William Gowland - in England

In England

On New Year's Eve 1900, Stone 22 of the Sarsen Circle fell over, taking with it a lintel. Following public pressure and a letter to The Times by William Flinders Petrie, the owner, Edmund Antrobus, agreed to allow remedial engineering under archaeological supervision.

To manage the job, Antrobus appointed Gowland, who, despite having no formal archaeological training, produced some of the finest, most detailed excavation records ever made at the monument. The only area that he opened was around the precariously leaning Stone 56 (the western stone of the Great Trilithon), an area measuring approximately 17 ft by 13 ft. The task proved more difficult since only small areas could be dug at a time for the pouring and the setting of concrete.

Despite these difficulties, he established that antler picks had been used to dig the stone holes and that the stones had been shaped on site. His work both identified the 'Stonehenge layer', a thin strata of bluestone chips that sealed many of the non-megalithic features at the site, and proved that these chips predated the standing stones.

Gowland died in London on 9 June 1922 at the age of 80 and was buried at Marylebone Cemetery.