A History of Ancient Britain (19 page)

Windmill Hill comprises three ditches, one inside the other. Within the inner circle, on the summit of the flat-topped hill was found pottery and the bones of domesticated animals like cows and
bulls. There in miniature was the world the farmers were trying to create – the safe, tame, ordered world in which plants and animals did what they were told and everything was in its place.
Outside the circles and far away, at the bottom of the hill in fact, they buried the bones of a wild auroch, a beast twice the size of anything the farmers dared to tend. Here was the Wild Wood
– the untamed, dangerous, unpredictable world they had left behind. It was the world of the hunter and the past.

There may even be a note of resignation in it all and a touch of sadness. There was an awareness and an acceptance that they could not go back
now, even if they wanted to.
They had come too far. The world of the hunter was the world they had all come from but they had cut it adrift, left it outside the circle. They understood what they had done and what it meant. The
men and women who designed, built and used the causewayed enclosure on top of Windmill Hill knew they had made their bed – and that from now on they would have to lie in it.

CHAPTER THREE

COSMOLOGY

We take buildings for granted. We live most of our lives indoors, inside houses, schools, office blocks, factories, shops, cinemas, pubs, clubs and all the rest. We walk down
city streets lined with gigantic structures of stone, steel and glass that seem as permanent as mountains; cathedrals dedicated occasionally to God but mostly to the making and moving of money.
When we look up, we see ceilings instead of sky. This is to us reality and normality.

But for the majority of our time here on Earth our species built nothing much but flimsy shelters against the worst of the cold and the wet. The decision – the need – to start
designing and building permanent structures was therefore a radical one. The first of them must have appeared upon the land as suddenly and as unexpectedly as a field of mushrooms after rain. Where
did it come from, this idea it was necessary to build, to have an inside as well as an outside? And once we started building things why did we start raising them higher and higher into the sky?

To begin to answer these questions we have to look back 6,000 years and more into British prehistory and to try and imagine what it was like to live during the time archaeologists call the
‘Neolithic Revolution’. The human
species had embarked upon the most profoundly influential ambitious social experiment there has ever been. By planting seeds
instead of gathering wild harvests and by keeping animals in pens instead of hunting them in the woods, we changed everything, and every one of us as well. Instead of helplessly trusting nature
– hoping the fish would come, that the fruit would ripen on the trees and bushes – we took steps to bring the world to heel.

Chemical analysis of human remains reveals that the effect on our diet was profound. After thousands of years of eating wild foods, hunted and gathered, quite suddenly we relied instead upon
domesticated cereals. Depending on your point of view, we either invested in the future or made an enemy of it.

By 6,000 years ago farmers were changing the land of Britain for the very first time: clearing away the Wild Wood and replacing it with ordered fields. They were possessed of profound thoughts
about their relationship with the very ground beneath their feet. Did they belong to it like the hunters had, or did it now belong to them? They were preoccupied, too, with what it meant to be
alive and what it meant to be dead. They were also newly concerned about what was to be done with the dead. Since they depended upon the germination of seeds and the birth of animals from their
herds, their lives were partly dominated by thoughts of fertility – how much could be taken from the soil and how much had to be given back.

It is strange to think the first people to spend time inside permanent buildings in Britain were the dead. The first ‘houses’ put up by Neolithic farmers were storage chambers for
bones. While the living continued to move around the landscape, chivvying their herds of cattle and sheep from one patch of pasture to another and carrying their shelters with them, at least a few
of the dead were tucked up inside well-appointed houses built of timber or stone, overlooking stands of wheat and barley.

So rather than places in which to live, the first houses were places in which to be dead. A handful of the living might spend some little time inside them now and again while interring a new
permanent resident, or perhaps seeking wisdom from the collected ancestors, but mostly those first buildings were meant to be seen and appreciated from the outside. They were territorial markers
and the claims they staked were made legitimate not by the words and actions of the quick but by the unquestioning silence of mouldering bones.

It seems likely that before there were tombs (or causewayed enclosures
either, for that matter) there were simply special places. They might have been hilltops, high
ground overlooking fertile land; clearings left behind by wild fires and full of flowers; stands of trees silhouetted against the sky. Such locations, pleasing to the eye and restful to the soul,
may have been places of pilgrimage – where groups gathered for all sorts of reasons at particular times of year, where they brought the remains of their dead – long before anyone
thought to dig an encircling ditch or to raise an upright timber, or a mound of earth, or a stone. (Maybe a tribe made a point of gathering in a natural clearing in the forest, surrounded and
bounded by trees. Once they had cut down all the trees and the special clearing was no more, it may have made sense to them to recreate the feeling of the remembered place by raising a circle of
great timbers or stones.)

When the farmers arrived they brought ideas that had germinated and flowered during the millennia it had taken the new technology to cross the continent of Europe. They looked at the landscape
and saw how it might be changed, moulded to suit a complicated and evolving vision of what it all meant. Long before the farmers came, hunters would have watched the movement of the sun, the Moon
and the rest of the lights in the sky, noting patterns that repeated again and again. That much is human nature. But farmers are more closely tied than hunters to circles and cycles. Farmers await
the coming and going of seasons with a particular, dependent urgency and if the passage of that time was marked by so many risings and settings of the sun and the Moon then it would have mattered
to keep track and to count, to look back as well as forward – to remember and to predict. As they waited for the Moon to return to the sky they might have imagined its journey and thought
about how time was unwinding and unspooling all the while.

Six thousand years ago there were two worlds on the Earth, one wild and one tamed, and they were separated, one from another, by boundaries. The Wild Wood bordered and defined their fields and
there were other, symbolic lines that could be drawn with ditches and lines of posts and stones. But there were also lines drawn between worlds, boundaries the farmers could not control –
between life and death, land and water, earth and sky.

There are landscapes in Britain that still have the power to inspire, and to remind even the most modern of us that the world is sometimes a place of wonder. The Lake District in Cumbria, in
England’s north-west, has apparently been attracting people – and filling them with wonder – since
the very beginning. It is a place made mostly of water
and stone. Even the hunters may have understood that the stone must have been there first, so the lakes and tarns could collect in its valleys and hollows. Maybe there was still then a memory, or a
remembrance, of the Ice Age – knowledge that the mountains themselves had been carved, ground, hammered and polished into shape by glaciers long ago.

For people without metal, still dependent upon stone for their sharpest, hardest edges, a place so obviously made of stone might have commanded a respect bordering on reverence. It is certainly
clear that much significance was placed upon axes made of a volcanic rock called tuff, or greenstone, that occurs in Great Langdale, a U-shaped valley two miles from the village of Ambleside. Such
axes have been found all across Britain and Ireland, suggesting their value was rooted in something other than their suitability for cutting wood.

Since forest clearance was integral to the spread of farming, the axe was the vital tool. It was after all a representation of a polished stone axe cutting a Mesolithic throwing stick in two
that was carved into the ceiling of the Locmariaquer passage grave in Brittany, by a farmer, to symbolise new ways triumphing over old. Every farmer would therefore have set great store by such
tools. But there are many sources of stone suitable for making perfectly good axes scattered all over Britain, without the need to secure raw material from somewhere as hard to get at as the high
slopes and summits of Great Langdale.

Flint makes excellent axes and is found in countless locations. It has the added benefit of providing sharp off-cuts which can be used for other tools besides the axes themselves. Unlike flint,
which often occurs at or near sea level, much of the Cumbrian greenstone is to be found towards the barren rocky summits of two peaks, Harrison Stickle and Pike O’ Stickle, 2,000 feet and
more above the floor of Great Langdale. The axes it produces, particularly those that have been ground and polished to give a characteristic cool, glassy smoothness, are certainly lovely. Held in
the hands they have a pleasing heft and would be just as desirable as ornaments. But they are no better for cutting down trees and shaping wood than any other kind of stone axe. So why clamber for
exhausting hours into the mist-shrouded mountains of the Lake District in search of a material that, on the face of it, makes the life of a farmer no easier? And why did farmers in every corner of
Britain covet axes knapped and ground from that particular stone?

Archaeologist and writer Mark Edmonds has spent three decades studying and wondering about the motivations of the people who climbed among some of the Lake
District’s highest peaks thousands of years ago in search of the greenstone. During the course of an exhausting day we spent together, scrambling up towards those 5,500-year-old axe
factories, he explained how so much more was being sought than a sharp edge.

While we were still much closer to sea level, Edmonds took me to see some recently discovered rock art that is another clue to understanding the significance of the uplands, the high ground, to
ancient peoples. Just west of the village of Chapel Stile, at Copt Howe, a pair of giant boulders nestles incongruously in a field, like pebbles dropped onto the grassy slope by a passing giant.
Before archaeologists paid them any attention they were familiar mostly to rock climbers, who call them ‘the Langdale Boulders’ and still find toe-holds among their fissures.

The larger of the two, formed of volcanic andesitic tuff stone, has around a dozen barely discernible carvings etched into one of its vertical faces. If Edmonds had not been there to point them
out I would have walked right past them unaware.

With the light from the right direction, casting as much shadow across the shallow grooves and peck-marks as possible, the best of them appear as multiple concentric rings or spirals. There are
also faint straight lines, rough rectangles and chevrons as well as a triangle with a carefully pecked surface, giving it the appearance of long-healed acne. The most prominent marks are a number
of cup-shaped depressions, but at least some of these may be the result of natural weathering.

The meaning of the carvings is anyone’s guess. Concentric circles and spirals are recurring features of prehistoric art – most commonly in the Boyne Valley in Ireland but also on
Anglesey and as far afield as Orkney. It has even been suggested the circular forms represent tunnels to other worlds, or other states of consciousness. People under the influence of hallucinogenic
drugs often experience the same sensation – of travelling through spinning circles of light – and this has encouraged some modern theorists, or the fringe element among them at least,
to imagine shamans having similar experiences in the ancient past and documenting them in stone.

Given their location – on such a visible and memorable landmark along the side of a valley leading to Langdale, and the climb up into the sky towards the greenstone – it is tempting
to see the boulders as touchstones,
or stepping-stones marking the way. Not quite a map but something to give direction just the same.