Back in 1985 I undertook a watching brief to see what turned up at Mount Pleasant when Wessex Water stripped a 10m wide area to put in an 18 inch pipe. The area they stripped ran from the bottom left hand corner to the top right and passed over part of the bank. Oddly enough very little turned up apart from a clearer picture of the bank and ditch.
Mount Pleasant is at SY710898 just outside and to the East of Dorchester - a palisaded enclosure here surrounded the henge that's relatively visible today (you can see how in a diagram in Alex Gibson's paper at http://www.jungsteinsite.de/2000_gibson/hindwell.htm).
As palisaded enclosures go, it might not have been as big as the one at Hindwell - but it used the most ridiculously large timbers. The posts were much closer together than at Hindwell and were 9 metres tall (9 metres!). Not only that, but at the Eastern side, there was an entrance with two post holes 2m! in diameter and 2 metres deep. This suggests they contained HUGE oak posts, rising 6m above the ground, and weighing 17 tonnes each. I'm only quoting the archaeologists, so don't blame me if this sounds mad - we know our ancestors transported and raised the huge trilithons in Stonehenge, so I suppose we mustn't underestimate their ability to use wood in constructions.
Also interestingly, the gap formed as the entrance between these two enormous posts was only 70cm wide - begging the interpretation that the enclosure would have had to have been entered slowly, one at a time. The inner henge would then have acted as another 'restriction' on the entry of the people at the site.
Mount Pleasant henge is one of the large Wessex henges and lies about a mile east of Dorchester. The bank was originally about four metres high surrounding an egg-shaped enclosure about 370 metres along its longer axis and about 320 metres along the shorter one. Originally the 4.8 hectare area could be accessed by four entrances. The bank is outside the ditch which had a diameter of about 43 metres with a single entrance.
This is a large round barrow on the north west edge of Mount Pleasant henge, said to have been added to the henge complex around 1800 bce. It is an impressive size, being not much smaller than the nearby Lanceborough barrow at Maiden castle. Like many local barrows it is now covered in trees , at least this protects it from the plough , sadly Mount Pleasant itself was not spared this fate.
I have included a nearby bowl barrow east of Conquer barrow and Mount Pleasant. This is on a hill overlooking both sites.
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