I have a season ticket to Ness Botanic Gardens on the Wirral, and although my first visits were confined mainly to the formal areas, in more recent forays I have been exploring the woodland areas and wide open meadow areas that lead down towards the Dee. It was a matter of some surprise, however, and a very nice one, when I emerged from some brightly coloured autumnal woodland recently to find myself confronted with a stone circle surrounded by a ditch and bank interrupted by two entrance causeways. This obviously modern creation is now known as Nesshenge.
According to John Hill’s article in the academic journal Antiquity (Project Gallery 83, 321, 2009), Nesshenge was built as a two-part experimental exercise by the University of Liverpool, contributing to the City of Liverpool’s 2008 European Capital of Culture, and referred to as the 2008 Stonehenge Rope Experiment using the principle of Occam’s Razor. Part 1 was intended to demonstrate “how Stonehenge could have originally been designed without using any complicated mathematics or astronomy” and to show on the ground, in white marker, how the different components at Stonehenge related to one another; Part 2 was the reconstruction of the ground-plan of one of the phases of the site, at a much smaller scale, .
The Ness Botanic Gardens were the work of Arthur Kilpin Bulley, the son of a wealthy Liverpool cotton importer. In 1898 he purchased the land in Ness to establish a nursery specializing in exotic seed and plant imports, creating a garden to showcase his discoveries. He died in 1942, and in 1898 his daughter gifted the garden to the University of Liverpool. The University now owns and manages Ness Gardens, and was therefore in the happy position to be able to provide the land for the experiment, overlooking the Dee estuary and Wales beyond, although it was not possible to provide the full 360ft (109.7m) area that would have been required to emulate the conditions facing the builders of Stonehenge.
The circle is built of small red sandstone blocks, some of which are laid horizontally to define an outer circle at the centre of the henge, with an inner circle of vertically-placed stones within it, and a single stone lying recumbent in the centre. An outlier stone sits just inside the northwest entrance. The monument is encircled by an outer ditch and inner bank, representing a henge, the bank about 2-3 ft (0.6-0.9m) high above the level of the interior, with the enclosed area some 135ft (41m) in diameter. Apart from the outlying stone positioned in front of it, the northwest entrance is unmarked but the southeast entrance is flanked by two tall wooden posts, a useful reminder that although stone is inevitably what survives in a prehistoric monument, wood was often used to create entire monuments or parts of them. At the time of its construction in 2008, the henge had a row of posts marking the inner line of the bank (see photos on the Antiquity page), but these have now gone. As Hill explains, “the reconstructed henge represents an important phase in Stonehenge’s unique history. Stonehenge first appeared around 2950 BC as a ditch and bank earthwork surrounding a central area with two entrances. About 2800 BC, a ring of 56 (probable) timber posts, now referred to as the Aubrey Holes, were set out.”
Henges were circular or oval enclosures, which characteristically had the ditch on the inside of the bank, although this is not the case at Stonhenge. They are thought to have been used for ceremonial purposes, defining a space within which special activities took place, possibly connected with seasonal changes throughout the year. One of the earliest phases of Stonehenge was defined by a henge, albeit with the ditch on the outside, which is emulated here at Nesshenge. The stone circles, both at Stonehenge and elsewhere were often contemporary. By no means all henges had later circles built within them. ‘Nesshenge’ represents a transitional phase in Stonehenge’s development from the Neolithic into the Early Bronze Age, c. 2650 – 2450 BC. Hill describes some of the decisions that guided the construction and orientation of the henge and circle:
We have carefully orientated the henge so that it not only incorporates a number of important astronomical alignments that occur at the real Stonehenge but we have also aligned our henge towards the direction of a special ‘notch’ between Moel Famau and Moel Arthur (on the distant North Wales coastline). Standing at our Heel Stone on the winter solstice (21 December) one can watch the afternoon winter sun setting between the two mountains.
There was clearly information signage at the site in the past, but although the boards still stand, there is nothing on them to explain it. On the map that I posted on previous piece here, the site is marked as Wood Henge, to the far right of no.9, “Wildflower Meadow.”
Rather than repeat the aims of the project and the methodologies used, I refer readers to the original short Antiquity article here, available free of charge and without log-in, which also has photographs of the circle under construction (due to the time constraint of three days to erect the monument, the ditch was dug out using a small mechanized excavator).
Both thought-provoking and fun, the experiment was clearly worth doing, and the enduring result is a really lovely and unexpected feature of the Gardens.
View of the estuary a little to the southeast of the circle.
