If Stonehenge was built in a woodland clearing, this photomontage gives an impression of how it might have looked, more like Japan’s sacred rocks (iwakura) in a sacred place ( niwa) in a forest than like the ‘English Acropolis’ Stonehenge was once conceived to have been.
Stonehenge was made at the height of the Neolithic forest clearance which converted England from a forest land to a partly-agricultural land. Clearings symbolized the presence and the work of man. There are no records of Neolithic vegetation cover on Salisbury Plain but it ‘must’ (as bad historians say) have been part-open and part-woodland. The photomontage shows that the Stones in the Henge would have looked beautiful in a woodland clearing, as would the Cursus and the Avenues. The Stonehenge Riverside Landscape Project, led by Mike Parker Pearson, has emphasised the fact that the henge was not an isolated ‘monument’ in the sense that war memorials are isolated monuments. Stonehenge was a complex feature in one of the earliest man-made landscapes in North Europe. It was, one might say, a context-sensitive design!