There’s something very special about this stone circle and its encircling henge, more than anything on account of its present-day incongruity squeezed in beside a fishing lake and a major landfill site down an otherwise unmarked sideroad. Even the stones, and much of the banks, are themselves modern reconstructions of what once stood here in the Bronze Age.
Needless-to-say, neither lake nor rubbish dump existed until modern times, both the side effects of the massive holes created by industrial gravel quarrying. You can thank the Pleistocene for that, and the many millions of tons of gravel laid down by the ancestral Thames when it was busy draining the melting ice sheets to the north. Back in the Bronze Age this was a much calmer floodplain environment – a generally open landscape dotted with henges, barrows, and small settlement sites on the higher ground.
Today, however, there’s still an undoubted appeal to the site – an apt reminder that the past still bleeds through in even the busiest corners of the countryside, and that people still care enough to preserve and rebuild such special places even when surrounded by the literal trash of our modern world.
