If These Stones Could Speak......
Stone Circles, Barrows, Tumps and Standing Stones
The landscapes of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and mainland Europe are dotted with stone circles, barrows, dolmens, menhirs and other scattered remnants of prehistoric settlements, and a walk through the countryside at sunset is indeed an interesting exercise. At dusk the lengthening shadows illuminate ancient features on the hillsides and throw them into relief, magically revealing the outlines and bones of ancient structures and settlements which crumbled and disappeared many centuries ago.
What do we actually know about the Neolithic peasants who created such wonders? We may assume that the times in which they lived were harsh, demanding and dangerous, and that the landscape in which they lived bore scant resemblance to the land today. They must have been an adaptable people, changing their way of life as circumstances required, working out painstaking solutions to their problems, assuaging their fears of the mysterious unknown, darkness, winter, disease, and death, by finding new ways of surviving, and by constructing mythologies, ceremonies and rituals to forestall the terrors which lingered in their minds. Their imaginations, suspended somewhere between savagery and science, surely held images of a primordial existence through which a mysterious and terrifying ancestor moved.The writer G.K. Chesterton spoke of a being who:
"... has no name, and all true tales of him are blotted out; yet he walks behind us on every forest path and wakens within us when the wind rises at night. He is our origins - he is the man in the forest."The evidence suggests that Neolithic man devised elaborate rituals to hold at bay the "man in the forest" and the savage forces of nature, and that he conducted his rituals in religious structures designed specially for that purpose. Five thousand years ago, Neolithic communities met in safety in ritual structures to take part in ceremonies which (they believed) gave them some measure of protection from the dangers of their daily lives. Given the amazing size of the early ritual enclosures and the staggering amount of labor which would have been required to build them, it is likely that the structures also fulfilled the roles of community forums, academies and centers of learning. There is much to be learned from the debris being sifted through at prehistoric sites, and from the antlers, flints, shards of broken pottery, stone axes and human remains discovered. There is also much to be learned from geology and an understanding of the landscape itself.We must have some idea of how the Neolithic peoples lived if we are understand their beliefs, their ceremonial structures, and at the end of it all, our own origins. These ancestors were industrious creatures who tilled the soil, tended flocks, hunted, fished, foraged, transported Sarsen stones for building and explored the land around them. Both the prehistoric climate and landscape were changing, and as they did, Neolithic communities and lifestyles were compelled to change too. Molded at first only by the land in which he lived and the cycle of the seasons, Neolithic man began to evolve as he became exposed to outside groups. Contact and commerce with outside communities began to influence lifestyles, beliefs and patterns of worship. Myths and stories were formulated, retold and handed down; new customs were assimilated, and new social conventions were devised as man's view of the cosmos and his own role in it began to evolve. Out of the interaction of communities, landscape, weather and time, the seeds of the future were sown.
It is several decades since archeologists began to think that the people who erected Stonehenge, Avebury and so many other ceremonial structures must have been more evolved and organized than originally believed. Neolithic people used a form of measurement, a precisely defined measure, for their architectural work, and this measure has become known as the megalithic yard, or 0.829 meters in modern measurements. Evidence of use of the megalithic yard can be found at prehistoric sites all over the British Isles. It has also been speculated that "the people" possessed some knowledge of geometry which they used to create non circular forms within their ceremonial structures. Some archeologists (Alexander Thom among them) believe that in the late Neolithic period, man developed some knowledge of astronomy and was able to predict eclipses and lunar movements, that in fact, Neolithic man laid out his ceremonial structures with some degree of accuracy, aligning them in such a way that at the summer and midwinter solstices, the rising sun fell directly on the central feature of the structure.
For centuries it was believed that the stone circles and barrows were constructed entirely by the Beaker people, the restless roving people who entered western Europe and the British Isles about 2500 BCE. This group were warriors, potters, smiths, gypsies and intrepid explorers, and the wonderful pottery or burnished metal beakers for which they named were actually used to brew an early form of mead or beer made from honey, local herbs and spices - wherever the Beaker people went, they passed along their knowledge of potting and brewing to the local peoples. We now know, however, that the earliest stone circles and other ritual structures were built long before the Beaker people arrived, possibly as much as a thousand years earlier. Although the Beaker people played an important role in later phases of construction at sites such Avebury and Stonehenge, the sites were already in existence when the first Beaker people arrived from the continent.
Recent findings are compelling us to reexamine our theories about Neolithic societies. It appears that such societies were much more organized and sophisticated than once believed. From the writings of archeologists, one receives two different pictures, a traditional view of primitive peasant communities ruled by entirely by superstition and fear, who attempted to protect themselves from the perils of their world through ritualized atrocities and sacrifices; and a second picture in which the early societies were socially evolved and organized groups with definite hierarchies, systems of measurement, knowledge of the sciences, educated priesthoods and structured educational systems. One cannot have it both ways.
"The people" left their stories behind in the remarkable structures they built, but the evidence available to us is old, friable and badly fragmented. The wondrous or perhaps distressing truth about the stone circles and other structures is that we know very little about them or about the societies which constructed them so long ago. Most of the sites were constructed during the later Neolithic period, and may well have served a number of different functions within in their communities. The structures were in use for a very long period - evidence suggests that stone circles were in use until the early Bronze Age, when they ceased to be important and were abandoned for reasons unknown.
It is indeed reasonable to assume that the societies which constructed the circles and other structures were somewhat organized groups with social hierarchies, given the degree of planning, the collective effort and the time which would have been required to carry out projects of such magnitude with the limited technology of the times. Human remains have been found in many of the sites, and this led to the sites being labeled simply as burial sites, mortuaries or charnel houses. There is one school of thought which believes that the ancients worshipped death and constructed their stone circles and barrows solely for their peculiar form of worship. This raises some interesting questions. One wonders if archaeologists or anthropologists sifting through the detritus of the twentieth century somewhere in the distant future will assume that the great cathedrals of Europe with their burial vaults and sarcophagi were the temples of death cults, or just burial sites.
Stone circles in Europe share many characteristics, but things become truly murky if one considers the most amazing stone circle of the lot, Stonehenge, for it is utterly unique. Stonehenge was built in many phases over more than a thousand years and shows evidence of being worked on by different societies at different times. Unlike Avebury, which was constructed of unshaped Sarsen stones, Stonehenge (in its later phases anyway) was made of shaped Welsh bluestone transported from a long distance anyway. Different phases of construction at Stonehenge have tended to become blurred together because later contributors occasionally overhauled the work of earlier toilers and reused the shaped Welsh bluestones for different uses and in different positions within the rings. The lintel structure of Stonehenge does not occur in stone circles anywhere else in the world, and its remarkable tongue and groove interlocking construction is also unique. From conception to its completion, Stonehenge is a marvel and has been so for close to four thousand years. We still don't know much about how or why it was raised, but there is doubtless a spiritual practice involved. The alignments with solar and lunar phenomena which have been written about so widely are actually rather imprecise, but there is no doubt that they were intentional and served some definite purpose of the ancients.
The End
By the time the Romans arrived in Britain, the stone circles and barrows had ceased to be important in the daily lives of the native Britons and had been abandoned. The circles and earthworks were deserted, their banks overgrown and their ditches choked by trees, rubble and dead leaves. The standing stones were leaning in all directions, lichen clad, weather stained and knee deep in wild grasses; the sacred enclosures were obscured by gorse and shrubbery. "The people" had gone away and the only visitors to the forlorn and abandoned sanctuaries were the wild creatures who roamed through them in search of sustenance. The enclosures stood alone in the dark winds and the sudden storms which blew across the emptiness of the still largely uninhabited landscape.Of all the stone circles in Britain, the largest and the strangest is Avebury Circle in Wiltshire, and it's my favorite site. I love its size, its location, its ancient, brooding, melancholy aspect and the ritual roadway, Kennet Avenue, wandering through it, and across the plain. Then too, there is the quirky aspect of the nearby companion feature, Silbury Hill, which is strange enough to make one wonder if perhaps it wasn't erected by aliens after all. There is also the remarkable chambered long barrow of West Kennet close by. Wiltshire is truly a place of wonders.
Avebury Glastonbury Tor Newgrange Silbury Hill Stonehenge Wayland's Smithy West Kennet Long Barrow
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