Archaeologist Mike Pitts is practicing standing on one small spot for an hour because he is about to take his turn on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth.

However, the acknowledged expert on Stonehenge his keeping quiet about what he is going to do when he gets up on the plinth at 1am next Wednesday to play his 60 minute role in an avante garde art scheme.

Mr Pitts, 55, of Silverless Street, Marlborough, with his wife Nicky and their young daughter, was among the tens of thousands of people who applied to take part in artist Anthony Gormley’s One and Other project to occupy the empty fourth plinth.

He was lucky enough for his name to be drawn at random to become one of the 2,400 people who will individually take a turn on the table sized stone platform every hour, 24 hours a day for 100 days.

Mr Pitts did not want to reveal what he’s going to do when he takes his stand for fear of lessening the impact of the work.

But he said: “I have a very clear, strong idea of what I plan to do on the plinth, and I’m very excited about it.

“But I don’t want to reveal what that is until I get up there.”

Mr Pitts, who was featured in a Time Team special filmed at Stonehenge earlier this year and edits the British Archaeology magazine, said people would have to watch the plinth website – www.oneandother.co.uk – to see what he would be doing or talking about.

Meanwhile he is still planning to lead a community project at Avebury that he proposed some years ago but which is still in at the drawing board stage to get villagers to re-erect one of the megaliths in the main stone circle that fell over in the 18th century.

Mr Pitts said he was also hoping to lead a search for the quarries or pits from which the Avebury sarsen stones were originally excavated more than 4,000 years ago. The stones were left by the retreating glaciers but would have had to be excavated, he said.

“Nobody has ever looked for them but we are hoping to find them,” he said.

However, for the moment his sights are firmly set on the Trafalgar Square monument created in the 19th century. Four plinths were built but after statues were placed on three of them funds ran out and the fourth plinth has remained empty. Each year the empty plinth is used for a contemporary art work.