Representation by Paul Garwood
- Date submitted
- 3 January 2019
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
This submission concerns two aspects of archaeological research within the Stonehenge landscape: (1) impacts on the western part of the WHS; (2) future advances in field methods. My research specialisms include Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain and funerary archaeology, and my recent fieldwork has mostly taken place within the Stonehenge landscape.
- The proposal to keep the western tunnel portal and a greatly widened road for a kilometre within the WHS is out of keeping with WHS management and research strategies. Moreover, their close proximity to the Winterbourne Stoke round barrow group (near Longbarrow roundabout) betrays a lack of understanding of the significance of such elite funerary complexes in the Stonehenge landscape and more widely. This is the best-preserved Early Bronze Age barrow cemetery (c2000-1600 BC) not only in Britain but in northwest Europe. It is especially significant in heritage and research terms because of the extraordinary preservation of the full range of mound types: ‘bowl’, ‘bell’, ‘disc’, ‘saucer’ and ‘pond’ barrows. The full spatial layout of the group is remarkably intact, providing striking views of one of the main funerary complexes near Stonehenge.
Central to understanding barrow groups are their spatial settings, visual connections and how these conveyed key social and cosmological relationships in Early Bronze Age society. Linear arrays of barrows articulated genealogical narratives of ‘descent’ played out along lines of mounds. Their locations referenced other mound groups and earlier monuments, long recognised in the distribution of barrows around Stonehenge, and indeed the Winterbourne Stoke cemetery alignment on the long barrow to the southwest near the A303.
The current A303 scheme would have a major detrimental impact on the setting and sensory qualities of the barrow group, diminishing one of the most spectacular heritage assets within the WHS. The new carriageways to the south would break up the Stonehenge landscape in a more extreme manner than the current road, while the massive new road intersection with groundworks just 100m from the long barrow, and new roundabouts and slip roads 250m away, would be even more intrusive. Such construction work would be an act of heritage despoliation, both materially and visually, that archaeological ‘mitigation’ and landscaping cannot compensate for.
- I have been involved in Stonehenge landscape fieldwork nearly every year since 2007, as a project director/co-principal investigator of four research projects (‘Palisade Field Survey’; ‘Stonehenge Riverside’; ‘Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes’; ‘Stonehenge Landscapes EMI’). One key lesson learnt in all this work (mostly driven by new geophysical methods), it is that we have scarcely begun to appreciate the full richness and complexity of the evidence within the WHS, and that current investigative techniques will be augmented in the future by new methods that will generate vastly greater and unprecedented new data.
It is our duty to ensure that any A303 development will not wilfully destroy sources of such evidence and fragment the WHS in ways that will compromise future understanding of the Stonehenge landscape, as current proposals threaten to do.
Paul Garwood Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Birmingham