A mysterious monument has appeared in the Sussex countryside. Antonia Gabassi investigates.

In April 2023 the polymath artist, DJ, chef and event organiser ‘Psillibilly’ received an unexpected phone call.

Psillibilly has long rented a 6.2-acre plot of land in Sussex (for reasons that will become apparent, I won’t go into more detail), and was busy conducting a rewilding and landscaping project. For many years he had maintained an ancient hazel copse on the site, and had recently planted a relief glade on adjacent land whose claggy clay soil had been degraded by centuries of intensive agriculture: 1,400 trees arranged in concentric circles.

The caller said he was the brother of a man Psillibilly knew, a digger-driver he was allowing to metal-detect on his site. Said he had 300 truckloads of topsoil to shift. Was he interested?

“I immediately thought: ‘I’ll build a henge’,” says Psillibilly, standing at the entrance to the site one mild March morning, before showing me around the place. “So four seconds later, I said ‘yes’.”

The soil arrived in 19-tonne loads over two and a half months. Over the following three months the digger-driver and Psillibilly built the henge in the manner Neolithic henges were constructed, forming concentric circular banks with a ditch between them. The entrance lies to the north-east, just like at Stonehenge; at its centre he erected a gnomon using the trunk of an oak felled in the Great

Storm of 1987. He didn’t apply for planning permission, knowing the henge would be more likely to gain approval retrospectively. His gamble paid off.

“My older daughter was born in 2022, my younger daughter in 2024,” says Psillibilly. “I consider the henge to be my middle child.”

We walk to the henge, which is a magnificent sight. In the middle, flanking the ten-foot gnomon, are two yellow armchairs. On the ground lies an intriguing pile of artefacts and printouts.

So what do you do with a henge?

Psillibilly has turned it into the centrepiece of his creative output. Once we’ve taken our seats, he shows me examples of work created from drone photographs of the completed earthwork. There are ‘hengoscope’ fractals inscribed onto a wooden totem; henge-inspired fabric prints; and, most intriguingly of all, image after image of ‘fake henges’, created through an ingenious process akin to Chinese whispers using AI models.

Psillibilly knows what he wants his henge to be used for. He envisages friends camping within its mounds to celebrate birthdays; outdoor exhibitions of his and others’ artwork; May fairs with Morris Men and maypoles. He also knows what he does not want it to become.

“I don’t want teenagers to use it as a drinking site, or to ride their motorbikes over it. For that reason, among others, I don’t want its whereabouts to become common knowledge.”

So, like ancient henges, Psillibilly’s modern earth monument has become shrouded in mystery. It is to preserve that mystery that I am using his nom de plume, and why I have been deliberately vague about the henge’s location.

The AI ‘fake henge’ project is another attempt to obfuscate the whereabouts of Psillibilly’s monument. He feeds aerial photographs of the henge into ChatGPT, asking it to describe the landscape in meticulous detail while inventing surrounding landmarks and terrain. Those descriptions are then passed into image-generation models such as Adobe Firefly and Midjourney to render photorealistic scenes.

“It’s like me describing a sunset I’ve seen, and you drawing it,” he says.

He repeats the process over and over, using different photographs as starting points and producing eerily plausible variations. Psillibilly shows me scores of images of henges akin to his own, but intriguingly different too. Some we have reproduced alongside this piece: somewhere among them is the real henge. I leave the site reluctantly – charmed, amazed, and no less mystified than when I arrived.