeared, stood still, gazed out and fell away.