Visited 12.6.10.
The last time I visited Stonehenge I didn't know about these post holes but have read about them since. You can't really miss them as you drive over them! I wonder if they will still me marked when the planned changes take place?
Not a lot to see, that’s for sure – but hugely important nonetheless. The best time to see the white blobs that represent the post holes is early in the morning, not sure what time the carpark opens, but I got there before 9.30am when the ‘henge opens for business. Just a quarter of an hour later and you risk getting run over by tourist coaches. The place shuts at 6.00pm(?), after that you’ll have to ask the security guard nicely - don’t know if he will let you wander round ‘his’ carpark though…
Ah, the beautiful car park at Stonehenge. What a strange meeting point for all sorts of people.
The post holes were apparently only discovered because they wanted to build the car park. They didn't find much in them - a piece of bone and a quantity of charcoal. But the thing was, the charcoal was dated to the Mesolithic - the post holes were made 10,000 years ago, 5000 years older than the beginnings of 'stonehenge' as we think of it. The charcoal was made from pine wood - and the whole area would still have been forest at that time, because it was only later that the clearances started. So three huge wooden posts were put up in a line, in a forest or a forest glade?
Perhaps the wood got into the pits later somehow. Maybe when the pits were dug in the Bronze Age perhaps. Perhaps they once held totem-pole type markers? The pits are pretty massive - 3ft across. More unanswered and unanswerable questions then.
Ronald Hutton (in 'Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles' 1991) mentions that neither Stonehenge nor Mesolithic experts took much interest in the discovery.. maybe because it didn't fit into their ideas of how things had been in the area. "There is no evidence anywhere in Europe for the erection of such huge wooden structures in the Mesolithic." No flint scatters have been found in the vicinity of Stonehenge, as they have been in other areas of Mesolithic activity. Even if the pits aren't Mesolithic, they must date from the Bronze Age, say, and their role in the Stonehenge landscape ought to be considered?
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