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Morning everyone! I’m Katy and I’m going to tweet about #archaeology, #geology and #landscape. But mostly, about #sarsen stone in the county of Wiltshire, UK. Thank you to @lornarichardson and @James__Dixon for organising #PATC5 and for accepting this paper 0/16 The abstract for this Twitter paper: This paper takes one of my recent #DailySarsen tweets and tells a story of the sarsen stone depicted in that previously-tweeted photo. Much of my public archaeology happens out-of-doors. The frightening reality of a serious communicable disease that has no vaccine means it will be some time before I can once more welcome people into Sarsen Country. My small efforts to recover a sense of Sarsen Country digitally, with #DailySarsen, have been welcomed by friends old and new. So here is an elaboration of one of the tweets; I hope people will enjoy the tale.
During CV-19 lockdown and as long as distancing measures apply, my public archaeology landscape walks in #SarsenCountry are suspended. Groups trips for local/regional societies to visit places in Wiltshire (UK) where sarsen stones can be seen are off-limits #PATC5 #DailySarsen 1/ The title of my paper for the Public Archaeology Twitter Conference is ‘#DailySarsen, or, Walking hand-in-hand with human and non-human friends’. Katy Whitaker, University of Reading/Historic England @artefactual_KW
Sarsens are the large grey boulders making the familiar shapes of Stonehenge, and Avebury’s great circles. They’re in medieval church walls. They pave our streets and protect grass verges. Sites in southern England from Dorset to Norfolk make #SarsenCountry #PATC5 #DailySarsen 2/ A photograph of Stonehenge showing some of the tall upright grey sarsen stones capped by horizontal sarsen lintels. Two sarsens lie in the grass in the foreground.
Some locations are famous for their ‘sarsen spreads’. Here swathes of sarsen stones lie about on the surface. Dorset and Wiltshire both have a sarsen ‘Valley of Stones’. You can see them outside Ashdown House, Oxfordshire. They are lovely to explore #PATC5 #DailySarsen 3/ A view up a shallow, grassy valley with gently sloping hills in the background. IN the mid-ground, large grey boulders lie in the grass in the valley bottom. There are a couple of hawthorn trees in the valley, and a copse of trees to the right hand side, including blackthorn bushes with white flowers in bloom.
So #DailySarsen is my small attempt to try to make up for what is being missed: something made of sarsen stone every morning, shared on Twitter at 10am. Each tweet includes a photo with the item’s name and location. I answer any questions that might arise #PATC5 #DailySarsen 4/ A screen shot of the Twitter website showing one of my #DailySarsen tweets. The tweet is in the middle, including a photo of a sarsen stone in the fabric of Clyffe Pypard church. To the left hand side are Twitter’s admin functions, to the right is a list of current news items.
By popular request my first #DailySarsen tweet was The Polissoir. High up on the Marlborough Downs, it’s a neolithic axe sharpening stone. There are only a few like this in Britain, and this one’s really outstanding. People often try to find it, but don’t always succeed #PATC5 5/ In the foreground, part of a large grey stone. Behind the grassy downland is visible, with scattered gorse and hawthorn bushes. The upper part of the image is the grey sky. The large grey stone is marked with a dish shape and five grooves or channels running diagonally from the middle of the stone to its left hand side.
I get asked to share its grid-reference, or take people to see it. Even though it’s close to the Ridgeway national trail it can be hard to spot in a landscape that’s full of recumbent grey boulders. I’ll take you up there, and tell you a little about it #PATC5 #DailySarsen 6/ A map extract showing the location of the polissoir in the middle of the image as a blue star, with the Ridgway national trail running from top to bottom on the left hand side. There are very few distinguishing features on the map, only a few small areas of woodland. Map title is The Marlborough Downs, scale 1 to 10000. Map copyright is Open Street Map, Creative Commons Licence attribution share alike.
Let’s walk up Hackpen, passing by the Fiddlers Hill stone. We’ll follow the Ridgeway south. Look out for broken bricks in the field beside the dew pond. They remind us that an estate brickworks flourished up here for a century where now a wheat field grows #PATC5 #DailySarsen 7/ A large grey stone in the centre of the image. In front is long grass and either side of it other plants are growing at the field edge. The landscape of green and beige fields behind rises up a slope to the horizon. The Top thirds of the photo is blue sky. On the horizon there are two dark green clumps of trees either side of the stone. It is just possible to see the Hackpen horse chalk hill figure just to the right fg the stone on the sloping hillside.
The view westwards towards Avebury is marvellous, isn’t it?! You can just see the top of Silbury Hill from here, it’s that flat green mound that looks like a barrow on the hilltop in the middle distance. Now it’s time for us to turn off, to the left #PATC5 #DailySarsen 8/ A long distance landscape view. The bottom two thirds of the image include big open fields with very few hedges, green and with a little yellow oil seed rape just showing. There is a clump of trees in the middle of the bottom third, and above that the top of Silbury Hill peeks up behind the hill slope. The upper third of the image is the blue grey sky above the gently sloping hills of the horizon.
Coming this way brings us to the northern edge of Fyfield Down. We are at a high point. Away to the south the chalk dip slope and the Valley of Stones wend down to the River Kennet. We can return home that way but for now look for the pointed standing stone #PATC5 #DailySarsen 9/
What might be ‘Aethelferthe’s stone’, mentioned in an early medieval charter, is your clue. Head for that upright sarsen with its pointed top. The Polissoir is just alongside it, close to the coconut-scented gorse bushes, part of a line of sleeping sarsens #PATC5 #DailySarsen 10/ A pyramidal grey boulder standing upright in a scrubby pasture field at dusk. The dark blue sky fills the top half of the image. A small hawthorn tree in dark profile stands to the left of the stone.
Two chunks of sarsen stone, one cleanly split from the other, and a gap and a hollow in the earth where a third piece was removed. This is what you have come to touch: the glossy smooth surface of the stone, the dished hollow and the steep-sided grooves. #PATC5 #DailySarsen 11/ A large grey boulder in the centre of the image, surrounded by scrubby grass. TO its left, at the rear, a smaller piece of grey stone which has been evenly split away from the main boulder.
These are the marks left by hours and hours of grinding and polishing stone axe heads. There are numerous examples like this on sarsens in northern France. But most of the few English ones have only the dish and not the grooves. #PATC5 #DailySarsen 12/ Part of a large grey boulder almost completely fills the image. Scrubby grass can be seen around the edge on the left hand side. The boulder’s surface is shaped with a dish and five long grooves to its left hand end. A red, black and white 50cm scale bar is placed in the middle of the boulder, parallel to the grooves. A similar 20cm scale  bar is placed at the top of the stone.Two flint axe heads lying on a surface of wood chips. The smaller axe is partly polished, whilst the larger axe below it is chipped all over. The flint is black and dark grey, with occasional pale patches.
Peter Fowler’s excavation found that the stone once stood upright. The few finds gathered from the thin soil around it included one axe thinning flake. Imagine coming up here to sharpen an axe head
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#PATC5 #DailySarsen 13/
About 5,000 years later the boulder was broken. A small group of quarrymen, never more than a dozen, worked Wiltshire’s sarsen spreads from around 1847 until the Second World War. Tons of stone went, smartly split into building blocks and street furniture #PATC5 #DailySarsen 14/ A portion of a grey stone viewed side-on. A trapezoidal scar in the surface shows where a hole for a wedge was cut into the stone. We are viewing the split surface, which is now covered in pale grey and green lichen. Two scale bars placed wither side of the scar show it is approximately 4cm deep and 8cm wide.
It’s a small miracle that the polissoir was left. Surely the sarsen cutters noticed those unusual shapes and the smoothed surface. Maybe they were told to leave well alone after very nearly quartering the sarsen and destroying its prehistoric remnants #PATC5 #DailySarsen 15/ Close up photo of part of a wall built in precisely shaped and squared sarsen blocks alternating with flint panels.
I look forward to walking with you to the polissoir and all those sleeping sarsen stones once it’s safe to meet again, to visit, and keep one another’s company. In the meantime, you can follow #DailySarsen to participate in a digital moment somewhere in #SarsenCountry #PATC5 /end A large grey boulder in the middle of the image, with grass in the foreground.  The legs of six walkers who are visiting the stone, standing close to it, can be seen in the background.
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