Shropshire Star

Shrop-henge?: Plan for Bronze age-inspired monument in Shropshire

Shropshire could soon have its answer to Stonehenge as plans to build a monolithic henge monument are underway.

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Jo Halden - artist's impression of the monument

Tim Ashton and his family have nearly finished building Shropshire's first burial mound in thousands of years on their farm at Soulton Hall near Wem.

Now the family are planning to use the land next to the barrow to build a modern henge monument that will hark back to the Bronze Age, and become the first of its kind in Shropshire.

Tim, who wanted it to be created as authentically as possible, has enlisted the help of Professor Todd Huffman, a particle physicist at Oxford University.

The plan is for a simple henge monument with some standing stones and Tim hopes it will be a thoughtful place, "paying homage to the pre-historic inspirations of the barrow but rooted uncompromisingly in the twenty-first century."

"I think it will be beautiful and a way of appreciating nature and the landscape," he said.

"We are inviting people to think about the big questions – most of us are concentrating on the shopping list and it will be a place where those pressures can recede.

Tim Ashton ancient burial feature, Soulton Hall, Wem.

"I cannot pretend to know the purpose of all henge monuments but they tend to always draw attention to something.

"That is part of why they are so magical, no one knows why they are there."

He said the proposed arrangement of the standing stones will call attention to things which are "fundamental and true."

"It is then up to the observer to interpret the significance they attach to that thing, and to be open to thinking how others react to it," he said.

The long barrow on the farm, a replica pre-historic tomb built with company Sacred Stones, calls attention to deeper thinking and Tim said he hopes the standing stones will further this.

"People are already doing thinking thanks to the barrow," he said.

"The barrow we have already built aligns with the rising sun on midsummer's morning and with the setting sun on midwinter's day. It is a natural reason for people to gather together.

Privilege

"The henge will hopefully be a nice thing for local people to walk up to and use.

"It was an enormous privilege to do the project around the barrow and this is now really honouring the values that represents to create something beautiful.

"We want to bring this here and make a positive difference to some people in Shropshire."

Specialist physicists helped to incorporate modern science into the plans, in place of ancient links to the sun and moon as henges would have been made 5,000 years ago.

Professor Todd Huffman, who was on the CERN team that found the Higgs boson, helped Tim involve complex scientific elements in the henge.

The monument will call attention to equinoxes, recently discovered black holes, and the Double Slit Experiement by Thomas Young in 1803 which asked – what is light?

"It is a modern creation of Stonehenge," Tim said. "We wanted to avoid it being flimsy or not involved in the twenty-first century and so made it contemporary.

"Hopefully it feels like a twenty-first century way of developing ancient ideas. They would have linked monolithic monuments up with the sun or the moon, like Stonehenge.

"But it is about how we extend that knowledge. We know things about the universe now they could not have possibly known.

"We know subatomic particles and black holes and other astrophysics. With help from Oxford, we wanted to create something with credibility and seriousness because it is related to a serious monument."