For the last three to four decades I have made it my business every year to get to a few prehistoric sites I haven’t seen before, as well as often visiting those that have already captured my imagination. As with most people, I have my own particular fascinations. Since I am especially interested in ancient astronomy I have spent a great deal of time looking at stone circles and stone rows. Apart from my own personal favourites, the sheer number and type of prehistoric monuments has always amazed me and I am so grateful to the many thousands of people who toiled away to create all the amazing structures that are dotted around every part of the landscape of our lovely islands.
What Is Prehistoric?
In a way the word ‘prehistoric’ is a little unfortunate because it is a ‘catch-all’ word and merely relates to anything that happened before written records were available to us. So, for example, a standing stone circle, a Scottish broch or a Neolithic passage grave are all prehistoric, but they are about as different in terms of form and function as a croft is from a city skyscraper. The intentions of those who built these structures were not the same and in many cases they would have been from different backgrounds and probably did not even speak the same language.
It has to be remembered that to the comparatively recent broch builders, those who created passage graves and long barrows appeared almost as ancient and as mythical as they seem to us today. This is surely why structures of vastly different ages often occupy adjacent sites. At Dorchester-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, England, for example, there was once a super-henge of the sort that can still be seen in North Yorkshire, but at the present time, as I write these words, significant numbers of Anglo-Saxon burials are being dug by archaeologists in the same area. Doubtless the Anglo-Saxons of the immediate post-Roman period looked at structures such as the super-henge and assumed that whoever had built it were either gods or had been in close communion with gods. As a result, they felt reverence for the site and chose the area to become a deeply reverential place for their own culture. They did not understand the motivation of the henge builders, and would have had little in common with them. They came from a culture that was probably dramatically different, but there was still a sort of instinctive understanding and an empathy that transcended the many centuries that divided them.
The Arrival of Christianity
It is often the case that the Christian Church chose to build its own places of worship on sites that were already ancient before Christianity even came about. The suggestion that the building of a church on a pagan site was a sensible expedient, in order to bring pagans to the Church, is surely only a part of the reason. By the time the present church was built at Rudston in East Yorkshire, the huge standing stone that gives the place its name was already so old that surely nobody in the district could have had the slightest clue why it had been put there. Whatever ceremonies took place around this giant stone immediately before the Christians arrived probably had nothing at all to do with the reason for the stone’s presence; but someone had gone to the trouble of marking out this spot and logically it was somehow sacred to them, and successive generations simply built on something mysterious but obviously in some way ‘holy’.
Less scientific observers have suggested that certain sites have been marked by stones, stone circles and even graves of one sort or another because they were already considered ‘special’ in some way. The emergence of underground streams has been one explanation – in other words a meeting of the world below and the world above. Doubtless this was sometimes the case, but it is certainly not always so. Really adventurous thinkers suggest that the Earth has ‘channels’ of energy, which are known by various names, and that it is where these channels, said to be similar to the meridians in the human body used in acupuncture, cross that people have felt a particular atmosphere and an affinity with the planet. As a result, they chose to place their most sacred structures in such locations.
I have to admit that I stand firmly on the fence in this regard. I well remember entering the crypt of an ancient church near Rosedale in my own county of Yorkshire. In a moment I was overwhelmed by a feeling of energy and an insistent power that I have sometimes encountered in some of our most magnificent cathedrals. I just knew for certain that the site of this crypt had been held in awe and reverence long before the church was even thought about. Don’t ask me how I knew, and certainly don’t ask me to prove the fact.
This is not science of course but we have to remember that although our Stone Age and Bronze Age ancestors were excellent engineers and good mathematicians, they didn’t even know what science meant. To them the world was far less clear-cut than it seems to us with our modern way of thinking. They understood the patterns of stars above their heads and built many of their structures to either copy the patterns they saw, or to point to astronomical events that could be observed from such sites. But surely their motivation was more religious than scientific?
Even modern science cannot answer all our questions, no matter how advanced it considers itself to be. Where did we come from? Where will we go to when our life is over? How can I best live my life so that whatever forces rule the universe will take care of me? What can I do to better ‘own’ or ‘control’ my environment, or at least live in such a state of harmony with it that the crops will keep growing and the Sun will return north each spring?
Some of these questions appear archaic to us these days, but they are still being asked, all over our planet. The truth is that we are animated bits of the Earth and we are inextricably linked to it at every stage of our lives. Would it be so extraordinary if, for some reason we don’t understand, some locations on the Earth were somehow relevant or special to us in a way we still cannot answer directly?
For me the sites mentioned below have a historical fascination, and most of them also have that ‘something else’ that I have been trying to track down for nearly four decades – but I don’t expect I ever will. Nevertheless, to stand and look at the largest standing stone in the British Isles or to crawl into the shady depths of a 3,000-year-old burial chamber is probably enough.