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‘The past is a different country,’ to paraphrase L.P. Hartley in The Go-Between, where he noted that ‘they do things differently there’. His context may have been quite different, but there’s a universal truth to his words.
In this book, I set out to probe the Neolithic and Bronze Ages and, specifically, why people back then built so many stone circles. My exploration takes place in Cumbria, where England’s tallest mountains are ringed by around fifty stone circles and henges, most of them sited on gentler terrain in the foothills. The county is, in terms of absolute numbers and the frequency of its circles, the most important in England.
This is not, however, a scientific study, nor even an attempt to discover some deeper truth about those who built these structures or why. There’ll be no dramatic reveal; no radical new theories. But through my calling in on more than half of all the known circles in Cumbria, I’m hoping that a better understanding may emerge. I’d like to shed light on which may have had a ritualistic justification; which may have genuinely served an astronomical purpose; which may have been burial sites; which were no more than meeting places.
The context for this adventure is that we seem almost to know more about the future than we do about so much of our past – we can predict things that are likely to happen with reasonable certainty, based only upon current levels of scientific and societal knowledge and understanding. But we don’t have to journey very far back in time to reach huge expanses of that country called The Past about which we know next to nothing. Of the Dark Ages, we can assert little beyond the possibility that there may (or may not) have been a Brittonic King called Arthur.
Of the days of Danelaw, our knowledge is rather more extensive, and yet it feels like it’s only within the last half-century that the true extent of the Viking settlement of these isles, and how people lived then, has been better understood. Of the Roman occupation, we know rather more – even though this is a more distant area of The Past. The thread here is, of course, that the Romans wrote things down. By and large, the Vikings – whose society had oral history at its heart – and Dark Ages Britons did not.
Knowledge abhors a vacuum, and into these unexplored tracts of The Past intrudes speculation. In the furthest reaches of The Past, such speculation becomes increasingly… speculative. What we know about the Neolithic and Bronze Ages in Britain has a firm foundation comprising the various archaeological finds at sites across the length and breadth of the country. While there’s no easy way to pin a date upon the action of erecting a tall stone in a shallow foundation, we may well be able to carbon-date tools, fire remains and ornaments with some accuracy. Skeletons may tell us how people died and the diseases they may have contracted, and we can sometimes even work out what people were eating thousands of years ago.
But imagine this for a moment: in, say, fifty years’ time paper has become obsolete and our entire body of knowledge is stored in huge data banks. A cataclysmic event occurs and wipes out all that data and any means of recovering it. A thousand years later, archaeologists seek to explore the Data Age, but all they have is skeletons and huge pits filled with plastic debris.…
These future archaeologists will seek to build an understanding of our times based upon the little that they know for sure. In just the same way, archaeologists today extrapolate from unambiguous foundations of Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Age “finds” using the prism of contemporary societal norms to create upon those foundations an edifice that represents but one possible interpretation of these ancient times. …
The early history of humans in Britain was not chronicled – little appears to have been recorded: early cave paintings; the mysterious Neolithic cup and ring marks on stones found mostly in Northern England and Scotland as well as throughout the Atlantic seaboard of Europe. Quite extraordinarily, similar marks have been witnessed in places from the Americas to Africa, India and Australia. Yet the physical reminders of where and how our Neolithic and Bronze Age ancestors actually lived or practised primitive agriculture, here, in northern Britain, remain scant. By contrast, while people were busy erecting stone circles in Cumbria, the ancient Egyptians had been building pyramids and writing on papyrus for centuries. The Minoan and Mycenaean civilisations in Bronze Age Greece built enduring structures of stone that still stand today. Mycenaean Linear B script tells us a great deal about how this advanced society functioned.
The enduring permanent legacy of parallel times here in Britain is limited. Relatively little can be understood of how people lived as so few settlements have survived well.… My aim is not to try to fill in the gaps with idle speculation; rather, to paint a broad-brush picture of why Cumbria seems to be quite special in this regard.
