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Stone shifting 4

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Yes please, Steve.

Any format will do, thanks.

[email protected]

Me too please, [email protected]

BTW Steve, you may/may not have come across this:

"What Aubrey probably didn't know, was that someone had already dug the soil away from in front of 55, and when the Stonehenger's originally erected this stone they had chocked beneath its front edge with a large Sarsen chocking-stone to hold it up. They did this because of 55's short length, and whoever dug many years later had completely removed the soil from around this chock, but had, lucky for them, abandoned this digging just short of it.”

“When 56 fell forwards it occupied the hole that felled it and so destroyed the Archaeological evidence. Also, when 56 came against the top of bluestone 68 in front, the base of this little stone was pushed backwards into the bottom of this hole as well, leaving very little of any void to be found.
Finally, because Mr Gowland found only very few Bluestone and Sarsen Chipping's in the area that fronted stone 56, this suggests the whole area had been removed and lowered by digging.”

This comes from a very "imaginative" website, so can't be used as the basis of anything but it does seem to suggest that the original profile may have been partly destroyed and that big chocking stones, should we need them, are "allowable".

Hi Baza, I've sent you a copy of the pictures.

For anyone else who's interested, the total size of the 7 pages is 1MB. To keep the email size down, I don't mind sending a subset of the pages. They are as follows:

Page
233: Location plan north and east (stones 27 and 60 are on this plan)
234: Location plan south and west (stones 53, 54 and 56 are on this plan)
250: Stone 60 (northernmost trilithon)
252: Stones 53 and 54 (southernmost trilithon)
253: Stone 27 (northernmost of outer sarsens, the one I traced previously)
254: Plan of Gowland's 1902 excavation of stone 56
255: Sections of Gowland's 1902 excavation of stone 56

In my previous trip to the library I had not been aware that stone 56 was the one that the BBC had used for their profile and also, because the drawings were from a much earlier (1902) excavation I had only given them a cursory glance. However, on closer inspection it would appear that the SW (outer) face of this hole is almost vertical, whereas the NE (inner) side is almost totally filled with rubble. The funny thing is that the section through the fallen sister stone 55 seems to indicate that it had very little anchorage at all. I guess that's why it fell.

The vertical outer face of the hole and the wide open inner side would work perfectly for dropping the stone in vertically from the outside, provided we used a timber shore to prevent the stone from overshooting. However, this does not appear to be the case for other holes such as 53/54.