Making: a henge

A henge isn’t a load of standing stones. And it’s pretty safe to assume that we can blame Stonehenge for that common misapprehension.

No, a henge is an enclosure, usually bound by a ditch and bank - there are examples of the ditch being inside or outside the bank, or both. The bank will often show evidence of post holes, which further reduced visibility into the space inside the enclosure.

Raising monumental stones, like those we see at Stonehenge, is something broadly associated with the later Neolithic period, and is part of the so-called “Neolithic package” of ideas that define that era, which comes after the Maskwitches’ Mesolithic. In broad terms, the Neolithic package comprises domestication of plants and animals, sedentary living and the building of permanent dwellings, the advent of pottery, and the raising of monumental stones.

The Neolithic package is increasingly coming under scrutiny as a useful model, and as we learn more about the deep past it’s not as universally accepted as it once was. The various elements of what was once considered “a package” are starting to unravel across time, and are not necessarily things that occur all at once with the shift to agriculture.

Henges are thought to have been community centres or sacred spaces, with the bank providing privileged access to that space, dividing the inside from the outside. In a world without buildings, or enclosures for animals, “inside” and “outside” could have been much more significant states than those we take for granted today. In Maskwitches, that is certainly the case, with the witches being the only ones in control of the magic of “inside”.

The construction of henges predates the raising of giant stones. And within the setting of Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland, it’s something your characters can oversee in their battle against the spirits. Bringing a community together with such a massive undertaking can be enough to heal its hurts and make it more resilient to incursion by spirits. The rituals carried out at a henge might help the witches identify a spirit’s name and give them power over it.

In making the new edition I pondered how to illustrate the witch-activity of building a henge. Being basically an idiot, the obvious answer was: build a model!

All great models clearly begin with making a massive mess by carving polystyrene. I hate carving polystyrene so much. I hope my hand conveys my utter disgust at this evil material.

Added to this, for some reason best known only to my barely-functioning brain, rather than carve a donut out of polystyrene and glue it onto a base, I decided to laminate up a big thick sheet of polystyrene and then carve this block down into to a bank and ditch, and the surrounding area. You know. The stupid way.

Then I discovered, when I came to prime the resulting carving with PVA glue, some idiot had used most of it. Being the only person with access to my work space it must have been me. Oh good.

Nonetheless with some judicious watering down of what I had on hand, I was able to seal the poly and paste on a load of tissue to form the basic surface of my henge.

Next up: paint it brown. Really horrible poo brown. But we just gotta believe! 90% of ‘making stuff’ is surviving the self doubt, right? Here we see my lack of patience in effect, as I can’t wait for the paint to dry without sticking it on the radiator.

The model is about 24”/60cm square. So when you don’t have much glue, the next obvious step is to paint on what you do have and pour loads of basing flock and mini pebbles over in sections, hoping that the glue supply will hold out, knowing that due to apparent neurodiversity if you don’t finish it now, it’ll never be finished. Gotta ride that up wave before it becomes the down wave!

We made it! The basic covering is done. Next up I added loads of basing tufts and flowers to give it some micro details and a sense of scale. I don’t worry toooo much about the Maskwitches models looking big/small when photographed. The slight sense of weirdness that comes from models will all add to the overall Maskwitchey feeling. But adding in stuff like tufts and rocks on a big model is well worth the effort. I didn’t photograph that process.

And here we leap forward to see the almost finished model, with some figures Photoshopped down to scale. I figured that by photographing the models from the same angle in the same lighting, and then shrinking them down, I’d get a decent result and I think it works.

I’ve also expanded the area of flat ground around the henge in Photoshop.

I’m currently recycling the forest I built in the last update into stakes to make a fence all the way along the top of the banks, which I reckon could look great when it’s done.

I couldn’t resist setting up a shot.