A Very Long Journey to Stonehenge.

The Return to the Journey to Stonehenge.

Or

‘There and Back Again. And There Again: An Unexpectedly Vague Journey.’

Rebuilding the main Digital Digging site gave me the opportunity to reflect on the previous content, and think of ways I could bring it up to date.  One of the candidates for this treatment was Bluestonehenge – Oval or Round?  

Stonehenge orange sunset

The piece describes how I stumbled across the possibility  that the circle of bluestones discovered during the Stonehenge Riverside Project may well have been an oval – a shape which potentially puts a different slant on the site because, unlike a circle, an oval has two ends and therefore an orientation.

The fortuitous stumbling took place while Adam Stanford and myself were developing an app which would appeal to anyone visiting Stonehenge and, hopefully, anyone who perhaps didn’t want to visit Stonehenge, but would like to buy an app anyway.

I was interested in revisiting the article for two reasons.  The first is that a large amount of information has surfaced since I first posted it, and the second is because it left something of a loose end. People had questions. They were often unanswerable ones about orientations, but the one that kept surfacing was this:

Where’s the app?

Well. . .

For ‘Journey to Stonehenge‘ we had pictured a traditional storytelling approach rather than a multimedia extravaganza – the main reason for this decision was that we wanted people who were at the site to be able to concentrate on what they were looking at while they had the opportunity.

To this end Adam arranged for the app to be scripted and narrated by Julian Richards – an expert on the archaeology of Stonehenge, and a familiar face from TV. The other reason we wanted to avoid a multimedia extravaganza was that – and I can’t stress how crucial this was to the final decision – neither of us turned out to be very good at that sort of thing.

Someone else was very good at that sort of thing, however, and beat us to it with The Stonehenge Experience – which, it must be said, is a rather splendid effort. So ‘Journey to Stonehenge‘ got shelved, and Adam and myself went onto different projects, leaving the world of apps behind.

But it seemed a shame to leave the files gathering dust, and the other night I went through the images while listening to Julian’s narrative and thought it might be time to bring them out into the light. To this end I’m working on turning the material into a short movie, probably accompanied by a web-page or two of supporting material and, of course, some Aerial-Cam images.

I’ll keep you up to date on how this goes – both here and on the usual social channels (see the sidebar).