Seahenge

As a 4,000-year-old timber circle uncovered on a Norfolk beach, Seahenge is one of Britain’s most remarkable prehistoric finds. Discovered in 1998, it drew quick comparison as a 'Stonehenge by the sea' - but who built it and what was it used for? In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr. Sue Greaney to explore the mystery of Seahenge. Preserved beneath the sands for millennia, this Bronze Age wooden monument offers extraordinary insight into ancient rituals, beliefs, and woodworking skills. Join us as Tristan discovers why this enigmatic site continues to intrigue archaeologists and challenge our understanding of prehistoric Britain. MORE Stonehenge https://open.spotify.com/episode/19LqOpDMGBtFTygVsJJfsw The Beaker People https://open.spotify.com/episode/6EDEArLo5e33uPLjpmzvT7 Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 1:51Tristan Hughes?

  Hey, all. I hope you're doing well. I'm currently at a service station on my way down to the south coast for the History Hit Summer Party. So with the Ancients team and the rest of the History Hit crew, it is a day of celebration. The team work incredibly hard to make sure that the Ancients keeps pumping out episodes twice a week every year since 2020. So incredibly grateful to them, as I am to you for listening. Without you, this podcast would not be able to function. Today's episode is all about Sea Henge, in my opinion, one of the most extraordinary prehistoric discoveries made in Britain in recent decades. And yet, its story feels much lesser known than other monuments such as Stonehenge. And I only learnt about this monument a couple of years ago, when it was a star attraction

• 2:35Tristan Hughes?

  of a new exhibition at the British Museum, but it blew me away back then, and so I thought we've got to dedicate an entire episode to its story. Our guest is the one and only Dr Sue Greaney. Sue is a leading expert on the prehistoric monuments in Britain. She's been on the podcast before to talk about Stonehenge, and she's back to talk all things Sea Henge. She's a wonderful speaker. This episode was so intriguing, and I know you're going to absolutely love it. So let's get into it.

• 3:16Tristan Hughes?

  In 1998, an extraordinary discovery was made along Holme Beach in North Norfolk. The remains of 4,000-year-old wooden posts, a prehistoric timber circle that had been hidden beneath the sands for millennia and was incredibly well-preserved. The name Sea Henge quickly stuck, linking it to the infinitely famous Stonehenge. To have a wooden monument survive for millennia is extremely rare. Sea Henge is one of Britain's greatest archaeological discoveries of recent decades, and yet, its story feels little known. Today, we're going to address that.

• 3:59Tristan Hughes?

  This is the story of Sea Henge, with our guest, Dr Sue Greaney.

• 4:06Tristan Hughes?

  Sue, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast. Oh, thank you.

• 4:11Speaker 07

  Great to be here.

• 4:12Tristan Hughes?

  Last time we did all the things Stonehenge, largely in the Neolithic period, didn't we? Today we're talking all about Seahenge, which feels a bit more mysterious, but it's intrigued me ever since I saw this, or parts of it, at the World of Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum a few years ago. My first question has to be, what exactly is Seahenge?

• 4:33Speaker 07

  Seahenge is actually a bit of a misnomer, because it's not really a henge, a bit like Stonehenge. It's a name that was given to the site when it was discovered by the local papers and it's stuck. Actually, what it is, is a timber circle, a very small timber circle. And it was discovered in 1998 off the north coast of Norfolk, when some sands and peats had been washed away by the sea, and it sort of suddenly got noticed that it was there. And then it was excavated the following year. So the name Seahenge, often by archaeologists, we prefer to call it Holm One Timber Circle, which isn't quite so evocative.

• 5:08Tristan Hughes?

  So it's not a henge at all, is it? But it was found near the sea. The sea part is at least a little bit accurate.

• 5:13Speaker 07

  It is fairly accurate. When it was built, it would have been more inland than how it was discovered. It was actually discovered in the tidal zone, kind of eroding out of the sediments. But when it was built, it would have been slightly more inland and actually in a kind of freshwater wet area, just behind a load of sand dunes.

• 5:29Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, can you tell us a bit about the whole discovery of Seahenge? Because it feels quite recent. It's not like Stonehenge that's been known for centuries. Seahenge is quite a recent phenomenon.

• 5:37Speaker 07

  That's right. It was possibly known about in the late 1980s, local people had seen these timbers. But people thought maybe it was a shipwreck or, you know, something fairly modern. But it wasn't until 1998, when a local man, John Lorimer, managed to identify it and reported it to the local Norfolk Archaeology Service. And they came out to have a look and said, no, this is really significant. This is important. And it's actually quite a small timber circle. It's only six, seven metres across. So we're talking about, you know, not something enormous that would be visible for miles away. But you'd really have to stumble across it and look at it carefully to know that it was a circle.

• 6:09Tristan Hughes?

  And is it really remarkable that a timber circle, of all things, has survived down through thousands of years?

• 6:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, and that's why it's really exciting as a monument, because we so rarely get timbers preserved from this period of prehistory. There were really unusual conditions where very soon after it was constructed, it got covered by peat and other sediments, and that meant it was in an anaerobic condition, which means that the timbers preserved, whereas every other timber monument we have from this period and earlier, only survives as post holes. Sometimes we get the odd trace of a tiny bit of post in the bottom of a hole, but really to have the actual timbers surviving and surviving above ground, as in the bit that would have been visible in prehistory is still visible to us today, is really astonishing. And so it can tell us so much about people's prehistoric attitudes to wood and to timber,

• 7:01Speaker 07

  and what these monuments actually looked like above ground.

• 7:04Tristan Hughes?

  And how long was it after the discovery, after the reporting of this monument, did it take for research to start going on Seahenge and then figuring out things like how old this monument actually was?

• 7:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, so there was an initial evaluation shortly after this discovery, which took place in late 1998, and that established it that it was definitely a prehistoric timber circle. And then a full excavation was planned the following year. It was quite controversial at the time, because some people, particularly local people, wanted to keep it, but it was actively eroding out of the peat, and you could see that the seawater and the inundations and the tides were just destroying the timbers. There was actually two timber circles. Holm one is Seahenge. There was another one, Holm two, which was left in situ, and it was in far worse preservation conditions, and it was excavated, but it was left in situ rather than being removed. So what they did in 1998 was a rather extraordinary project, where they had to excavate between the tides.

• 8:01Speaker 07

  So they only got about between one and four hours a day to actually go in and excavate. And they had to use several pumps to make sure that the water was removed from, if everyone's ever dug a hole on a beach, you know that water just appears quite quickly. So it was a bit of an extraordinary project to try and do, and they had to record it as carefully As they could, looking at things like debris from the woodworking that had taken place, making sure that they rescued the timbers. And immediately those timbers were then transported to a local site called Flagfen, which is just near Peterborough, where they had lots and lots of facilities to preserve the wood. So they put them straight into water tanks so that there was no further decay and they didn't start to dry out and crack. And then really the conservation of those timbers started from then, which is a process of

• 8:45Speaker 07

  drying them out slowly and using different chemicals to kind of impregnate them and preserve them, basically the same as they do with things like the Mary Rose and things. So that's when the research started and the amazing amount of work was done on site by Mark Brennan, who was the archaeologist, but also by Maisie Taylor, who is a prehistoric woodworking specialist. So she was able to examine all of the timbers and look for signs of the marks where the axes had actually been used to trim the trees. And looking at the history of, you know, which trees had been used and how they'd been divided up around the circle and all kinds of really interesting detail about how the monument had been built.

• 9:19Tristan Hughes?

  Fantastic. So many details that we can delve into. But it also sounds like, I was just thinking straight away about coastal archaeological discoveries and almost a race against time with with the tides and so on. So my mind immediately went to like the Haysborough footprints or something like that. Those nine hundred thousand year old human footprints, the earliest in Britain. Similar with that one, a race against the clock to ensure that they're preserved, that they're recorded. And it seems similarly with C Henge's discovery, it was done quickly but effectively to then record all of these details.

• 9:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, luckily in that part of East Anglia, we have a real cluster of excellent archaeologists who are used to dealing with waterlogged conditions in in the wash and around the kind of the flat areas of Peterborough and things. So the experts were there, ready to to jump into action. But yeah, it was definitely a team effort and it was, it was, as I said, it was quite controversial at the time. So there was protests at the site during the excavations because people wanted it to be kept in position.

• 10:11Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 10:11Speaker 07

  So the archaeologists had to deal with that. And as of course, the media, it was on the front page of one of the major newspapers. And so it became, you know, a real place for reporters to go and take photographs and have interviews and things. So they were trying to deal with all that as well as do the best job they could with the archaeology.

• 10:26Tristan Hughes?

  Well, quite frankly, when a name like C Henge emerges, it sticks and that gets the media interested, doesn't it? Well, let's delve into that first part of the research, which is the dating of this monument. This is extraordinary. So how old did they figure out was C Henge?

• 10:42Speaker 07

  So Sea Henge was built in the late spring or early summer of 2049 B.C., 2049 B.C.

• 10:50Tristan Hughes?

  Almost a pinpoint precise date there. That is extraordinary knowledge.

• 10:55Speaker 07

  It is amazing, isn't it? So this is because we can use, because it's timber, we can use a technique called dendrochronology to look at the timbers and look at the tree rings. And this is a really well-established technique for dating timber by counting and looking at the different tree rings and matching that across to known date timbers. So by different seasons and different climate change through the years, you can actually basically map this kind of growth of trees. And so they were able to do that for these particular trees. And of course, they had so many posts and also a central large trunk that they were able to get a complete sequence and really precisely date the timbers.

• 11:28Tristan Hughes?

  When we think of something like Stonehenge or the Ring of Brodgar or other great monuments from that time period or a bit earlier, you see people saying, oh, this would have taken years to build. But if you've got a particular date for Woodhenge, do we think then that it took much less time to build a timber circle like that?

• 11:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a much, much smaller and simpler monument. There's some estimates in the publications about how many people it would have taken, perhaps 50 people or so working for a couple of weeks. You know, it's really a very short term thing. And unlike monuments like Stonehenge, for example, it was built in one go, one phase, and then not altered. So unlike other monuments where we see phases of change and lots of different building projects coming and altering and changing and revisiting sites over millennia sometimes, Sea Henge is a kind of snapshot, one-off monument built and then very quickly covered.

• 12:16Tristan Hughes?

  So 2049 B.C., is that correct too?

• 12:20Speaker 07

  That's right, yeah.

• 12:20Tristan Hughes?

  So about 4,000 years ago it was built. Can you set the scene of what Britain looks like at that time? What shall we be imagining with all of these monuments at that time and the monumental world that Sea Henge sits in?

• 12:35Speaker 07

  So that particular date is within what we call the early Bronze Age. So this is a period of time when people have got metal tools. So some of the tools that were used to build the monument were bronze axes, which is kind of the bronze is the go to metal of this period, obviously being the Bronze Age. The early Bronze Age, though, is actually really similar to the period before that, the late Neolithic period, the late Stone Age, in terms of how people are living and their lifestyles at this time. People are generally thought in this period to be relatively mobile farmers and pastoralists. So they have herds of cattle, herds of pigs, sheep and goats. And evidence for settlements in this period is really quite rare. So we think that people are still probably moving on a seasonal basis,

• 13:17Speaker 07

  perhaps moving between different settlements, relatively ephemeral settlements, so things that don't leave much of a trace behind. This is in contrast to the Middle Bronze Age period, which comes a little bit later, when people, we do start seeing the first round houses and the first kind of permanent settlements and farms and field systems and things. So in this early Bronze Age, people, in terms of monuments, people are building round barrows. I'm sure lots of listeners will be familiar with with the round barrows that you can see scattered across quite large bits of Britain. And this is the go to monument for this period, really. So that's how they're burying their dead.

• 13:50Tristan Hughes?

  And sorry, Sue, could you explain quickly what a round barrow is for those who might not know what actually a round barrow is?

• 13:55Speaker 07

  So in the early Bronze Age, people are building round barrows, which are relatively small mounds of earth, covering sometimes one burial, covering sometimes multiple burials, and often surrounded by a ditch. They come in different forms, bell barrows and bowl barrows, but in essence, they are mounds under which people are buried. And this is a tradition that comes into Britain at the start of the early Bronze Age, so around about 2400 B.C., perhaps 400 years or so before Seahenge gets constructed. And at that time, we have a big shift in what happens in Britain. So although the lifestyles stay the same and the kind of the farming and the livestock and the mobility stays quite similar, we have new people coming into Britain at that time from the continent. So this is what often get called the beaker people or the beaker folk.

• 14:41Speaker 07

  And these people come into Britain at that time with the first metals, with different types of Pottery with probably new ideas about burial and religion, language, all those kind of things. And so what you're seeing in terms of the people who built Sea Henge is about four hundred years after that period of immigration, when people are much more connected with the continent and they are making things like beaker pottery. And they're burying their dead under round burrows. And by that point, about two thousand B C, people are fairly well integrated. That immigration has happened, the people are kind of quite a mixed population and fairly settled in terms of kind of their lifestyle.

• 15:14Tristan Hughes?

  And so in regards to the monumentality, so you have the round burrows, you have these new people who have come in a few centuries before Sea Henge is built. The landscape of Britain at that time, would there have still been stone circles and timber circles in use? Because normally you'd think with stone and timber circles, you think the Neolithic, you'd think the end of the Stone Age. But of course, this is the early Bronze Age. But would people going around the UK at that time? Would timber circles, stone circles still be very recognisable points in the landscape?

• 15:44Speaker 07

  Certainly, yes. So in the late Neolithic period in particular, there was a whole load of stone and earth and timber monuments constructed across much of Britain. And these would have been still known about and still present in the landscape. Timber circles were built in that period as well. So particularly large timber circles and also things we call palisaded enclosures, which are great big areas of land surrounded by thousands of posts, which we can talk about a bit later. So yes, timber monuments and stone monuments would have been present and known about in the landscape. The interesting thing about timber monuments is, of course, they don't last. So if you set up a timber post, even if it's a substantial timber post, it's not going to last more than, say, a hundred years or so. So what you might have had by this period is a whole series of slightly decaying monuments.

• 16:28Speaker 07

  If you ever go and there's on the Isle of Arron a few years ago, they built a replica timber circle and then left it. And it's really interesting to go there and see it kind of part rotten, part fallen down because that's more might have been quite familiar to people in the early Bronze Age is these monuments that had been once really spectacular and the centre of kind of ritual activities, actually now maybe a bit more abandoned and sort of decaying in the landscape.

• 16:50Tristan Hughes?

  I guess that goes back to what we were saying at the beginning with how extraordinary Sea Henge is, is that you still have the timber post surviving.

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• 17:16Speaker 03

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• 17:35Speaker 03

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• 18:25Tristan Hughes?

  I'd like to ask now about how many examples of timber circles there were in Britain at that time. Is it quite a difficult task sometimes, finding those post holders in the soil and trying to identify the remains of where a timber post once stood?

• 18:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, we do have quite a few examples of timber circles, but you're right. You have to find those through excavation, through geophysical survey. They obviously don't survive above ground anymore. And so, we know that people built large timber circles and timber monuments all the way through the Neolithic period. But by the early Bronze Age, a lot of the timber monuments are actually associated with burials.

• 18:58Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 18:58Speaker 07

  So, these round burrows, which are associated with burials, often if surveys are done, they show that there is a ring of pits underneath. So, round burrows can be kind of multi-phase in that the first burial might- Have been just surrounded by a simple timber posts and then they added a mound later. So what we're seeing is that small timber circles like Sea Henge were often associated with burials and were part of the kind of sequence at Round Barrows.

• 19:24Tristan Hughes?

  That's a nice hint to where we'll get to later on in the chat when we talk all about its purpose. If we go back specifically to Sea Henge now, Susan, can you also give us a sense, you hinted at it earlier as well, of what the landscape around the area of Sea Henge in East Anglia in Norfolk would have looked like some 4,000 years ago when it is built?

• 19:44Speaker 07

  So they did lots and lots of environmental work when they did the excavation. So they looked at things like pollen. They looked at the sediments. They looked at survival of things like beetles and all kinds of other. Yeah, really amazing kind of insects and things that get preserved in the sediments. And from that, they were able to tell that Sea Henge had been constructed in basically a sort of freshwater sort of boggy area. Not that far from the coast, but not right on the coast, because of course the Norfolk coastline has changed since the Bronze Age and has become more inundated. And that means that it was built on relatively dryish land, but perhaps just at the interface where the dry land was becoming wet. And what we know is that nearby there was quite a lot of oak woodland.

• 20:26Speaker 07

  And so the timbers that were actually used to construct the circle were probably from the very local area.

• 20:32Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's now explore those timbers themselves, Sue, and explore the monument itself. So if it was like Sea Henge is made of two particular parts, the outer ring and then the centre, it's almost like we did with Stonehenge where we talked about the various parts of the monument in our chat. Let's start with the outer ring first of all. Can you tell us about that?

• 20:51Speaker 07

  So the outer ring is 55 timber posts. Originally, they would have been perhaps been two to three metres tall, but when they were actually excavated, they are up to a metre in length, still surviving. And basically, these are trimmed smallish trees, so they are perhaps 50 to 100 years old or something like that. All oak, the whole monument is built of oak. And they were set in a, in a circle. It's actually a very sort of slightly oval shape. It's about six metres by seven metres. And these were set very close to each other, so almost forming a complete continuous fence line. And they were set up with the bark still on the trees and they were split posts, so they were sort of half moon shaped posts. And they were set up with their bark on the outside of the circle.

• 21:34Speaker 07

  So if you would look at the monument, it would almost be like looking at an enormous tree. Because they were set up very close together. Access was provided, one of the posts was a little fork. It was a forked branch, so a tree that had forked in two, and you could have stepped between those two to get access to the inner part of the circle. Really interestingly, the analysis they did of these posts afterwards showed that several of them had come from the same trees. They think maybe fifteen to twenty trees were used to to build it. And some of the timber posts were the same timber, the same tree as the one that ended up in the middle, which we'll talk about in a minute. So that, so it's a really interesting thing in that some archaeologists have suggested that this was almost like

• 22:15Speaker 07

  setting up a recreation of a tree with the bark on the inside and the bark on the outside and the bare wood on in the inside. And that stepping into this circle would have been a bit like stepping into a tree, which is quite fun.

• 22:28Tristan Hughes?

  And is there a ditch or anything outside of this ring of trees or anything like that, like with Stonehenge?

• 22:33Speaker 07

  No, they they carefully looked for evidence of a ditch when they did the excavations or a bank or anything. They didn't find any evidence for that, so it looks like it was simply just freestanding. They're just digging holes down to take the posts and then setting them upright.

• 22:45Tristan Hughes?

  It's also so interesting because you mentioned Stonehenge there, that there's always the talk about where particular stones came from. And people now being able to kind of pinpoint particular locations where where the stones were sourced. If you're saying that the wood for these timbers seem to have been largely from the same trees or only only a few trees. Is it different with dendrochronology? Can we not pinpoint exactly which, you know, prehistoric forest they came from or how far away they came from? Or is that just information we can't ascertain?

• 23:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, we unfortunately, there's no techniques for doing that. But handsily, these particular trees were noted to be really gnarled and quite kind of irregular in shape. And the idea is actually that these trees were being affected by seawater. So these trees were not necessarily the healthiest oak trees, but they had been basically kind of had their growth stunted and a bit more kind of affected by sea. So the point when they were constructing this timber circle was probably one of landscape change. Was probably one where the coast was changing and that established oak woodlands were perhaps being inundated for the first time or or in the lifetime of the people that were building the monument. And that's one idea again about, you know, are they are they building this in response to that change?

• 23:57Speaker 07

  And so that's why we think the trees came from very locally, because they've got this effect, which suggests that they're being impacted by seawater.

• 24:06Tristan Hughes?

  So this is my favourite part of the whole story of Sea Henge, which is if we now go to the centre of the monument and this bizarre piece of timber right in the middle. Sue, what is this?

• 24:18Speaker 07

  So really interestingly, what they put into the middle of this timber circle was an upside down tree. So they took the base of a tree with all the roots and things. So we think this is a tree that had fallen over or perhaps been felled by pulling it down. It's perhaps in a storm or something like that. And they put it upside down in a great big pit in the middle. So what you would have seen stepping into that space would have been a tangle of roots and basically the bit of a tree that you never normally see, which is the bit that would have been below ground. This is really exciting because if we'd just found this as a normal archaeology site, we'd have just found a big pit. We wouldn't have been able to know that they were putting a tree upside down in the middle of a timber circle. So it's, it's really evocative and it's really kind of makes you

• 25:00Speaker 07

  think, well, why on earth were they doing that? What was the, why did they invert this tree? It's a very odd thing to do. And we can begin to speculate about why, why they might have done that and why this particular tree. But yeah, that's what they set up in the middle.

• 25:13Tristan Hughes?

  And I'm trying to picture it as well, like roots going everywhere, like curly hair, just looking really bizarre and weird, you know, to people who, many people who may well not have seen anything like that before. The big question then, Sue, what are some of the theories? Why did they decide to put an upside down tree, roots and all, in the centre of this timber circle?

• 25:31Speaker 07

  Well, it's a really difficult question to answer because we can't really get into the mindsets of somebody in the Bronze Age. But if you think about it being an inversion of a tree, you're basically sort of thinking about the underworld and thinking about below ground. So perhaps it was some way of, of kind of communicating with the underworld or representing the underworld. People would have seen these kind of roots quite commonly. When trees blow over in a forest, you, you get what we call a tree throw, which is when trees fall over and they bring up lots of material and you can see all the roots. But to have that completely upside down suggests that, you know, the rest of the tree almost is below ground and that you've completely inverted your world. So perhaps it's to do with communication with underworld spirits, or perhaps it's to do with rituals that relate

• 26:16Speaker 07

  to the trees themselves. So trees are amazing metaphors, even in the modern world, you know, about growth, about maturation. Oak trees in particular, you know, they last 600, 700 years easily. So they're far outlast a human lifetime. So trees are like...

• 26:35Speaker 07

  Really significant for prehistoric people. I mean, people have even suggested that the Stone Age, for example, should be called the Wood Age, just because wood and managing woodland and using wood in lots of different ways for fuel, for tools, for building structures would have been, you know, an everyday thing. You would have been highly kind of attuned to the properties of trees, the properties of different species of trees and what their capabilities were. So perhaps this was a known tree, you know, perhaps this was a landmark tree. Often trees mark places or mark rootways. So perhaps this was a special tree that was particularly important to the people of this area. Perhaps it was felled in a storm, perhaps, you know, it was taken down deliberately, but

• 27:16Speaker 07

  maybe that tree, you know, was known and was inverted for some ritual purpose. But it is quite difficult to know exactly why it was done.

• 27:25Tristan Hughes?

  Might start having to position people to recall the Stone Age to the Stone, Wood and Bone Age, but maybe that doesn't quite roll off the tongue the same way. But when we get to the Iron Age, I remember, you know, certain Roman writers, I think Julius Caesar does as well, talks about when exploring Iron Age Britons and so on, their love of the forests, sacred groves and so on, the importance of nature and natural areas for them and their beliefs. Do we think there could have been a similar idea with these early Bronze Age people? Do we know what Bronze Age people thought about trees? I never thought I'd say that statement, that question, but here we go.

• 28:03Speaker 07

  In archaeology at the moment, there's people who are really keen on the idea that people in prehistory wouldn't have known the difference or recognised the difference between nature and culture in the same way that we do. And that actually trees would have been seen as as living beings to be, you know, negotiated with or perhaps, we know that, for example, some Native American tribes had, before they felled a tree, they would make offerings to it. They would, you know, ensure that things were done in the correct way. That because, you know, taking things from the environment was about giving back as well as just exploiting things. So it's quite possible that people had really interesting and direct relationships with trees and that they would have seen trees as living beings that had to be involved in social relations in some way.

• 28:45Speaker 07

  Or another. So we can't know that for sure, but certainly some of the activities that people did throughout the prehistoric people in relation to trees may suggest that. So for example, in archaeology, we often find tree throws. So basically the great big pits where a tree has fallen over. And then been often things get deposited in those hollows. So we have examples, for example, from the Avery landscape where an aurochs bone was stuck upright into a tree throw hollow. We have other examples where lots of bits of pottery and things get deposited in these places. So, you know, people are making offerings potentially to the underworld or to the tree itself, or something in relation to the forest. And so there's a real suggestion that people would have had a much more intimate relationship with woodland and with trees than what we have now in the modern world.

• 29:30Tristan Hughes?

  And so what do we think then, if it is the Bronze Age, if we believe trees are very important to these people? If the Henge, you know, it isn't as grand as one of those earlier monuments like Stonehenge, but evidently still important. What do we think was then the purpose or purposes of the timber circle to see Henge?

• 29:52Speaker 07

  So the original excavators suggested that potentially it was somewhere that was used for burial. And in fact, they suggested that the upturned tree, the roots could have been a platform on which excarnation could have happened. So excarnation being when you lay out the dead body and it can be a place where it decays or gets picked by clean by birds and things, that it may have been a burial monument or a monument somehow involved in the funery activity. But we don't actually have any direct evidence for that. There's no human bones from the site. You know, we don't have any of the evidence that that was taking place. But there is a suggestion that maybe this is to do with life and death. And it's that idea of the tree being a metaphor for for kind of life and death. And we know that in this period, people were using

• 30:34Speaker 07

  wooden coffins and some of the brown barrows elsewhere in the country, people were hollowing out logs to put their dead into. And so trees, or perhaps even the interior of trees, may have been seen as a place where people went when they died, or where they came from before birth. And so there's this idea that, you know, timbers and trees may have been sort of involved in some sort of life and death rituals. The other thing, of course, is timber decays visibly over time. This is not necessarily a monument that was built to last forever and ever. They knew it would have eventually decayed. In fact, they probably would be surprised that it survived thousands of years. But that decay process, you know, was an observable phenomenon where people could visit the site and see that it had been, you know,

• 31:16Speaker 07

  beginning to decay, the posts would have fallen over, that rotting and animals and things like that would have destroyed the monument. So maybe that was also part of it, the visible decay of the monument was also kind of part of what it was about. But yeah, we can't really say that much more than that. Interestingly, the other timber circle, Holm Two, had a slightly different setup in the middle. So it was another oval, slightly larger of timbers, timber posts, but within the middle were two sort of logs almost set in parallel to each other, which looked like they would have been, they had notches cut into them as if they were going to support something in the middle. And people have suggested maybe that was a coffin or a bia or something related to somebody being placed there for burial.

• 31:58Speaker 07

  Again, though, we don't have that surviving, so it's only speculation. But it's quite possible that even if these weren't for burial or for exclamation or something similar, that they were related to those funerary rituals in some way.

• 32:10Tristan Hughes?

  It's interesting that we focus on, you know, the funeral and burial aspect with this monument. And yet with the other earlier monuments, once again, I'll go to Stonehenge because it's the most famous one, but we were recently at New Grange Passage Tomb and did Mace Hallow a couple of years ago up in Orkney. There's always talk about a link to the solstice or a solstice alignment, that idea of the astronomical interests of these early farmers. Could there be any potential astronomical link with Seahenge?

• 32:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, there is some indications that an alignment to the solstice was important. So that forked trunk that I mentioned, which was kind of the entrance into the timber circle, was on the southwest side of the circle. And directly opposite, there was one post that was with its bark facing inwards rather than outwards like all the others. And that was to the northeast. And those would indicate the solstice directions. So the sort of summer sunrise in the middle of June and the midwinter sunset. So that orientation is quite common. That general orientation is often seen in timber monuments from the late Near Elythic, so it's sort of no surprise that there's a hint of it here at Seahenge as well. It's such a small monument, though, it's only six metres across, that you're not talking

• 33:22Speaker 07

  about a kind of long, an alignment through which you could actually precisely see and observe solstice events. So it's probably much more what we see more generally with monuments in the late Near Elythic and early Bronze Age, which is that they're sort of aligning their monument to their cosmos, to their key directions, but it's not a precise observation monument. It's more about just making sure that it fits and it's in the right way. Interestingly, just on either side of that one post on the north-east side, some of the timbers there were actually the timbers that had come from the central tree. And they were squared off slightly differently to the other posts. Instead of being split, they were actually kind of cut down to be large sort of timber square posts.

• 34:06Speaker 07

  So that suggests that also that part of the monument was significant and they were marking that out in some detail to refer to the central tree being in that direction. So yeah, there's a lot of detail in just looking at the timbers and working out which trees they come from that kind of tells us that that difference, that astronomical alignment might have been important.

• 34:24Tristan Hughes?

  Being a bit spiritual here, but bear with me in this, but if you were going into the monument itself, past the ring of timber posts with the bark pointing outwards, I know that with some stone circles, for instance, when I went to see the Ring of Brodgar, the massive stone circle up on the Orkney mainland, how there may well be a sense that you're almost going from, I don't want to say one realm to the other, but going almost into a closed off space when you entered past the ring of stones. Do you think there could be something similar with the bark pointing outwards in the inverted tree in the middle? Could there be this idea that you were walking, if you walked past the outer ring, you were walking into almost a different world in their mindset?

• 35:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, definitely, I think so, particularly because the posts were so close set, you couldn't have seen out and people couldn't have seen in. So it would have been a very enclosed space. And in fact, the people who visited and were part of the excavation did say it had a particular feel to it, it was very. Kind of enclosed, you couldn't hear, it was some muffled sounds from outside and that kind of thing. So it was very much a different world, but also a really small world. I think it's only six metres across and you've got this great big oak tree upside down in the middle of it. You'd have had to kind of edge round, you know, there wouldn't have been room for that many people inside this space. It's a very intimate space. So whether that meant that only certain people could go in, or perhaps it was only a certain family that was involved, you know, in, in the construction and the use of it. So it's

• 35:50Speaker 07

  a much more, I guess intimate or small scale monument than a lot of the ones that we're more familiar with.

• 35:57Tristan Hughes?

  And does that affect the acoustics at all as well? If all the timber posts are close together, surrounded, if you're inside, I know, once again, it's quite difficult to envisage, well, maybe not, but the fact that you've only got one timber circle surviving with the post, would that have affected the acoustics when you went inside too?

• 36:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a really interesting question. It probably did. And in fact, I'm working at the moment with some acoustic specialists to think about woodhenge, which is another timber circle from prehistory, which, using computer modelling and digital model to recreate the timbers, what that would have done to the acoustics. So it's certainly a research question that would be really interesting. And in fact, for sea henge, because we have got the surviving timbers, we actually could perhaps do some modelling on that. But I don't think that's ever been done yet. So research question for the future.

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• 37:19Tristan Hughes?

  And guess what? We're also now on YouTube. After Dark, a podcast from So the people themselves, do we know much about the community that built Sea Henge some 4,000 years ago?

• 37:46Speaker 07

  Not really. We know it was a small group, the base of perhaps 50 people or so involved in kind of, there's quite a lot of work involved, even though it's a small monument, felling the trees, cutting them up. We know that quite a lot of them had trimmed bases, so they weren't just cutting them and getting a kind of classic V shape that you get when you fell a tree with an axe. They were trimming them quite well. And so there was a fair amount of effort involved. We think they're probably local. They were obviously well aware of the changes to the coastline and were building these monuments probably in, you know, in reaction perhaps to what was happening to their changing landscape. You know, there's an idea that perhaps they were building this, these monuments to kind of placate the gods and say, no, we don't want to lose our landscape, or we don't want to lose this lovely forest

• 38:29Speaker 07

  that's disappearing to the sea, who knows. But we know that there are some other early Bronze Age round barrows very close by, just inland. So there were certainly communities that were there and burying their dead in round barrows in the local area. But this is, the timber monuments are slightly different, being in their location to the coast and also them being not barrows necessarily, but these timber structures.

• 38:50Tristan Hughes?

  So we know that they were using metal axes by this time, which feels unusual when we're thinking of timber circles and stone circles. I know you mentioned that, of course, we're in the Bronze Age now, but surely it takes some time for metalworking to pass down to some of these communities. But we know for a fact that this community had access to bronze or copper? I don't know, please explain, at that time to create this monument?

• 39:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, so metalworking arrives in Britain around about 2,400 B.C. And the first metal artefacts are copper and gold, and they're very much decorative. You know, they're small artefacts that get placed in burials, like little earrings and hair tresses, and copper axes, which wouldn't have actually been that much use. You know, if copper is very soft, it wouldn't have been particularly useful compared to the stone. axes that they were used to using for things like felling trees. But by this period, round about two thousand two hundred B C, people perfect the art of making really good bronze. And they're combining copper with tin from places like Cornwall. And in fact, it's the Britain is really at the forefront of bronze production at that point. And it goes sort of then back across Europe in a wave of kind of innovation.

• 39:55Speaker 07

  So by two thousand B C ish, which is when Sea Henge is constructed, they have really perfected making very, very good tools out of bronze. And they really stopped using stone axes at all, you know, they were still using flint to make small artifacts, small scrapers and and arrowheads and things. But for axes, they'd switched entirely to bronze.

• 40:16Tristan Hughes?

  Because even if the trees that they use, you know, there's examples of some sea rot. You would still need a bronze axe rather than a copper axe to fell a mighty oak tree or something like that.

• 40:24Speaker 07

  It's much more efficient and much quicker. Yeah, the tools are sharper and easier to sharpen themselves.

• 40:31Tristan Hughes?

  And also to recap what you said there as well, Sue. So although there is another timber circle right next to Sea Henge. We don't think that this was part of a larger monumental complex like maybe what we see near Stonehenge. And maybe we shouldn't be imagining timber circles aligning the East Anglian coastline of today that are yet to be discovered.

• 40:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, certainly. It's not part of a larger complex of monuments as far as we know. I suspect there were a lot more timber monuments than we know about, obviously, just because of the difficulties of them disappearing. So we've got a kind of fairly unique situation here where they've survived and then been revealed by erosion. So. Yeah, it's but they don't seem to be part of, as we say, kind of monument complexes elsewhere, where you get lots and lots of monuments being built over a long period of time.

• 41:12Tristan Hughes?

  And so if Sea Henge is constructed some four thousand years ago, but right at the end of this age of great timber and and stone circles. What do we think happens to it if, you know, wood does decay, you know, in the grand scheme of things, not very long after it's built?

• 41:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, so in these examples, if they'd been on dry land, it may be that people would have come back to them and buried somebody there, erected a barrow over the top of them, you know, by mounding up the earth over the timbers. Once they decayed, perhaps, you know, that would be a kind of typical sequence we might see. But here, quite unusually, there was very quickly, the area was inundated with seawater, with sediments and with peats, which meant that the timbers got preserved. So it's around about this time that really people stopped building great big monuments. And in fact, these are typical of this period in that they're small scale, they're much more kind of community scale monuments rather than great big henges and great big stone circles that perhaps people were used to building in the previous period in the late Near Elythic.

• 42:08Speaker 07

  So this is in a way typical of that much smaller scale focus on monuments being a family or a small community endeavour rather than large communal projects.

• 42:19Tristan Hughes?

  Have there been any discoveries of tools or bones or anything within sea henge, within its vicinity, within its area? Or was it just the timber posts that have survived? And of course, the inverted tree stump in the middle?

• 42:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, so there wasn't that much found when they excavated. They found quite a few wood chips, so they could see where the timbers had actually been shaped and worked. They found some pottery from the early Bronze Age, just a few shards. Really interestingly, in the base of the tree trunk, I should have said this before, but the tree trunk had actually got two holes bored into it to facilitate pulling it along, to drag it from wherever it was growing.

• 42:56Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 42:57Speaker 07

  And within those holes was preserved two considerable lengths of honeysuckle rope. So rope that had been made by twisting together strands of honeysuckle and which had been used to drag the tree into position. So again, a really interesting preservation of something organic that we wouldn't normally see, but shows the kind of technologies and things that people were using at that time. But other than that, it is quite an empty monument. It doesn't seem to have been a place where people were depositing animal bones or human bones particularly.

• 43:24Speaker 07

  It's probably something that was only in use for a very short period of time anyway, but it seems to be a place not for deposition of offerings or anything like that, but very much about just the tree and the experience of the life and death of the tree.

• 43:36Tristan Hughes?

  I'm so glad you mentioned the rope there because of course that's the other big thing that we need to think about, isn't it? It's how they transported the big planks of wood, the big trunks to the place where they ultimately set up the monuments like we do with the stone circles. That's extraordinary that you have that organic rope material surviving as well.

• 43:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, and actually East Anglia is great for this kind of preservation because there's been a site, you've probably heard of it, Must Farm, not farm from Peterborough, where excavations have taken place over the last few years. And there, because the houses, these are middle Bronze Age, so slightly later than Seahenge, because of the way that they burnt down and then basically landed in water, they've been preserved. And we've got amazing preservation there. Wooden tools, you know, wooden bowls, textiles, amazingly fine textiles that people are making out of things like nettle and hemp, just really shows you the kind of missing majority of archaeologically what we miss really from most of our sites, where all of these organic materials don't survive.

• 44:32Tristan Hughes?

  I did not realise that Peterborough was such a rich area of Bronze Age archaeology, but you know, I must go and visit Must Farm in the future because that's another of those extraordinary sites.

• 44:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, go to Flagford and see, I think Must Farm itself is now under a quarry, so you can't visit the site itself. But the actual artefacts and things are on display, I'm sure, in the Peterborough Museum and things like that.

• 44:52Tristan Hughes?

  Given that it was only discovered some 20 years ago, and given how much research has been done, the fact we have the timber posts themselves surviving, do you think it's almost inevitable that with more scientific advancements, with more research, that we can learn even more about this monument and how it fitted into that Bronze Age world 4,000 years ago?

• 45:10Speaker 07

  I think there's certainly a growing awareness that timber monuments were really significant. Lots and lots of kind of antiquarian research has focused on the stone monuments because they survive. But actually, we can't really understand the stone monuments, including Stonehenge, unless we know about timber monuments too. A lot of my research focuses on timber monuments from the late Neolithic period, and that's doing things like really detailed radiocarbon data. To establish the chronologies of these monuments. And the the things that they're building out of timber in that period are absolutely extraordinary. Great big enclosures with one thousand four hundred posts. Huge great big tree trunks used to set up and create monuments, which are just as as much effort and just as much energy and resources needed as for a stone monument.

• 45:53Speaker 07

  But because they don't survive above ground, we haven't really been focusing our research in that area. So it's certainly somewhere that there's much more research to be done. And in terms of the techniques that we're able to use, things like dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating and, you know, really detailed analysis, careful analysis of things like tool marks and and how these timbers were were were used and shaped is certainly an ongoing area of research, particularly for sites like Must Farm. It's just extraordinary to see how much people understood about the different qualities of different species of wood, how they were managing woodland, how they were, you know, just real experts in using wood and timber to its full extent.

• 46:33Tristan Hughes?

  I'm never a huge fan of using the word unique, but I guess in terms of the fact that it has survived and its preservation does make sea henge feel that way in regards that, you know, that you do have the the timber posts surviving. Sue, do you think there's any chance that we might see future sea henge equivalents emerging, being discovered in the future? Could there be other ones within, you know, coastal areas today below the sand that have survived because of that? Any chance of that, do you think?

• 47:01Speaker 07

  I think so, yeah. Certainly Norfolk and and Lincolnshire coasts are eroding at some rates. And there's also other areas, the Severnestre, for example, south coast of Wales, where we've got extraordinary preservations of things like mesolithic fish traps and other activities that were kind of happening on the coastline. So I wouldn't be surprised to see other small timber monuments like this emerge at some point in the future from one of those coastlines. And things like the Haysborough footprints that you mentioned early on, you know, a lot of these coastal peats and intertidal wetlands and things do preserve extraordinary evidence from, you know, millennia ago in terms of the human occupation of Britain. But also relatively recent, interesting timber things, wooden boats, for example. You mentioned you'd done a programme about Newgrange.

• 47:44Speaker 07

  There was a log boat found recently in the Boyne, which had been preserved in in the river, not on the coast necessarily, but a boat from the same period that Newgrange was constructed, which, again, was a chance discovery. So there's certainly lots more preserved wood out there for us to find in future.

• 48:00Tristan Hughes?

  Sue, this has been such a wonderful conversation. Lovely to have you back on the podcast. Is there anything else you'd like to mention about Sea Henge before we completely wrap up?

• 48:08Speaker 07

  No, just that if you want to see Sea Henge, it's on display in the Lin Museum in King's Lynn. So if you want to go and have a look at the timbers yourself, then yeah, go and visit.

• 48:17Tristan Hughes?

  I can't believe I forgot that, absolutely. Great to mention that as well, Sue. It just goes to me to say, what a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today.

• 48:26Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 48:30Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr Sue Greaney talking through the extraordinary story of Sea Henge. I hope you enjoyed this episode shining a light on what I think is one of the most extraordinary prehistoric monuments ever discovered in Britain. Thank you for listening to the episode. Please follow The Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. If you also want to hear about my thoughts, what I thought about that episode, well, I'm starting to put up videos on my Substack and the first video is my reaction to this episode all about Sea Henge. So if you want to hear my thoughts a bit more about what I thought about the episode, then head over to Substack and you can see that there.

• 49:15Tristan Hughes?

  Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. Now that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.

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