Those trench and borehole records for Stonehenge Bottom etc

Stonehenge Bottom and Stonehenge -- from Evironment Agency and 

EH imagery, with thanks

Thanks to Steve for highlighting these rather obscure records of "glacial" features and deposits turned up during the long research programme related to the A303 road and tunnel proposals.  The word "glacial" pops up a few times, but we don't know whether it was used after due consideration by a glacial geomorphologist (in which case we need to take it all rather seriously) or whether there was just a slapdash use of terminolgy.  "Glacial" might have been used accidentally instead of the word "periglacial" just as the term "Ice Age" might have been used just to signify great age.  We shall see.

But the reference to "glacial till" seems to be more considered.........

Check out this very interesting post: 

https://www.buystonehenge.com/the-glacial-a303/

From Steve Hooker's blog site: 

Sample 51138, forty litres of the Trench 511 sequence, sits in the Wessex Archaeology archive. Nobody has examined it with the drift question in mind. Clast lithology, fabric, micromorphology and mineral provenance could tell till from solifluction from riverwash. Dating it is a separate fight.

The four Phase 7B OSL cores: where are the results? If ages exist, publish them. If the cores were never run, they may yet be datable. An age alone would not identify a till, but a Middle Pleistocene number under that coombe would change the conversation.

The hummocky belt at Stonehenge Bottom has never been archaeologically sectioned. One trench through the toe would separate phosphate diggings from solifluction from anything older. I’ll guess permission from English Heritage is a hard ask.

Nobody has clast-counted the coombe and colluvial deposits for exotics. The quartzite at STP72602 says the method can detect them.

Are you the hero?

Anyone could do most of this: no research council, no grant. An afternoon in an archive. A phone call to Wessex Archaeology asking after sample 51138. An email to the Gloucestershire lab asking where four sealed cores went. The trench is the exception. That needs consents stacked three deep, this being the middle of a World Heritage Site, so bring patience and a professional dig team. The documents have been public for years, the samples are on shelves, and the question has never been asked of the material that could answer it. So I hope some fascinated party asks. Maybe that is you, dear interested reader, who made it this far.

The Wessex Archaeology sample 51138 clearly needs to be looked at by somebody who knows what a till looks like when fresh, and what it might look like when thoroughly degraded.