Reconstructing the Devil's Quoits
By Liam Rogers
Place 7/8, Winter 2001
About six miles west of Oxford is a ruined circle-henge known as the Devil's Quoits at Stanton Harcourt (OS reference SP 411 048). Within a bank once around two metres high and around one hundred and fifty metres in diameter was a ditch and a circle of around thirty-five megaliths. The stone circle was around eighty metres in diameter. Assays from the ditch have yielded radiocarbon dates of 2060 +/-120 B.C.E. and 1640 +/-70 B.C.E., and suggest use from the later Neolithic until well into the Bronze Age. Late Neolithic grooved ware was found in a posthole[1].
The site has been largely destroyed, from Romano-British agricultural use, the construction of an airbase runway in 1940 and extensive gravel quarrying ever since. Now only part of the ditch fill remains, along with two buried stones and fragments of another.
The Reconstruction Plan
In 1940, Grimes excavated the site, leading to the scheduling of one of the three remaining stones which he left buried for safety. Further excavations in the early seventies and late eighties enabled the plan of the monument to be ascertained "with sufficient detail to allow a reconstruction of the stone circle and associated earthworks". Further stones were recovered during the investigations, although most have been lost during quarrying[2].
The Brief for Reconstruction Works[2] submitted by the waste company Greenways (now Hanson), which operates the site, to Oxfordshire County Council was approved in October 1998. Three specific aims were stated:
1. Restoration of the monument to a state of visual attractiveness;
2. Re-establishment of the setting and features of the monument;
3. Presentation of the monument to the public in an informed and meaningful way.
More at:
http://www.the-cutting-edge.freeserve.co.uk/place/quoits.htm (Archive link)
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