Sacred Monuments, Magickal Heritage & Crop Formations

Some of the monuments are those that seem to be the earliest to appear in the neolithic landscape and include causewayed enclosures, and long barrows. Some have a long life, particularly the long barrows and may not have finally fallen out of use until the latter part of the Neolithic period.

The causewayed enclosures (earlier known as causewayed camps) have greatly increased in numbers in recent years due, in the main, to aerial photography. The enclosures, which are usually impossible to spot from the ground, show up as crop-marks from the air in standing crops as the greater depth of soil in their ditches allows the crop planted above the ditches to grow taller and ripen later than the rest of the crop so the lines of the ditches appear as dark marks in the field. The number of causewayed enclosures known has jumped from 16 in 1970, mainly in southern England, to round about 50 today, one at Donegore Hill in Co. Antrim in Northern Ireland. However, northern and western Britain still appear blank on a distribution map of causewayed enclosures.

They are so-called because the enclosure is formed by a number of short stretches of ditches and banks that make a roughly circular shape. In some cases there are more than one 'circle' as at Windmill Hill (three) and Robin Hood's Ball (two) in Wiltshire and Maiden Castle (two) in Dorset and at least one, at Knap Hill, in Wiltshire, appears to be incomplete. They range in area from some four acres at Whitesheet Hill in Wiltshire to twenty acres at Windmill Hill.

A good deal of effort has been devoted to the elucidation of causewayed enclosures but so far no satisfactory general explanation has been forthcoming and we can only point to possible explanations for specific monuments derived from excavation evidence.

To give some examples. The earliest excavated was Windmill Hill, part of which was examined early in this century. Very little was found in the interior of the enclosure but the ditches turned out to be a series of conjoined pits containing a variety of materials. These included deposits of topsoil, pottery, animal bones, charcoal and stone axeheads from various places in western Britain. Excavations in recent years around the monument found more pits containing animal skulls and flint implements.

These are clearly ritual deposits and have been discovered in other causewayed enclosures like Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire and Hambledon Hill where successive deposits were found in the ditches and at Etton (Cambridgeshire), which was almost completely excavated, and where there were deposits in the ditches and in the interior of the enclosure.

The deposits, like those discovered around Stonehenge were perhaps made as offerings to some power that was thought to control natural phenomena like the weather, fertility of animals, crops and humans, running water, the sun, etc, etc, perhaps attempts to ensure good fortune in these areas. Ceremonial places where deposits of this sort are made are called fana so this is one explanation for causewayed enclosures.

Others that have been put forward over the years are cattle-markets and central places, a term that means a place where meetings of a scattered community could take place.

One particular function was identified by the excavator at Hambledon Hill. Roger Mercer found the soil in the interior of the enclsure full of small pieces of human bone and in one of the ditches the lower half of a skeleton of a small boy where it had been dragged by some wild animal. Mercer identified the monument as a place of excarnation where bodies were exposed to the elements after death until the flesh had rotted away.

Dating of these enclosures rests mainly on determinations from the southern monuments. A rough estimate for the construction of Windmill Hill and Knap Hill would be c3450BC, for the first construction at Maiden Castle about 3800BC, and for Hambledon Hill c3400BC. So round about the middle of the fourth millenium BC would be a good starting point for them and. as far as we can say, they seem to be falling out of use about a thousand years later.

Associated with them and perhaps constructed by small groups of people (septs or small clans) who cleared and farmed in adjacent small areas are mortuary enclosures and long barrows. Professor Colin Renfrew, who has studied megalithic stalled cairns (barrows) on the island of Rousay, identifies each one with an adjoining territory belonging to a particular sept. The cairns not only served as places where the excarnated remains (skulls and long bones) could be deposited after exposure but also as a marker of the sept territory on which dwelt the people whose ancestral remains were stored within it.

Evidence for groups farming individually in a small area comes from Lough Gur, south of Limerick, in Ireland, although so far megalithic tombs have not been identified with them. In the area in and around the lake, investigation has identified Geroid Island where there is evidence for seasonal grazing of pigs, Knockadoon where scattered houses and fields have produced evidence for mixed farming, Rockbarton which has hearths in an area of fenland where wild foods could be collected in summer and Rathjordan, also on the edge of marshland, where a hunting site has been found that was probably used in autumn.

It may be then that the long barrows in other areas performed the same function as on Rousay, that, in the Windmill Hill area, for example, the long barrows belonged to the several clans who came together to build the causewayed enclosure. Building a long barrow may have have been within the capacity of the twenty or thirty people who made up a sept but who could not have constructed a causewayed enclosure by themselves.

There are two types of long barrow: the earthen long barrow and the megalithic long barrow. The 'long' refers to their shape, the 'earthen' to the material forming the mound and 'megalithic' to the stones used for the chambers. It has never been a particularly useful distinction for it it really only works in Wessex and not in other parts of the country.

Nowadays, it is better simply to distinguish between non-megalithic (without stone chambers) and megalithic but this is probably only true as a) a constructional distinction and b) a ritual distinction which is probably real but which we have only the haziest conception of. A typical neolithic position!

But the function of all barrows was surely the same: they were almost certainly used as a repository for human remains left behind after excarnation. As, during the process, animals and birds carry off the smaller skeletal bits, it is usually only the long bones and the skulls that survive in a mortuary enclosure after excarnation when they could be stored and perhaps used in ceremonies.

In India and other places, people still excarnate their dead today. In the Naples area of Italy bodies are disinterred after they have become dessicated and are then stored in communal charnel houses where they are visited annually and ceremoniously rewrapped in fresh cloths for the coming twelve months.

In other places today the dead are paraded annually through the village and shown the changes that have taken place over the last twelve months. So the idea that the ancestors should be respected and shown consideration as though they still remained part of the community is not a far-fetched archaeological idea.

Archaeologists love to classify things and barrows are frustrating to archaeologists because they are so many and varied that they defy classification except in very broad (and probably rather meaningless) categories. The mounds might be long, trapezoidal, ovate, rectangular or oval while the chambers underneath can be made of wood or megaliths ( large stones) and in a variety of plans. Entrances can be at the sides or at the ends or in the case of the earthen long barrows entirely obliterated by the heaping up of the mound.

Names given to categories can be geographical: Severn Cotswold, Clyde cairns, Maes Howe tombs, Clava cairns and Camster cairns. Other names describe some specific feature of the category: Entrance graves, Wedge graves, Passage graves, Court cairns and Portal dolmens.

Mortuary Enclosures show up best from the air as rectangular enclosures but it seems that they were sometimes developed into earthen barrows and as such have been found underneath some excavated mounds. Wor Barrow in Dorset, Willerby Wold in Yorkshire, Fussell's Lodge in Wiltshire and Nutbane in Hampshire are examples of mortuary enclosures later incorporated into non-megalithic long barrows.

The ditches of a Neolithic mortuary enclosure have been excavated at Yarnton near Oxford with evidence of three inhumation and eight cremation burials inside. At Stoney Middleton in the Peak District National Park in Derbyshire the remains of what is thought to have been a Neolithic excarnation platform have been discovered. It is where bodies would have been exposed to be picked clean by predators before burial (see also Hambledon Hill). The platform, found underneath a Bronze Age barrow (note the continuity), was surrounded by a semi- circular wall with three standing stones at the entrance. Hundreds of human teeth and bones have been found at the site together with the tiny bones of small animals such as frogs and rodents which are thought to have been desposited in the droppings of owls and other birds of prey attracted to the decaying flesh. The excavators believe the platform was built c3000BC and used for a thousand years.

At Wor Barrow, the palisaded enclosure was later filled in and covered with a mixture of chalk and soil dug out of flanking ditches and so became an earthen long barrow (non-megalithic barrow). The bones that had previously been excarnated/stored in the enclosure were placed together at the eastern end prior to the closure. Willerby Wold, had, prior to the heaping up of the mound, a timber facade to the enclosure similar to Kilham in the same county and a crematorium area. Fussell's Lodge, in the early period, had an enclosure and porch similar to Wor Barrow while Nutbane in its first phase as a mortuary site featured an enclosure with a timber building/elaborate porch in front of it. Radiocarbon dates for mortuary enclosures include:

Willerby Wold, Yorkshire c3710calBC (cal = calibrated)

Kilham, Yorkshire c3670calBC

Nutbane, Hampshire c3450calBC Dalladies, Fettercairn, Kincardineshire c4100calBC

Normanton, Wiltshire c3390calBC

Earthen long barrow (non-megalithic barrow) at

South Street, Wiltshire c3400calBC

At Wayland's Smithy in Berkshire, an earlier earthen long barrow had a megalithic barrow built on top of it, demonstrating both a continuation of burial practice on the same spot and the essential equivalence of the megalithic and non-megalithic monuments and it allows us to see them as different strands of the same tradition of ancestor veneration.

There is no need necessarily to regard this veneration as a religious practice as we would the practice of deposits associated with the causewayed enclosures mentioned above but rather as a means of proclaiming the continuity of the communal identity. A date for the interface between the two barrows at Wayland's Smithy is c3600calBC.

Two earthen long barrows are unusual in that there is no sign of any bones or wooden mortuary structures underneath the mounds. Only an arrangement of hundreds of upright stakes which divide the areas under the barrows into segments along both sides of a central spine like the skeleton of a fish. These barrows at Beckhampton Road and South Street, close together in Wiltshire, are usually referred to as cenotaphs for want of a better description.

The megalithic tradition has benefitted by large-scale excavations devoted as much to the mounds as to the stone structures under them. Three Severn-Cotswold types have been totally excavated in recent years at Ascott-under-Wychwood, Oxon, Gwernvale in Brecknockshire and Hazleton North in Gloucestershire. At Ascott and Hazleton, stone-walled segments under the mounds recall the stake segments in the Wiltshire earthen examples at Beckhampton Road and South Street and at Gwernvale a wooden phase preceded the stone phase as at Wayland's Smithy.

Excavations of megalithic long barrows have demonstrated their function as a repository for human bones, usually long bones and skulls, lying in stone chambers which are usually arranged at the end of a passage leading into a mound or along either side of the passage, or in compartments of a gallery, one end of which may serve as the entrance to the structure. Otherwise, the gallery is sometimes reached by means of a tunnel at right-angles to it running from the side of the long mound.

The Severn-Cotswold type of long barrow comprises two sub-types. One is the transepted gallery grave with a gallery, one end of which forms the entrance, from which open on both sides a number of compartments, known as transepts. The best-known excavated example is West Kennet not far from Avebury in Wiltshire. The other sub-group consists of individual chambers placed on both sides of the long mound with separate entrances. Occasionally in this sub-group there is a dummy entrance at the broad, eastern end of the mound where the entrance of the transepted gallery grave is found. An example of a 'dummy portal' is at Belas Knap in Gloucestershire. Finds in these monuments are usually long bones and skulls, the products of excarnation.

The West Kennet barrow, which is often taken as a typical example of the 'transepted gallery grave', has megalithic chambers under the eastern end of the ninety-metre-long mound. The gallery is entered from a small courtyard later blocked off by a facade of upright large stones, one of which is said to weigh fifty tons, that leads to a gallery from which small chambers open off on both sides. There are two chambers on each side of the gallery which are referred to as the 'transepts' with a chamber at the end of the gallery. Unusually, the structure is high enough for one to walk upright inside. Often, as, for example, at Stoney Littleton south of Bath, one has to crouch inside.

At Stoney Littleton there are three 'transepts' on each side of the gallery and the mound has a kerb of drystone walling around it. Here the chanbers and the gallery take up a large proportion of the length of the mound. Evidence from the excavation at West Kennet shows that the chambers were in use for the deposition of the remains of the excarnated dead for a thousand years.

Investigation of the alignment of long barrows in the Windmill Hill/Avebury region shows that they have the broad ends of the mounds, where the megalithic chambers are or where the remains of the bodies were placed in an earthen long barrow, facing in a general easterly direction. This has prompted the suggestion that the megalithic 'suite' or the mortuary enclosure underneath the earthen barrow was aligned to face the point on the horizon where the sun would rise on a particular day of the year.

An example of the passage grave type of megalithic tomb is Newgrange in the Boyne valley in Ireland, set under a vast round mound mainly of water-rolled pebbles which has recently been restored to a likeness of its original form. Around this 200,000 tons of material, is a kerb of oblong boulders decorated with a variety of incised designs.

The cruciform chamber at the end of the passage is roofed with a hexagonal vault built of corbelled blocks each weighing up to a ton. This chamber is also ornamented with incised designs.

Above the entrance is a fanlight leading to a tunnel above the passage. This allows the rising sun on midwinter's day to shine along the tunnel and play on the centre of the chamber floor. The same phenomenon occurs with two of the tombs in the Loughcrew cemetery in Co. Meath.

Not far off, at Knowth, two passage graves, one a Breton type, and the other similar to that at Newgrange, lie under a mound even bigger than Newgrange's. Like Newgrange it has carving on stones of the grave and on the kerbstones surrounding the mound but the quality of the art is higher with simple, bold designs that can be appreciated at a distance. Around the mound are grouped seventeen smaller tombs each covered with a round mound.

At the eastern end of the group is the Dowth tumulus, the largest of the three, covering two megalithic structures, both decorated, although not to the same standard as Knowth and the mound has the same kerbstones, albeit decorated in a second-rate style. All the passage graves contained large round-bottomed bowla carved out of single blocks of stones used for some ritual purpose.

A group of barrows of this sort is described as a cemetery and this is the finest barrow cemetery in the British Isles. Other passage grave cemeteries exist in Ireland, as well as individual barrows, all in the north and east of the island, the earliest being built around 3000BC.

The two commonest megalithic tombs in Ireland are the courtyard cairn, which is the earlier, and the portal dolmen. Probably the earliest courtyard cairns date from the fifth millenium BC. Under a trapezoid or elongated mound is a gallery consisting of two or more chambers separated by a jamb which leads into a forecourt lying at one end of the mound. The end of the mound continues round the forecourt on both sides, sometimes almost totally enclosing the forecourt, like the claws of a lobster. Cremation is the commonest burial rite in Ireland but some inhumations are found.

One of the best examples of a court cairn is Creevykeel in Co. Sligo with a cairns some 55m metres long. The evidence for deposition was five small pockets of cremated bone in the chambers. Three subsidary chambers were inserted into the tail of the cairn and in one of them a great deal of pottery was discovered.

The portal dolmen is found in Cornwall and Wales but the greatest concentration of them is in Ireland. The rectangular chamber usually becomes narrower and lower towards the rear and is entered between two tall slabs each side of the doorway which form a miniature forecourt. The entrance is often blocked by a slab which may reach right up to the capstone (roofing-slab) that can be massive. At the Brownshill Portal Dolmen near Carlow in Leinster it weighs over a hundred tons. The grave goods are similar to those from the court cairns except that the pottery is decorated. On top of the chamber was placed a long cairn. These similarities have led Irish archaeologists to put forward the idea that the Portal Dolmen was derived from the Court Cairn.

However the chambers of many Portal Dolmens stand unencumbered by a cairn, suggesting that they never reached the stage of acquiring a mound.

At the end of the Neolithic period the Wedge Grave appears in Ireland. The chamber is in the form of an antechamber and gallery which narrows slightly at the inner end and is often entered by a doorway framed by tall slabs. Some examples have an outer walling parallel to the sides of the gallery. The cairn may be roundish, oval or D-shaped and often has a retaining wall. Inside both inhumations and cremations have been found together with pottery, commonly of the Beaker type. At Moytirra, Co. Sligo, the inhumed remains of four adults and a child were found. At Lough Gur, the chamber contained the remains of at least twelve inhumations and a cremation. Barbed-and- tanged arrowheads and thumb scrapers occur amongst the flint artifacts.

In south-west Scotland, cairns tend to be rectangular or wedge-shaped with the wider end built concave to form horns like the court cairns of Ireland. The gallery leads off this forecourt and is split into compartments by kerbs. Half of the burials found in the chambers have been cremations and half inhumations and were accompanied by round-bottomed early neolithic bowls and flints. Dating for the earliest monument is probably before 4000BC and the assemblage is known as Clyde Cairns.

Bargrennan in south-west Scotland is one of a small group of passage graves in the area and has given its name to the group. Elsewhere in Scotland the megalithic cairns are mainly variations on the themes of the passage grave and the gallery grave.

In Orkney are the passage graves referred to as the Maes Howe type named after the most famous example which has a high passage leading to a rectangular corbelled chamber with three rectangular cells opening from it about a metre above the floor of the main chamber. The chamber lies under a mound of about 35 metres in diameter that is surrounded by a ditch. Radiocarbon determinations from Maes Howe and from the Quanterness passage grave indicate a date for the group in the later fourth and early third millenia BC.

In north-eastern Scotland the Clava Cairns are another type of passage grave. Two sub- groups make up the assemblage. One is an annular cairn with a hole in the middle like an American doughnut. Like the doughnut, there is no break in the encircling material. In the unroofed interior, cremation burials were made. The other sub-group is a characteristic passage grave with a corbelled chamber at the end of a short passage set under a round mound. Monuments of both sub-groups are surrounded by circles of monoliths (individual standing stones).

Further north in eastern Scotland is the group known as the Camster Cairns. The chambers are galleries divided up by projecting jambs into interconnecting compartments entered at one end and covered by circular mounds. In some examples, however, the gallery can be much longer, accommodating up to twelve compartments and the mound is correspondingly elongated. In these examples the chambers are entered through a short passage at the side like the Stalled Cairns on Rousay mentioned above.

A final type of megalithic tomb remains to be described. This contains a short megalithic passage with no differention between the passage and the chamber covered with a round mound which is usually revetted with a kerb of stones. In south-west Cornwall, the Scilly Isles and south-eastern Ireland there is a small group of these monuments which seem to belong to the Bronze Age. They are known as Entrance Graves.

Although we have evidence of human remains being placed in megalithic tombs in a fragmentary condition, presumably after excarnation, as in the chambers on Rousay Island, we also find examples of complete bodies being placed in them accompanied by grave goods. Instances of such have been found in the double courtyard cairn at Audleystown in Co. Down. It is this variety of practice that makes it so difficult to provide a coherent picture of neolithic burial activity. The best we can do is to say that a great deal of it revolved around the mortuary enclosure or the megalithic chamber and it involved the veneration of the ancestors.

The megalithic chambers were constructed with large stones which were not artificially shaped. They were, in fact, selected so that they fitted into their appointed position in the structure. Weighing many tons, the largest were probably not transported over a great distance but they had to be manhandled on the journey and then lifted into position and this would have required considerable engineering expertise and a large number of people. This last criterion is certainly true of the passage grave mounds and of the positioning of the largest capstones.

It is unlikely that this specialised knowledge was possessed by everybody at the time and this raises the possibility of the existence of specialist megalithic builders. If such people existed they would have had to travel from one site to another to supervise constructions and this would have involved the existence of a system of communication between one community and another. Communities may not have been as isolated as is sometimes supposed.

In recent years a small number of defended or fortified sites have been discovered which belong to the Neolithic period. Two of the best known are Carn Brae in Cornwall, Helman Tor in Devon and Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire. At Carn Brae a neolithic hut was found built up against a stone rampart and was associated with pottery, flints, pits and hearths. At Crickley Hill around 3500BC about four acres of the highest area of the hill were enclosed with a stone bank. Evidence of the use of antler picks was found in the shallow pits from which the stone was quarried immediately in front of the rampart. Around the inner edge of the half-metre high rampart a timber stockade was built. There appear to have been five entrances. Inside, neolithic flints and pottery were uncovered which suggested a settlement site.

Later, a second bank was dug from deeper ditches and another palisade built about thirty metres inside the first fence surrounding the same settlement. Four entrances in this new rampart matched four in the outer bank. They were framed in timber and apparently had wooden gates. Through the south-eastern entrance led a straight, fenced roadway with a rectangular wooden house standing beside it. These defences were demolished and rebuilt several times and also suffered from fire. It has been suggested that finds of arrowheads are evidence of attack.

Round about 2,500BC the last neolithic defences were built. There were three entrances with the usual low, stone rampart and a rear palisade. One of the entrances opened onto a fenced road along which were at least two wooden, rectangular houses. A path continuing the line of the road led to a fenced enclosure that has been interpreted as a shrine. This last neolithic settlement was apparently razed to the ground and burnt after an attack by bowmen four hundred of whose arrowheads have been found embedded in the palisade and around the entrances. The disaster occurred in the years shortly before 2000BC.

Neolithic leaf-shaped arrowheads occur in some numbers at other neolithic enclosure sites: at Carn Brea and Hambledon Hill in Dorset. These occurrences have been taken by archaeologists to demonstrate that serious clashes took place between rival groups at the time but we do not not know whether this was tribal warfare or the result of disputes between neighbouring communities over grazing land or something similar. It is interesting to record that a dozen or more instances of death by leaf arrowheads have been recorded from various excavations where skeletons have been unearthed in sites of this period.

Apparently, enclosures at the time could be used for a variety of purposes, none of which we fully understand. There are ditched areas with no special characteristics as at Bury Hill in West Sussex which was identified from the air as a crop mark, large rectangular areas as at Dorchester in Dorset and very large palisaded enclosures found and partially excavated at West Kennet near Avebury and Plasketlands in the Lake District. Like a great many neolithic monuments, these large enclosures remain an enigma. At West Kennet, the location in the special area where so many neolithic barrows and other ritual features have been found, may mean that it too had a religious function.

Archaeologists tend to suggest that anything they do not understand is ritual, whether it is a monument or an object, but this should not be an excuse for not trying to understand what might be meant by the term in the particular context. Ritual can mean any habitual activity not undertaken for a practical purpose and may not be religious in the sense that we use the word nowadays. Veneration of the ancestors involves ritual, patriotism as practised nowadays involves ritual like saluting the flag or singing the National Anthem. There are even rituals connected with football and cricket and other sports. The 'Ashes' for instance or the Olympic flame are examples. So we should not immediately associate ritual with religion in prehistoric contexts.

Prehistoric religion was an immensely complicated business and whenever we try to understand it, we inevitably simplify it and lose most of its sublety and possibly all of the significance that it had for early people.

It was an integral part of man's way of life. The very basis of existence, hunting and/or farming, depended for its success on man's relationship with the gods (i.e. the natural forces or whatever it was that controlled these natural forces). It required enormous effort on man's part to forge and cement a successful relationship with these natural forces. Evidence of this can be seen in the construction of monuments like Silbury Hill and Avebury which needed immense labour and time to build. This effort seems totally out of proportion to the economic prosperity of the times. Whether we shall ever be able to understand the functions of these ritual monuments is a moot point.

First of all we must make an effort to visualise a religion which prompted the construction of many of these monuments. One can suggest that it contained two elements:

1. A contract with the gods.

2. Methods of interpreting the messages of the gods.

The first element would have involved sacrifices or deposits in fana or other sacred spots accompanied by rituals. These would be in exchange for benefits that the gods could bestow like success in hunting or prosperous harvests.

The second could be achieved in several ways like the examination of the entrails of sacrifices or the observation of omens (unusual natural events like rainbows, etc.)

We can suggest that the monuments like causewayed enclosures and henges were sites for both these activities. Their locations would have been chosen by the religious leaders and their designs tailored to the rituals that took place within them.

The religious leaders were the intermediaries between men and gods because they had the wisdom that enabled them to decide what rituals would best propitiate the gods and the knowledge to interpret the gods' demands. Rituals were traditional and probably only gradually changed with time and brought about modifications/changes in the designs of the monuments.

We can see that very few of these ritual monuments were constructed at one time and left unchanged. Most were modified, like Stonehenge which was rebuilt or added to on several occasions, and presumably these phases reflect changing rituals and/or beliefs that occurred over the centuries. A surprising number were never finished (Stonehenge and Silbury Hill, for example) and this may reflect very slow building programmes that were not completed during the lifetimes of those who initiated the works or because of political reasons.

Dr. Ron Wilcox, Professor of Archeology

Stones of Avebury

Here, among the stones of Avebury,
Where the old ones built solid dreams,
And we can walk in wonder,
And guess at what these signs may mean.

Here in the paths of the ancients,
We follow where generations led.
Enacting long forgotten rituals,
For gods whose very names are dead.
Silently they talk
Of what they've seen across the years.

Among them we still walk
We flicker 'cross the centuries.Not one millennium, but five,
Have passed since this temple was new,
Built not by aliens or giants,
Built by people just like me and you.

David Craig

Visit Stitch's Galactic Playground!

Who Are

StarKids