It’s dawn. A waning crescent moon tracks Jupiter and Saturn across a sky brightening from navy to royal blue. The reeds whisper, wrens chunter in thickets of sea buckthorn, oystercatchers and curlew call. The first geese of the day, recently arrived from Greenland, tack towards the Wash as the sun crests a bank of castellated cloud and gleams of golden light race up and down a million stems of marram grass, making the dunes shimmer.
The soundscape would have been familiar to those working on the mosaic of wet woodland and salt marsh that existed here in the spring of 2049BC. Their work involved the hand-felling and splitting of oaks and the laborious excavation of a much larger trunk by the roots. A hole was bored in the massive stem and a hawser of braided honeysuckle threaded through, allowing the stump to be dragged then lowered upside down into a ready-made hole and packed around so that it stood with roots spreading just above head height.
Fifty-five split and round posts were closely spaced to form a circular palisade 3 metres high and 6.6 metres in diameter. Over the ensuing years, the timbers – now on display in the Lynn museum – were preserved in near-pristine condition, first in anoxic mud and then in peat accumulating in a freshwater swamp that replaced the salt marsh. The peat was covered by encroaching dunes, which in time passed above it like slow-drifting clouds, until one day, in 1998, the remaining covering of beach sand was whisked away by the advancing sea.
Tree ring analysis shows the timbers were all felled at the same time, in the spring of 2049BC. Archaeologists have interpreted the monument, now known as Seahenge, as a funerary structure, in which the central inverted stump cradled the body of a high-status person. Perhaps it was a sky burial, from which mortal matter was redistributed, energy released and recycled. Given the 4,071 years elapsed, there’s some necessary guesswork here, but today those people feel close, and the location apt. Their rituals emphasised cyclicity, in a place of auditory and visual spectacle. A place of natural departures and returns, where land, sky, water and light seem elementally balanced.
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