Four new 'henge' monuments in Scotland and Northumberland

The four monuments described below are recent additions to the class of prehistoric sacred sites known by the name of "henge monuments," of which forty examples are now known in England and Scotland.Though these monuments vary considerably in the details of their plans, certain features are common to nearly all of them.The chief of these is the presence of an enclosing earthwork, in which the bank normally lies outside the ditch; access to the enclosed area, which is circular or nearly so, is given either by a single entrance-gap, or by two such gaps facing each other from opposite sides of the site.The central area may contain a circular setting of standingstones or, exceptionally, a ring of timber posts or of ritual pits, or one or more burials.In many sites no visible feature now remains within the earthwork. 1 The henge monuments may conveniently be divided into two classes, on the basis of the number of entrances; Class I comprises those with a single entrance, and Class II those with two.The finds from excavated sites of both classes suggest that this division is a real one.Pottery and other artefacts from monuments of Class I belong, with few exceptions, to the non-Western Neolithic cultures of Britain; while the finds from sites of Class II point to an association with the Beaker peoples, and particularly to that group of them represented by beakers of Type A.The henge monuments hitherto recognised in Scotland all belong to Class II.The circles of Stennis 2 and Brodgar 3 in Orkney have not been examined, but excavations have been carried out at the three remaining sites, Broomend of Crichie 4 (Aberdeenshire), Ballymeanoch B (Argyllshire), and Cairnpapple 6 (West Lothian).It is significant that the only two beakers of Type A so far recorded in Scotland come from Ballymeanoch and Cairnpapple respectively.