A History of Ancient Britain (20 page)

Cup- and ring-marked stones are a class of monument, or perhaps artwork, found scattered across parts of England, Scotland and Ireland. They are notoriously difficult to date but some of them at
least are thought to have been made as early as the Neolithic period. Almost always on horizontal, rather than vertical, outcrops of bedrock they are often in clusters close to other monuments like
burial mounds and stone circles. The rings are sometimes pecked around the cup-shaped hollows, sometimes on their own; and, given that they were cut without stone tools, all of them represent an
enormous amount of time and patience. They are often numerous, so that one plane of rock after another in the same location is found to be covered in a veritable rash of pockmarks and whorls.

If dating them is problematic then interpreting the meaning of the things is harder still. My own favourite of the many choices on offer is to see them as marks left behind as proof of passage.
For people making an important journey – maybe a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage or a rite performed at a certain age – there may have been a desire to leave something permanent behind,
just to show you really had passed that way. And so the spirals and other shapes at Copt Howe may be something similar – perhaps started by one traveller and then continued and added to by
many more pilgrims over the years.

Long before the artworks were added the boulders – distinctive and memorable – may have been counted special anyway by the Mesolithic hunters. From the perspective of our world of
buildings – with clear distinctions between natural and man-made, inside and outside – it is well nigh impossible to get back inside ancient minds. In their world, short on scientific
explanation but rich in memory and story, there may even have been a sense in which the natural world appeared to have been ‘built’ by powers unseen. Even today it is impossible to look
at the tors of Dartmoor without noticing how they resemble the ruins of massive fortresses. Natural features and landmarks, like strangely enigmatic boulders that seemed placed by a giant hand, may
have provided inspiration for the location and even the building materials of the first man-made additions to the landscape.

Edmonds pointed out how, from a position directly in front of the most heavily decorated face of the larger boulder, the unmistakable outline of some of the Langdale Pikes themselves –
Harrison Stickle included – appear
neatly framed against the sky. Did the Langdale Boulders mark a significant point on the journey of the axe-makers travelling to and
from the source of the stone? ‘Five or six thousand years ago, the chances are no one was living up here full time,’ said Edmonds. ‘They would come here because the high ground
would give them good grazing. But what drew them up here was not the chance of living here full time – that would happen later. It was the stone that brought them up – it was the stone
that they came for.’ (Ever since the Copt Howe carvings came to light there has been disagreement about their age. Some locals even suggest they were carved as recently as 70 or 80 years ago
by someone half-remembered, who camped nearby for a time. But whenever they were carved, the fact remains the boulders and their place in the world inspired someone to carry out the work. Whether
decades or millennia old, they mattered to someone who cared about what and where they were.)

As we made our way higher into the hills, eventually onto the quarry sites themselves, Edmonds pointed out that there was no practical need to climb so high. On Pike O’ Stickle the
axe-makers concentrated their extraction on and around a narrow, precipitous ledge that is nothing less than a dangerous place to be, then as now. According to Edmonds there are exposed outcrops of
greenstone much lower down, some of even higher quality, geologically speaking, than that found in the most remote quarries; and yet it was the harder-to-reach stuff that was most attractive to the
Neolithic craftsmen. ‘It wasn’t just the stone itself,’ he said. At least part of what mattered was precisely where it had come from – from hard-to-reach, challenging
places, up high, as near to the sky as possible.’

Edmonds has spent a lot of time in those mountains, pondering as usefully as working. I first met him more than 20 years ago when I worked as one of his volunteers excavating another axe factory
– that one high up on slopes above Loch Tay in Scotland, close by the village of Killin and the mountain of Ben Lawers. He was thoughtful about what it all meant then and he is even more
wrapped and folded into the high ground now.

He writes about the motivations of the axe men at least as well as he talks: ‘What mattered were the distance and the climb to places only seen on the horizon when the trail brought them
into view,’ he wrote in
The Langdales: Landscape and Prehistory in a Lakeland Valley.
‘To crags that were dangerous and sometimes unstable, that could vanish in the cloud and
lead you on false trails in harsh conditions. A place of fractured stone
where a wrong step could be your last, where only the swifts move in and out with ease.’

Edmonds describes the quest for stone as one that fitted within the season when grazing herds were moved up onto the remote pastures, when a few of the folk left hearth and home behind and began
journeys into the high country. As well as minding the beasts they took the opportunity to climb yet higher, to where the stone was most removed from daily life, and therefore better: ‘Where
the goal of working was to make tools which said something about you, the journey, and a measure of separation conferred a special quality to both the act and the artefact.’

For Neolithic farmers increasingly bound to the earth – by their crops but also by their ancestors planted in the same soil – the deepest roots of all would have been those of the
mountains. Thrust up into the sky, with mist and cloud for cloaks, they were surely home to more than birds. Won from the highest and most threatening of the peaks, the grey-green stone might as
well have come from another world, one populated by spirits and gods. Though the axe men could not have known it the material they sought and worked was the ash from ancient volcanoes compacted and
transformed by the hammer blows of deep time.

In order better to understand the effort involved, Edmonds has also learned how to make polished greenstone axes for himself. The job of making a ‘rough-out’, knocking flake after
flake from a block to produce the basic shape, takes him around 45 minutes now: no time at all. But while the roughing-out was completed in the quarries (literally millions of still-sharp flakes
form man-made scree slopes all over the Pikes’ uppermost slopes, testament to countless generations of return to those places) the finishing of the pieces was done far away.

Back in the lowlands, back in the everyday world, hundreds of hours were required for the job of polishing the surface of the axe, grinding it first against coarse material and then with
progressively finer abrasives until finally a glass-like smoothness was achieved. (Polished and also therefore ‘polite’ are words that originate in the jewellery trade. They apply to
the work of cutting gem stones and convey the sense of something being refined and finished by laborious, patient labour, of things being made the best they can possibly be.)

But while polishing makes for a more beautiful object it does not make a sharper or better axe. Often finished polished stone axes show lines and blotches of different colour – veins
running through the pieces like lettering
through seaside rock, adding to their allure. Those features would have been visible in the uncut block and in the rough-out and
seem always to have inspired the completion of the finished axe that contains them. And yet such veins are faults in the stone and therefore points of weakness. By rights the maker of an axe
intended for chopping down trees ought to have discarded such a stone at the very beginning. The first blow against something hard would likely shatter such an axe along the fault line so that
hundreds of hours of work (not to mention a life-threatening climb up a mountain) would be wasted at a stroke.

Such items, then, were never intended to be used for work. Instead they were symbols, precious objects kept and admired, given names and attributed with power; passed from hand to hand, from
parent to child and from clan to clan.

Up on those lonely perches, surrounded by the evidence of ancient labour, the notion that people came just for stone to make tools does seem patently absurd – as though devout Catholics
would travel to Lourdes to buy a pint of milk. ‘What we’re dealing with here is a monument,’ said Edmonds. ‘A place that draws people up, draws people together to make
objects that say something about who they are.’

The axe factories of Great Langdale are part of a belief system centred on the relationship between people and the world, and also the nature of stone itself. But it was a belief system that
continued to evolve, changing over time into something different and arguably more complex. Once you know the story of Great Langdale – better yet when you visit the place and hear it from
someone like Mark Edmonds – then the scree slopes of sharp flakes suddenly matter and make sense. But they are less than prepossessing at first sight – far less impressive than the
views they command. It was surely the place itself that mattered, high in the sky, as much as the work done there.

It was the farmers who first felt moved to build in Britain around 4000
BC
. First came places for the dead made sometimes of stone and sometimes of timber, often
enveloped within mounds of earth or rubble. Then a little later they made enclosures where they could gather to feast and to reflect, and also cursus monuments that established and maintained
boundaries between wild and tame, inside and outside and between life and death.

But if the first of the buildings were about the ancestors and the dead, then as the fourth millennium
BC
gave way to the third a fundamentally different set of ideas
began to be expressed. Rather than obsessing just
about the continued role of the dead in the daily life of the tribe, some people in Britain began thinking about the living
and how they fitted into society as individuals. Much more significant – and more enigmatic in terms of the monuments the new thinking inspired and shaped – they began thinking about
the universe, about time and about how they were connected, as individuals, to the cosmos.

Circles mattered to the artists who decorated the boulders at Copt Howe. They mattered to the builders of the causewayed enclosures like Windmill Hill and they mattered as well to the designers
of new monuments that began to appear across Britain from around 3000
BC
onwards. In the uplands, in open spaces under the giant sky they built circles of stones. These also
tend to be located in those parts of the country – Cumbria and the south-west of England, Wales and the west of Scotland – where mountains pierce the sky and where bedrock is exposed
and in plentiful supply. In the lowlands – of southern and eastern Scotland and eastern England, where building stone is harder to come by – monuments called henges were more
commonplace.

Henges began to be built around the same time as the stone circles. At first glance, and to the uninitiated, they are similar to causewayed enclosures. But there are crucial differences between
the two. For one thing henges are more straightforwardly circular in shape and are marked out by only a single, unbroken ditch. For another, the material dug out is heaped up into a bank around the
outside edge – in contrast to causewayed enclosures, which sometimes have banks on the inner rim. While a bank on the inside of a ditch could have a defensive function, one on the outside
– affording attackers the benefit of the high ground overlooking the interior – is useless.

Even the word henge is unhelpful, derived as it is from Stonehenge, which is a unique and special site. In Old English ‘henge’ means hanging or supported and refers specifically to
the sarsen lintels that could be said to ‘hang from’ or be ‘supported by’ their uprights.

True henges are circles entirely without stones, and while circles of stone are generally located on high ground where they can be seen from miles around, henges are on low ground and valley
floors. People approaching stone circles have a view towards the centre of the monument that is only partly obscured, even perhaps framed, by the stones themselves – and people inside can see
out. The encircling bank of a henge, on the other hand, conceals people within a private and enclosed space cut off from the world. In short, stone circles show off what goes on inside, while
henges hide it.

Also in Cumbria and therefore within easy reach of the greenstone are some stone circles that archaeologists regard as among the very earliest in England, dating to
around 3000
BC
or even a little earlier. Names like Castlerigg and Long Meg and her Daughters add to the atmosphere of the sites – and show how long people have
wondered about them and their origins. Sunkenkirk is another, where local legend says folk were laying foundations for a church (or kirk) when the Devil intervened and stopped the job by making the
stones sink into the earth. The circle itself is an oddity in that so many stones are involved (perhaps as many as 60 originally) they may once have formed a complete barrier. There is also a
clearly marked entrance at Sunkenkirk, like a porch formed of rough stone pillars and approximately aligned with sunrise at mid-winter.

Archaeologists are usually scientists and therefore uncomfortable talking or writing about how places make them feel. But there is no denying stone circles have an atmosphere all their own.
Perhaps we bring that feeling ourselves, in the expectation that such sites must once have mattered, and had power; but it is surely impossible to walk around those, touching stones set in place
5,000 years ago, without sensing something strange?

It was partly a childhood fascination with places like Sunkenkirk that attracted me to archaeology in the first place. Growing up in the town of Dumfries, in Scotland’s south-west, I made
several visits as a schoolboy to the Twelve Apostles stone circle close to the nearby village of Newbridge. There the mystery lies in the fact that, despite the name, there are only 11 stones. The
circle is large by any standards – over 250 feet across – and the stones that form it squat in a sloping field bounded on all sides by modern roads that add to their strangeness. Early
on I learned that circles of stone – like henges – are almost unknown outside Britain. And yet well over a thousand of them survive here – not counting the unknown number that
must have been destroyed or lost before such places were deemed worthy of preservation – part of a tradition that endured well over a thousand years.