Amesbury

Amesbury is the nearest town to Stonehenge, and was itself once a key part of the Stonehenge landscape. The River Avon, which formed part of the processional way between Durrington Walls and Stonehenge, flows through the town and was a focus for many of the elaborate Bronze Age burials in the area, as high-status people claimed a place in this most revered landscape.

Many of these graves are now lost forever under housing estates and gardens. Those which have been excavated give an inkling of the once richness of this area.

Merlin and Vortigern.

Pseudo-historian Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed that Stonehenge was built by Merlin, wizard, sorcerer or shaman. In another legend, Merlin advised the British leader Vortigern, who was building a castle on the site, that its continual collapse was due to two dragons who were buried beneath the site.

This legend, often thought to be invented by Geoffrey, may have an older origin. Amesbury derives from ‘Emrys’s burgh’ or settlement, and Emrys was a title commonly applied to Merlin. Amesbury, therefore, was known from Saxon times as ‘Merlin’s settlement’. Perhaps the ancient legend has a grain of truth.

The river at Ratfyn

The Avon runs through a steep gorge near Ratfyn, the northern part of Amesbury, and a series of square structures, comprising four wooden posts around five metres high, have been discovered. They may have been huge wooden platforms used for the exposure of bodies to be devoured by kites and crows before they were cremated. Pits nearby contain the bones of cattle, pig and dogs, perhaps the remains of funeral feasts.

The cliff top, hidden by the trees of the gorge.

The Amesbury Archer is the town’s most famous discovery. The adult man, who died between 2500-2280BC, had lived in the Stonehenge area but had spent his childhood in the Alps or Bavaria. He had then made the arduous journey of over a thousand miles to Britain. Genetic analysis shows his son was also buried nearby.

The man was buried with twelve arrows, two archer’s wrist-guards, five beakers, three copper daggers, a metalworking anvil and a pair of gold earrings or hair ornaments, making it one of the richest burials found in the area. His importance was immense. Perhaps he was one of the first people who travelled to Britain, bringing the new skills of metal-working which would eventually overturn Britain’s infrastructure in every way. Thousand-year-old monuments were sealed up, new ones were built, and a new spiritual way of life redefined people’s lives even as their practical lives changed forever. Perhaps this man was the instigator of it all.

The Amesbury Archer

The Bulford Stone

The Bulford Stone is another former standing stone which formed part of the vast Stonehenge ritual landscape. Like the Cuckoo Stone, it is a glacial erratic which was raised in its natural location, and like the Cuckoo Stone it has survived through chance. It has long fallen and was until recently believed to be a natural erratic, until excavation revealed its true importance.

The Bulford Stone is around two miles from Woodhenge and the Cuckoo Stone, which are visible to the west, and intriguingly is on the same alignment as these sites and the Stonehenge Cursus discussed last week. It seems this alignment of natural features stretches far further than was once thought.

The Bulford Stone, looking towards Woodhenge

Around the standing stone, which was raised at an unclear date, was once a Bronze Age round barrow which was positioned to incorporate the stone. The barrow contained three burials dating to 1900BC-1750BC.

They included an intriguing array of grave goods, including flint knives, arrows and antler tools for flaking flint; a piece of Cotswold limestone shaped very much like one of the Stonehenge sarsens, perhaps representing a microcosm of the stones’ spiritual power; a boar’s tusk pendant; and a piece of rock crystal which may have come from the Alps. These unique finds suggest high-status burials, perhaps of shamans. Rock crystal is commonly used for divination, healing and other spiritual purposes. Other high-status burials nearby, such as the Amesbury Archer, had come from the Alps region, an arduous journey 4000 years ago and one which conveyed considerable prestige.

The Bulford Stone, looking east towards Beacon Hill

While the Cuckoo Stone stands in rough grassland, the Bulford Stone is in the middle of an agricultural field, and for hundreds of years farmers and machinery have had to dodge around it. Most large boulders which were in the way were simply removed, the reason for the huge loss of standing stones over the past few centuries. Why did the Bulford Stone, until recently believed to be a natural erratic with no significance, not suffer the same fate? Perhaps the spirits of the shamans who were buried at its foot continue to guard their ancient ward.

The Cuckoo Stone

The Cuckoo Stone is a fairly modest standing stone around a mile from Stonehenge. The sarsen is one of many which once littered the landscape, left here long ago by glacial action, and the stone was simply raised in its original, natural location. It has long since fallen again. 

A pit near the stone contained cattle bone, flint, pottery and an antler pick, perhaps the tools used to raise the stone and the subsequent feast to consecrate it. The pick dates to 2900BC, the earliest phase of Stonehenge which at this point comprised a circle of bluestones but none of the huge sarsens.

Bronze Age burial urn from the Stonehenge area.

The Cuckoo Stone remained a revered site for the next three thousand years. Several Bronze Age cremation urns were interred around the stone, with dates ranging from 2000BC to 1260BC. Much later still, a Roman-era village with large farms and a wide spread of fields grew up around the stone, and burials from this period were inserted into a Bronze Age barrow a short distance away near Woodhenge. Almost certainly this village was the home of people whose ancestry stretched back to the Neolithic and Bronze Age inhabitants of the area, despite their adaptation of Roman ways in the early centuries CE, and they were successors to the ancient traditions of the still-sacred Stonehenge landscape.

The Cuckoo Stone looking towards Woodhenge

Why was the Cuckoo Stone so important? It lies on gently sloping grassland on the eastern edge of Salisbury Plain, with wide views in all directions but the west, where Stonehenge itself is hidden by the slope. The stone is on the same alignment as the Stonehenge Cursus, an enigmatic ditched enclosure 3km long and 100m wide, which seems to commemorate an ancient routeway. This route, and perhaps the cursus if it had been continued, would have incorporated the Cuckoo Stone, at the time recumbent but eventually raised, and continued to Woodhenge a few hundred metres to the east.

We will probably never know the reason for the importance of this alignment of natural features, but they remained respected in people’s memories as the Neolithic was succeeded by the Bronze Age, as Celts and then Romans swept across Britain and the country’s way of life changed beyond recognition, again and again. Eventually the Cuckoo Stone succumbed and became a mere rock in a field, but thanks to recent archaeology, its importance has been rediscovered.

Woodhenge

Woodhenge looking from the entrance. The remains of the ditch are visible.

Woodhenge was a timber monument built on Salisbury Plain and a key part of the Stonehenge complex. Nothing now remains except concrete markers denoting the wooden posts. It has no alignment or view of Stonehenge itself, but it lies around half a mile from the Stonehenge Cursus, following the same alignment, suggesting the two monuments were (or were to have been?) linked. It also overlooks the vast henge of Durrington Walls and would have been clearly visible beyond the henge banks.

Woodhenge is on the edge of a prominent ledge of the plain, which drops away to the south and east and has far-reaching views. It would also have been clearly visible dominating the high horizon. It comprised six concentric circles of timber posts, reminiscent of the timber circles in Durrington Walls itself. The posts, ranging from fairly modest trees to substantial mature trees, were raised then left to decay. The outer circle comprised small, closely placed posts; then two circles of increasingly larger posts; then three inner circles of smaller posts. The monument was enclosed by a circular ditch and bank with an entrance facing north-west, towards the midsummer sunset.

The Stonehenge tenon joints which may represent experience in timber-building.

Unlike stone-built monuments, it is impossible to know what Woodhenge looked like. The tree trunks may have been left with bark and perhaps branches, resembling an artificial forest or wilderness. They may have been stripped and decorated, or had ritual offerings pinned to them. They may have had horizontal lintels, rather like Stonehenge itself. One point supporting this is the rounded mortice-tenon joints on Stonehenge’s sarsens, added to stop the lintels slipping free. The weight of the stone, in hindsight, made this unnecessary, so were the builders using their experience of building timber-lintelled structures, where these precautions were essential? It may be that all these ideas were incorporated into the timber circles: perhaps a lintelled enclosure contained a microcosm of the forested wilderness which children feared and adults were forced to learn to master.

The Woodhenge posts date to around 2500BC, the time Stonehenge was radically restructured, but like many monuments Woodhenge had a much longer heritage, which began as veneration of a natural feature. Four standing stones once formed a three-sided cove in the southern part of the monument. These had been raised around a tree throw-hole: a huge mature tree had once stood here, perhaps long venerated by the local people, and when it fell the stones were raised to commemorate it. Pottery and flints placed in the hole date to around 3800BC, over a millennium before the timber circles were raised.

 

The cairn in the centre of Woodhenge

A child’s burial was found at the centre of the timber circles, its location now marked by a cairn. It is often stated that this was a sacrifice to consecrate the monument, but many archaeologists now refute this. The burial was probably in fact from the Bronze Age, long after the site had decayed into a mass of rotten stumps and fallen logs, and the skull damage, once attributed to an executioner’s axe, was probably simply damage from 4000 years in the ground.

Today Woodhenge is little known and little visited. Perhaps the concrete posts which are its sole survival tell us the message it was built to convey, five millennia ago. Even the most enduring of life will decay and vanish, and nobody will ever know it was there.

The Stonehenge Great Cursus

 The western end of the cursus.

The cursus is a strange and enigmatic structure, unique to British prehistory, and with a purpose which still eludes archaeologists.

Cursuses are ditched and banked enclosures, around 100m wide and extending for several kilometres across the landscape. Their shape gave rise to their name: an early suggestion, now refuted, was that they were racecourses.

The Stonehenge Cursus is three kilometres long and 100-150m in width, and stretches east-west across the plain a few hundred metres north of Stonehenge. It was built in the early Neolithic period, between 3600-3300BC, several hundred years before Stonehenge itself was begun, and is perhaps the oldest creation in the Stonehenge complex.

The location of the Lesser Cursus.

A second cursus was also built to the north, 60m wide and 400m in length, along a ridgeline which has a commanding position over the surrounding area. It had been extended at some point, and the fact that it simply stops at its eastern end suggests it may not have been finished.

The eastern end of the Great Cursus was formed by a now-ruined long barrow which dates to a broadly similar time, although it is unclear whether it was built before, after, or at the same time as the cursus. Many cursuses incorporate long barrows and other ritual structures.

It’s possible that this cursus too was unfinished, and the long barrow was simply a convenient ‘stop’. It’s also possible that they were never intended to be ‘finished’: they were simply extended continuously according to rules we can only guess at, rather like Stonehenge itself and the nearby timber monuments were continually remodelled. It’s becoming more and more apparent that the process of creating monuments was more important to our prehistoric ancestors than the finished structure itself.

Supporting this theory is the Cuckoo Stone, a standing stone which became a shrine a few hundred metres from the ‘end’ of the cursus and on the exact same alignment. Perhaps this would have in time been incorporated into the cursus. Further on the same alignment is Woodhenge, another standing stone called the Bulford Stone, and then the prominent Beacon Hill. Surely this cannot all be coincidence?

The view east along the cursus. The ditch aligns on the distant Beacon Hill.

The most accepted explanation for cursuses is commemoration and movement: perhaps they were a memorial of a processional way or a corpse road or spirit road. This could explain why many are linked to long barrows. Cursuses in other places seem to be transferring power from an older ritual monument to a newer one.

The Stonehenge Cursus begins at its western end on a ridgeline, which offers views in all directions, then rapidly drops to eventually reach Stonehenge Bottom, once a watercourse. The hillside quickly obscures the view behind, leaving the walker with nothing but the route ahead which remains visible, with the cursus ditch aligned on the distant Beacon Hill, until the midpoint when that too is swallowed.

The view behind is swallowed up as the traveller journeys east.

In the bowl of the valley, nothing remains of the outside world and the journeyer is left with a sense of isolation and disconnection. Was this a key part of this symbolic journey? Were people, perhaps the living or perhaps the dead, ritually and spiritually scoured clean here, aided by the flowing spring water, before continuing their journey back into the world? From this point, the walker climbs up the opposite slope, the views of the plain reappear, and the high point of the ridge appears where the long barrow stood and the cursus ends. A long journey is complete.

Durrington Walls

  

Reconstruction of Durrington Walls, showing the avenue, river, and timber circle.

Durrington Walls, found two miles from Stonehenge, is one of the greatest henge monuments in Britain, and part of the vast religious complex which stretches across the chalklands of Salisbury Plain.

The henge today survives as a chalk bank, originally three metres high and over a mile long, enclosing an area of 42 acres, with an internal ditch 16 metres wide and six metres deep. This vast earthwork enclosed a huge settlement, with up to a thousand wattle and chalk houses divided into discrete communities. The ditch and bank were dug around 2500BC, destroying many of the outer houses, and is linked to the increasing elaboration and enclosure of already ancient ritual sites, and also to the raising of the huge sarsens at Stonehenge.

The extent of the henge.

Durrington Walls was closely linked to Stonehenge. Researchers now think that people came to Durrington Walls, from across the chalklands and also much further afield, including Wales and northern Britain, bringing livestock and trade goods to an annual gathering at the midwinter solstice where community relationships were reaffirmed, livestock exchanged and marriage partners found. Two timber circles, one found immediately in front of the entrance and containing at its greatest extent six concentric rings of huge posts, have been linked to religious rites and funerary ceremony. Likely people brought cremated remains to Durrington to be deposited in the river, or for a chosen few, to be deposited inside the banks of Stonehenge after a short journey down the river. Midwinter has always been seen as a time of rebirth and renewal, when the sun begins again its annual journey across the sky, and has often been seen as the time when souls cross into the next world or alternatively join those souls waiting to be reborn.

The site of the avenue leading to the river.

Like Stonehenge, Durrington Walls had an avenue leading down to the river Avon, fifteen metres wide and with five-metre chalk banks on either side. Like Stonehenge, this avenue was based on a natural feature. Beneath the avenue, on the same alignment, was a ‘road’ of natural flint. This aligned perfectly on the midsummer solstice sunset. This is the opposite alignment of the Stonehenge avenue, and adds to the theory that they are spiritual ‘opposites’ – one linked to the living and one linked to the dead.

The focus of Durrington Walls, towards the fertile farmlands, the river and the rising sun.

Durrington Walls is on steeply sloping ground, which was terraced to build the hundreds of houses, with an area of high levelled ground furthest from the entrance where five elaborate enclosed buildings were raised. Perhaps they were chieftain’s houses or houses of the ancestors or spirits. They certainly had a natural command over the site. Unlike Stonehenge, which is on a bleak and exposed hillside which emphasises its liminality, Durrington Walls faces southeast, towards the rising sun which would give light and warmth to the community. It is sheltered from the prevailing winds and offers good views over and easy access to the river which provided nourishment in both practical and spiritual sense. It certainly feels like a place which was buzzing with life.

Marden Henge

Marden’s bank, inner ditch and northern entrance.

Marden Henge, about ten miles north of Stonehenge in Wiltshire, is one of the biggest henges in Britain and one of the most unusual. It is in a crook of the Avon, the river which is closely linked to Stonehenge, and the river replaces the bank for part of its perimeter.

The henge, roughly oval and 500 metres across at its widest point, had an entrance aligned precisely north, and a second to the southeast, linked to a causeway which led to the river. Its bank survives up to three metres high and forty metres wide.

The Avon at Marden

The henge was built on the flat river plain where today, after heavy rain, the mud-laden river can be seen creeping around willow trunks and through the long grass on its banks. It probably once filled the henge ditch and waterlogged the surrounding land. Little can be seen of the surrounding landscape beyond the river plain, with the exception of the ridgeline which marks the start of Salisbury Plain, and water seems to be a key aspect of the monument’s character.

The view across the henge towards the river.

The henge has been associated with the construction of Stonehenge. The huge sarsen stones, incorporated into Stonehenge around 2500BC, were dragged from the Marlborough Downs in the north, through the Vale of Pewsey and up onto Salisbury Plain. Recent work has shown that they most likely crossed the Avon at Marden, and were then dragged up the gentle slope which leads from the village onto the high plain, about the only feasible route when dragging multiple twenty-tonne rocks.

Many henges were dug on sites with already sacred or historical importance, perhaps as an act of enclosing and formalising that memory. Marden’s enclosing ditch is dated to 2570-2290BC, the same time or slightly after the sarsens were moved. Perhaps its creation was the final act of Stonehenge’s builders after their work was done.

The slope likely used to drag Stonehenge’s sarsens up onto Salisbury Plain

Marden was also the site of a large earthen mound, similar to the much more famous Silbury Hill near Avebury, but on a smaller scale. The mound, 70 metres in diameter and nine metres high, built sometime during or after the henge’s construction, was destroyed after antiquarians dug through it. Nothing now survives. Silbury Hill was built around 2400-2300BC; Marden may have been a similar date.

Both mounds were linked to encircling watercourses, and I feel the idea carries weight that they represent something akin to the mythical island of creation, rising from the primeval waters. It would certainly feel that way, as people watched the water silently creep through grass and tree roots around the mound as heavy rain swelled its course.

Why was it built at Marden? Was Marden linked to the birthpoint of Stonehenge? Perhaps the river was the boundary between two communities, the point where the stones were ceremonially handed over, and so this site was chosen for the great mound to be raised. Unfortunately, thanks to clumsy treasure seekers, we will probably never know.

Stonehenge

 Stonehenge is Britain’s most famous prehistoric landmark. In its heyday four thousand years ago, it attracted people from across Britain and across Europe. Today, largely ruined thanks to time and human endeavour, nothing has changed.

Stonehenge was built and rebuilt several times over a 1500-year period, in a chalkland landscape which was already of great sacred significance. A series of colossal wooden posts, their significance now long lost, were raised in what is now the Stonehenge carpark 5000 years before the monument was begun. Two linear monuments known as cursuses and several long barrows were built nearby in the preceding centuries. And the spring known as Blick Mead attracted votive offerings for several thousand years.

The Amesbury Archer, who was brought up in the Alps and was buried a mile from Stonehenge around 2400BC. He was perhaps one of the earliest metal workers in Britain.

The earliest construction at Stonehenge was a circular ditch and bank, dug around 3000BC, with a ring of 56 Aubrey Holes around its inner edge. These were once the sockets for the famous bluestones, brought several hundred miles from the Preseli Mountains in South Wales. Many, perhaps all, of the holes also contained cremation burials, perhaps interred as the stones were raised and perhaps of people with particular associations with that stone.

Around 500 years later, the horseshoe of huge trilithons – paired and shaped stones with a horizontal cap – were raised in the centre, along with a circle of capped sarsen stones. The bluestones went through several rearrangements which took place over the next few hundred years. It seems a final rearrangement was abandoned uncompleted around 1500BC.

The approach up the avenue, with one of the ditches still visible. The Heel Stone, a glacial erratic raised in the entrance almost in its natural position, is on the left.

Stonehenge seems to have been a place linked to death and funerary rites. The remains of over 150 people were interred at the site, and no evidence of feasting or other signs of occupation have been found. As is perhaps fitting with its unique structure, people came here only for important and austere rites.

Stonehenge was approached along an avenue, over 3km long and 22 metres wide, which led from the river Avon in a circuitous route to cross King Barrow Ridge, later the location of several Bronze Age barrows, and the first view of the stones in the distance. They are in fact barely noticeable, lost among the grey-green of Salisbury Plain, and soon vanish from view as one drops into the valley of Stonehenge Bottom, probably once a seasonal watercourse.

Then comes the climb up the hillside, and the stones gradually rise from the ground and stand proud on the skyline, displayed in all their glory as the walker approaches. The world beyond them remains invisible. It is a remarkable piece of landscape engineering, which would have been all the more powerful with the banks of the avenue funnelling the viewer’s attention.

The view from the entrance.

The stones seem very distant from the outer ditch, today’s permitted viewing point, and this was probably intentional to reinforce the point that only the select few were permitted into the stones’ presence. The ten-metre high trilithons crowding over the initiate would create a near terrifying sense of claustrophobia and power. It would feel like the most powerful place in Britain, in the world, as it was intended.

The Stonehenge Archer, buried in the ditch around 2200BC. He had died after being shot by three arrows which broke his sternum and one rib, shown in the picture. Was this a murder or a sacrifice?

The avenue and entrance align to the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset, and recent investigation has shown that beneath the avenue lay several periglacial channels, deep ditches naturally formed during the Ice Age and by coincidence on exactly the same solstice alignment. These were incorporated by the avenue’s builders. Were they seen as a natural sun channel, created by the Gods, spirits or ancestors, and eventually incorporated into Britain’s most important sacred site? It seems very likely.

One of the many Bronze Age barrows which focus on Stonehenge.

Stonehenge’s final modification was during the mid Bronze Age, around 1500BC, but it was the focus of attention, good and bad, long after this point. Bronze Age barrows were raised where they would be visible on the skyline from Stonehenge. Roman-era pottery was found in large quantities, perhaps the result of religious rituals. It seems some of the stones were toppled by the Romans, perhaps an attempt to break the site’s power. In the Saxon period, when the site became known as the ‘Stone Hangings’, it was used for executions.

Today, it is a tourist attraction.