A History of Ancient Britain (24 page)

Having moved the bluestones out of the way to give space for the sarsen structures, the builders of the final phase of Stonehenge then brought them back in and erected them as a circle and an
oval within the new larger settings. All of it represents colossal effort and commitment, but archaeologists are increasingly of the view that the sarsen-building phase may have been compressed
into just a few years of fairly frantic activity. An avenue was built as well – two parallel earthen banks leading all the way from the stones to the River Avon a mile and a half away.

The intervening years have seen many of the stones toppled into the grass, so the place has a ruined look. But the likelihood is that Stonehenge was never finished. Different generations imposed
their own visions on the site, but even at the end it was what it had really always been: a work in progress.

By the middle of the third millennium
BC
, an entrance to the circle was aligned with the solstices of mid-winter and mid-summer. But it was in the monument’s final
phase, towards 2000
BC
, that the rising and setting of the sun was most famously – and most permanently – marked in stone at Stonehenge. The largest of the
trilithons, the final stones of the avenue and an upright monolith outside the circle, known as the Heel Stone, are all in a line that forms what is effectively the axis of the monument. At
mid-summer the rising sun follows a path directly along this line, indicating
beyond any doubt that the architects of that final phase had been very precise in their layout
of the stones and other features. Neolithic thinking – Neolithic religion – changed during its first millennia in Britain. The final form of Stonehenge paid heed not just to what was
happening on Earth, but also to cyclical and predictable events.

But while revellers gather at Stonehenge to watch that mid-summer sunrise, they are overlooking something crucial importance. That same alignment, of trilithon, avenue and Heel Stone, also
points in quite the opposite direction at the other end of the year, to sunset at mid-winter. This simple fact may make all the difference. To understand why archaeologists are increasingly sure
the popular view of the place may be back to front, it is necessary to consider what was happening at another important Neolithic site nearby.

As is the case on Orkney, no single monument on Salisbury Plain or anywhere else can be understood when examined in isolation. Stonehenge was part of an entire landscape that had been sculpted
and moulded, by people, into a backdrop for ritual and belief. On their own the hanging stones set within their circular bank and ditch count for just a few phrases from a long story. All around
are the rest of the words, in the form of other henges, tombs, cursuses and yet more stone circles, and only when all of it is considered together do the sentences construe and finally begin to
make sense.

Archaeologists excavating the interior of the great earthen henge of Durrington Walls, two miles north-east of Stonehenge, found huge quantities of animal bones, primarily belonging to pigs.
Examination of the animals’ teeth revealed them to be generally rotten – evidence that the beasts had been deliberately fattened up prior to slaughter. Piglets are usually born in the
spring and since the vast majority of the bones found at Durrington Walls were of animals that had been killed at around the age of nine months, all the evidence there points to feasting on a vast
scale . . . in the depths of mid-winter.

Farmers from hundreds of miles around were seemingly in the habit of gathering at Durrington Walls for the mother of all hog roasts. It was at that time of year when the days are short and cold,
when the sun stays low in the sky, distant and aloof. Thoughts might turn dark, like the sky, and so people made a point of gathering together at the lowest ebb – on the day when the
sun’s visit was briefest and most desultory – to seek reassurance and solace from one another’s company instead. If ever there was a time for great fires, and great feasting by
the light of towering flames, it was
when the heavens had only cold comfort to offer. And as the old year died – as the old sun rose and set for the last time before
being renewed – thoughts might have lingered too upon the whereabouts of souls departed during the months since the last mid-winter, of those most recently dead.

It is thought now that the earthen bank and ditch of Durrington Walls enclosed a little world of the living. People gathered there to share a grand celebratory meal together before accompanying
the souls of their loved ones towards the world of the dead. Archaeologists have only recently discovered a 100-foot-wide avenue leading from the settlement of Durrington Walls right down to the
banks of the River Avon. It is believed the cremated remains of the dead were transported downriver on boats, a gently meandering journey along the purifying waters, leading from one world to
another. The route then returned to dry land once more for a final procession along another avenue: the one leading into Stonehenge from the north-east.

In stark contrast to what happens at the site every 21 June, Neolithic pilgrims faced the setting sun of mid-winter as they approached the stones, as they walked hand-in-hand with the memories
of those they had lost. As well as raising circles of timber and stone at Stonehenge, it turns out the farmers were in the habit of burying the cremated bones of their loved ones there too. The
remains of hundreds of individuals have been found buried throughout the interior, and the assumption is that death and the dead were part of the place from the very beginning.

The most recent work on Stonehenge and its surroundings has been carried out by the wide-ranging Stonehenge Riverside Project and Josh Pollard, one of its directors, took me on a guided tour to
help me see the site from a chilly new perspective. ‘One thing we’ve realised from recent work is that Stonehenge has a very close relationship with rituals to do with the human
dead,’ he said. ‘We know, from very early excavations, that there are at least 300 cremation burials within the area of the bank and ditch. We also know of many other unburnt human
bones that were placed within the monument. So effectively the site was being used as a gigantic cemetery.’

‘What you’ve got to realise is that we’re looking at communities who probably didn’t conceive of life as coming to an end at the point where they died,’ he said.
‘But that basically this was a transition into another state of being, into a state of ancestorhood – so we think that, from that perspective, the mid-winter solstice was probably very
important because this of course marks the point where you have the death of one year and the regeneration of another.’

Pollard said that the modern preoccupation with mid-summer at Stonehenge, with life at its zenith, was in all likelihood misguided. ‘I think celebrating life,
celebrating the seasons is fine,’ he said. ‘But in a way what they should be doing [at Stonehenge] is celebrating the dead, the ancestral dead, and they should be doing that at
mid-winter.’

The farmers who created Stonehenge lived and died by the seasons. The extremes of mid-summer and mid-winter must therefore have been powerful reminders of time passing, from one year to the next
and from generation to generation. Everyone has an image of Stonehenge in their mind’s eye. It is one of the fixed points that holds the landscape of Britain in place, like a drawing pin in a
map. Like the
Mona Lisa
or the Great Pyramid of Egypt, our image of Stonehenge is so familiar it has become hard to see it through fresh eyes. But that is precisely what we must do now if we
are to regard the stones and the earthen circle they sit inside as Neolithic farmers once did.

Go there in the winter time if you can, in deep mid-winter if possible, when the golden warmth of a summer’s day is as distant as a rumour, impossible to believe. There is still a charge
in the air around those stones, like the ozone-rich tang that tingles on the tongue after lightning. You can feel it, taste it. And if you walk near them on mid-winter’s day itself, you can
feel it just a little bit more. Stone is cold in the dark, a product of the same qualities that make it last for ever. The monoliths of Stonehenge reach up from the grass like a skeletal hand from
a grave and that open, treeless landscape makes them all the more stark, unforgiving and unyielding. Stand then in their shadow, while there is snow on the ground and as the sun sets at the end of
another year. Feel the warmth of life drain through the soles of your boots and down into the ground and all at once you realise the stones belong not to the living but to the never-ending days of
being dead.

It was also while looking at Stonehenge that I thought again about Serge Cassen and those megaliths of his at Carnac. Cassen has said he believes hunters raised the lines of megaliths in the
face of the farmers’ advance. He regards the seemingly endless rows as a last defiant cry rendered into stone by people who had seen the future and realised it did not include them. But
thinking about the centuries swallowed up by the different moods and meanings of Stonehenge brought me to a simple realisation: that stones are raised not by losers but by victors.

Memorials in stone are pushed up towards the sky by unreasonable
men – those who have seen a world that does not suit them and who have decided to alter it again
and again until it finally fits. Perhaps the hunters were triumphant in Brittany, at least for a while. Far from surrendering their hold on the land, they tightened it, weighed it down with the
heaviest stones they could find. Maybe they had their first generation of tenant farmers do the job for them.

In
The Ascent of Man
Jacob Bronowski held that farmers were always prey, at least at first, to bands of marauding nomads. War was the nomads’ business, he said, and they waged it
with men and women trapped upon the land, those unable and unwilling to flee because of their servitude to their crops. But Bronowski also argued that if war has one weakness it is that it can only
ever be a temporary condition. Regardless of the wishes even of its keenest practitioners, it cannot be sustained indefinitely.

Accept for a moment that the hunters waged an early and shapeless sort of war in Brittany, clumsily but forcibly relieving the farmers of their surplus and making them do their bidding. But as
Bronowski said, they could neither maintain their nomadic ways of life nor their antipathy to those who had settled among them. One day the hunters awoke to find the farmers all around. Finally
there was nowhere left to roam. And so at last those unreasonable men and women resorted to the only course open to them – to allow themselves to be seduced by ways they had once despised. By
then, though, it suited them. They had grown tired of resisting and wanted peace for its own sake. While moss grew upon the rows, they accepted their role as masters and landlords in a world
inherited by the meek. Then and only then did the stones that had marked their victory become their memorial.

Today we are used to being surrounded by man-made things that dwarf us. But in our modern world they are seldom dedicated to spiritual matters, and more often to money, power and earthly
prestige. The motivation of the people who built the first great Stone Age monuments 5,000 years ago was more or less the same. The new age – an age of astronomy and concern with the
goings-on in the heavens above – was about more than a spiritual awakening. It was also about a new society, one in which we start to see social hierarchy for the very first time. The
builders of those first monuments were every bit as competitive with each other as the architects of modern skyscrapers, and they wanted to show off.

Grooved-Ware pottery – of the sort found on Orkney – has also been recovered from Stonehenge, which means there must have been a
connection between the sites.
The chamber of Maes Howe is briefly illuminated by the setting sun of mid-winter, another world of the dead aligned with the dying of the light. Experts therefore believe people must have travelled
between the great sacred places of Britain, and that this would hardly have been the experience of the average Stone Age farmer, but the privilege of a new elite, people at the top of society who
would have voyaged the length and breadth of the country on a kind of Neolithic Grand Tour.

When that King of Orkney travelled to Colchester in
AD
43 to see with his own eyes the face of the Emperor of Rome, the near-certainty is that he made the journey by
boat. It is entirely believable as well that the craft that carried him all that way down the coast of the long island of Britain was a relatively simple one. On the Hebridean island of Coll I
spent some precarious time in a little coracle, a boat made by stretching an animal skin across a basket-frame of bent saplings. These were certainly among the vessels of the hunters of the
Mesolithic, as much as 10,000 years ago, and there is no reason to believe the technology would have evolved much over the ensuing millennia: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, as the
saying goes. So prehistoric hunters, pioneering farmers, first-century kings and everyone else in between would have relied upon sea-going vessels made from plentiful everyday materials.

In County Meath in the east of Ireland a woodcarver and dreamer by the name of Clive O’Gibney has set himself the task of proving that sea travel in the Neolithic was rather more
sophisticated than has been previously thought. In the yard of his workshop beside the River Boyne, within site of the world-famous tourist attraction that is the passage grave of Newgrange,
O’Gibney has completed a mammoth task: the building of a large sea-going vessel, longer than a Transit van and about as heavy, using only materials and techniques known to have been available
in the ancient past.

What English speakers call coracles, the Irish call curraghs. The two craft are essentially one and the same, in that both comprise animal skins stretched over frames formed of slender saplings;
but the Irish version is often larger and more reassuringly boat-shaped. Sea-going curraghs, powered by oars, have been used in Ireland for longer than anyone cares to remember. Legend has held
that one St Brendan made it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to Newfoundland in one in the late sixth century
AD
. (The English adventurer Tim Severin recreated St
Brendan’s voyage in 1978, successfully completing the crossing accompanied by four like-minded friends.) But until O’Gibney entered the fray no one had tried to imagine
how sailors contemplated journeys of perhaps several hundred miles 5,000 years and more ago. Most intriguingly of all, the Irishman is convinced the longer voyages – and
certainly those linking Ireland to Britain – would have been undertaken in curraghs powered by sails.