Wiltshire's holy hills and sacred stones
‘How grand! How wonderful! How incomprehensible!’ exclaimed Richard Colt Hoare, the early 19th-century aristocrat and antiquarian, of Stonehenge. Another, more famous and earlier antiquarian, William Stukeley, described Wiltshire’s other great stone circle, Avebury, as ‘stupendous’, even comparing it to the pyramids of Egypt. A third Wiltshire monument – Silbury Hill, one of the world’s largest man-made mounds – has similarly been a magnet for superlatives: in the 17th century, Stukeley remarked that it was ‘astonishing’ and ‘magnificent’.
Today, Wiltshire has the highest concentration of prehistoric World Heritage monuments on the planet. But why does this county in southwest England boast such an extraordinary concentration of monumental Stone Age culture in such a relatively small area?
New research suggests that during the Stone Age, the Wiltshire landscape looked very different to how it does today. More than 500 square kilometres of countryside was littered with hundreds of thousands of strange rocks, now known as sarsen stones. This vast mass of boulders was useful from a purely constructional viewpoint: without this resource, Stonehenge and Avebury simply couldn’t have been built, at least not on the scale that they were. But the research is revealing that these rocks were also important in another, much more spiritual way.
To prehistoric people, fascinated by the land from both economic and religious perspectives, the presence of all those rocks would have been a mystery crying out for an explanation. The boulder-strewn landscape was not only completely unlike any other in Britain, it was also fundamentally inexplicable. The rocks bore no obvious relationship to the underlying geology. They sat strewn across grass-covered fields or open woodland, often lying in groups or in long procession-like lines. Beneath them was simply a layer of soil and, a few metres down, natural chalk or gravel.
Just as modern humans seek explanations for the things they see in the natural world, so, too, did our pre-scientific and prehistoric forebears – but how did they explain the origin of these mysterious rocks? Now, long-hidden evidence is shedding new light on the probable significance of Stonehenge and Wiltshire’s other prehistoric World Heritage sites, suggesting that the rocks weren’t just used for building stone circles, but had other, less obvious, and perhaps more telling, uses.
Sarsen structure
Recent excavations at Silbury, the 40-metre-high, 4,400-year-old man-made hill 26 kilometres north of Stonehenge, have shown that hundreds of sarsens were deliberately included in the matrix of the monument, almost certainly not for purely constructional purposes. As the sarsens were 50 per cent heavier than the chalk rubble used as the primary building material, it would have been much more difficult and time-consuming to haul them up the side of the hill while it was under construction.
Sarsens were included in two specific construction phases: relatively early on, and during the later period when the main part of the mound was constructed. During the latter phase, the sarsens were included in discrete groups within the hill’s chalk rubble matrix. Only 40 or so were found in the recent excavations of a small section, so it’s likely that there were hundreds in total.
What’s more, recently re-examined photographs taken during excavations in the 1960s clearly show three more groups of sarsens in the matrix of the upper part of the monument. Their presence and potential importance seem to have been ignored by the excavators 40 years ago – presumably because they were looking for evidence of structures, and scattered rocks weren’t perceived as being relevant.
Because the prehistoric builders of Silbury Hill had deliberately chosen to include sarsens, rather than restricting themselves to the lighter chalk rubble, archaeologists have concluded that their inclusion must have been symbolic rather then purely functional. But what did they symbolise?
To answer that crucial question is to unlock the secrets of the Neolithic mind – and perhaps even to gain a fuller understanding of why Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill were built in that extraordinary boulder-strewn landscape in the first place. But to do so, we must look at other, seemingly unrelated prehistoric monuments – and to scholarly disciplines not normally associated with conventional archaeology.
Laid to rest
The first clues are found in the burial mounds of Britain and Ireland. In Wiltshire itself, close to Silbury, are two elongated mounds, or long barrows, that would normally be interpreted as burial monuments. But these two earthen structures contain no burial chambers or human remains; instead, they seem to represent eternal resting places for sarsen stones.
One, South Street Long Barrow, less than two kilometres west of Silbury, has around ten small sarsen stones located where the funerary chamber and human remains would normally be. Others are incorporated in clusters into the matrix of the mound.
The second non-funerary mound, Beckhampton Road Long Barrow, also includes a number of sarsens – and both monuments were deliberately built on top of natural sarsen boulders.
Elsewhere, standing stones were actually erected inside burial chambers – for example, in Ireland at Loughcrew in Meath and Carrowkeel in Sligo, and Bryn Celli Ddu in Anglesey, Wales, as well as in Brittany. At a great burial mound at Fourknocks in County Meath, prehistoric people had placed an oval cross-section cobble – probably representing a human soul – next to a human skull. Nearby, at another burial place at Knowth, Stone Age people put egg-shaped cobbles on the sacred space immediately outside the tomb.
This suggests that rocks, stones and boulders may have symbolised or embodied dead ancestors or their spirits, and this theory is supported by extensive historical evidence. This tradition has been in the folklore of Britain and Ireland for millennia, evolving over thousands of years in several phases.
The most ancient – the pre-Christian, prehistoric phase – includes stones that were seen as being spiritually alive. They were perceived as being able to move, speak, drink, dance and even bleed. Indeed, according to ancient tradition, the stones of Stonehenge itself originally danced, while two standing stones in Oxfordshire are said to ‘walk’ down to a local river to drink.
Several standing stones in Ireland were believed to speak, scream or foretell the future: the Stone of Destiny in Tara was said to scream in approval when the rightful king touched it, while others functioned
as oracles. In County Cavan, the Crom Cruach stone was considered a god and was said to be accompanied by a dozen ‘standing stone’ assistants.
Other Irish folklore describes standing stones as ancient pre-Celtic giants turned to stone by druids, and in several other cases, natural rocks (as distinct from standing stones) were seen as, or were associated with, prehistoric deities. Other stones were seen as embodying or containing the souls of the dead – or even the souls of unborn children.
In Wales and Ireland, ancient warriors would deposit their souls in the form of stones before engaging in battle, collecting them later if they survived. The stones that remained were, by definition, the souls of the fallen. Piles of stones associated with such traditions still survive near Galway in Ireland and in Powys and Mid Glamorgan in Wales.
But this anthropomorphisation of stones and rocks isn’t simply an ancient British and Irish phenomenon, but a tradition with a worldwide distribution: humans in general can be transformed into stones in more than 20 different cultural traditions, including those of Lithuania, Greece, China, the Pacific islands, Greenland, Alaska and Brazil. In India, tradition says that one can be reincarnated as a rock. In Scandinavia, rocks are seen as petrified giants, trolls and dead humans. Icelandic folklore holds that the dead live on inside stones.
These disparate pre-scientific cultures sought answers to the same fundamental spiritual questions and came to startlingly similar conclusions, in which our souls somehow continue to reside within the natural world. Strangely shaped or mysterious rocks tended to be prime candidates as embodiments of the souls of the fallen or of ancestral spirits. It imbued the natural world with spirituality – and forced humanity to respect it in spiritual terms.
Stone souls
All of this archaeological and folklore evidence from cultures around the world suggests that Silbury was, after all, a burial place for the dead – not for their bodies, but for their souls. It also suggests that the bizarre landscape of ancient Wiltshire may have been seen as spiritually more powerful than anywhere else in Britain. If this was the case, the chieftaincies in the area would certainly have exploited that religious significance and could conceivably have prospered as a direct result of the spiritual authority that the landscape would have conferred on local rulers.
Wiltshire’s stone monuments should now be seen as having possessed an additional dimension, for in Neolithic times, the great stones of Stonehenge and Avebury may have been viewed as spiritually alive – not merely as temples to the gods or ancestors, but actually embodying those spirits and deities themselves.
Where did the sarsen stones come from?
Between 60 and 40 million years ago, silt and sand were laid down, either as river-borne alluvium or as marine sediments, across parts of southern England. Then, around 35 million years ago, these layers
of sand were covered up by additional deposits and were subsequently saturated with silica-rich groundwater.
Over time, the concentration of silica increased further – possibly as a result of increases in acidity or the evaporation of the water in which it was dissolved. When the water could no longer hold the silica in solution, the mineral precipitated out and filled the pores between the grains of sand. As the precipitation continued, the silica began to act as a mineralogical glue, sticking trillions of grains of sand together to form a two-metre-thick layer of solid rock, known as sarsen, immediately below what had originally been the water table.
Over the past three million years – particularly during the last ice age – water erosion and freeze-thaw processes exposed, eroded and broke up this crust of sarsen into millions of loose boulders that remained scattered across the landscape. Many of these massive rocks gradually slid down valley sides, accumulating at the bottom of the slope.
This bizarre, boulder-strewn terrain survived until medieval and early modern times. But as agriculture increased and became more intensive, water erosion washed soil from ploughed fields down onto valley bottoms, burying huge numbers of sarsen stones. Many of the remaining rocks were then cleared in order to increase the amount of arable land. And as towns developed and grew, large numbers of sarsens were broken up for use as building material. Today, only a few small areas are left – notably Fyfield Down, Overton Down, Lockeridge and Piggledene in Wiltshire and Portesham in Dorset.
How was Silbury Hill built?
Silbury is the largest man-made hill in Europe and one of the three largest in the world. Built by Neolithic tribesmen in around 2400 BC, it has been a World Heritage site since 1986. Yet it’s Britain’s biggest archaeological mystery: for hundreds of years, people suspected that it was a giant tomb for an ancient king, but successive generations of investigators have failed to find any evidence of human burial.
During the 20th century, archaeologists concluded that it was a non-funerary religious monument – perhaps built as a stepped truncated cone, in some ways reminiscent of Egypt’s first pyramid, the Mesopotamian ziggurats and the Mesoamerican pyramids in today’s Mexico. However, the most recent research shows that Silbury Hill was never a step pyramid and never contained the mortal remains of a king or anyone else. But a new investigation, led by English Heritage archaeologist Jim Leary, has revealed exactly how the monument’s complex interior was constructed.
First, the builders removed the turf and topsoil from the entire circular area on which the mound would be built. Then, a low mound – just 80 centimetres high and ten metres across – was constructed, but not of any material available onsite. Instead, the builders seem to have deliberately gone some distance away to obtain pure gravel – presumably for some unknown ritual purpose.
The next phase doubled the mound’s diameter by piling up a mixture of imported turf and soil around the edge of the gravel, transforming it into a flat disc-shaped platform, which was then revetted with a wattle fence, held up by a series of wooden stakes.
Several pits (two were found in an excavated section, suggesting there could be up to six in total) were then dug into the surface of the gravel mound, into which were placed a mixture of yew berries, flint flakes from tool-making activity, and animal bone – presumably the remains of ceremonial or religious activities conducted nearby. The mound was then enlarged using a mixture of chalk, gravel, soil, turf and 200–400 small sarsen boulders – each material from a different geological source – to make it five metres high and 30–35 metres across. The chalk rubble was obtained from a ditch that now encircled the monument.
The mound then underwent a series of five expansions – each made up of chalk rubble extracted from the ditch – making it 25 metres high and 70–80 metres in diameter. Finally, the prehistoric builders included 15–20 clusters of broken sarsen stones in the chalk rubble as the hill reached a height of around 42 metres and a diameter of 160 metres.
It’s unclear whether any rituals were carried out on the summit, but the remains of several animals were found in excavations carried out during the mid-20th century, indicating that some form of sacrificial ceremony took place there.
July 08
Today, Wiltshire has the highest concentration of prehistoric World Heritage monuments on the planet. But why does this county in southwest England boast such an extraordinary concentration of monumental Stone Age culture in such a relatively small area?
New research suggests that during the Stone Age, the Wiltshire landscape looked very different to how it does today. More than 500 square kilometres of countryside was littered with hundreds of thousands of strange rocks, now known as sarsen stones. This vast mass of boulders was useful from a purely constructional viewpoint: without this resource, Stonehenge and Avebury simply couldn’t have been built, at least not on the scale that they were. But the research is revealing that these rocks were also important in another, much more spiritual way.
To prehistoric people, fascinated by the land from both economic and religious perspectives, the presence of all those rocks would have been a mystery crying out for an explanation. The boulder-strewn landscape was not only completely unlike any other in Britain, it was also fundamentally inexplicable. The rocks bore no obvious relationship to the underlying geology. They sat strewn across grass-covered fields or open woodland, often lying in groups or in long procession-like lines. Beneath them was simply a layer of soil and, a few metres down, natural chalk or gravel.
Just as modern humans seek explanations for the things they see in the natural world, so, too, did our pre-scientific and prehistoric forebears – but how did they explain the origin of these mysterious rocks? Now, long-hidden evidence is shedding new light on the probable significance of Stonehenge and Wiltshire’s other prehistoric World Heritage sites, suggesting that the rocks weren’t just used for building stone circles, but had other, less obvious, and perhaps more telling, uses.
Sarsen structure
Recent excavations at Silbury, the 40-metre-high, 4,400-year-old man-made hill 26 kilometres north of Stonehenge, have shown that hundreds of sarsens were deliberately included in the matrix of the monument, almost certainly not for purely constructional purposes. As the sarsens were 50 per cent heavier than the chalk rubble used as the primary building material, it would have been much more difficult and time-consuming to haul them up the side of the hill while it was under construction.
Sarsens were included in two specific construction phases: relatively early on, and during the later period when the main part of the mound was constructed. During the latter phase, the sarsens were included in discrete groups within the hill’s chalk rubble matrix. Only 40 or so were found in the recent excavations of a small section, so it’s likely that there were hundreds in total.
What’s more, recently re-examined photographs taken during excavations in the 1960s clearly show three more groups of sarsens in the matrix of the upper part of the monument. Their presence and potential importance seem to have been ignored by the excavators 40 years ago – presumably because they were looking for evidence of structures, and scattered rocks weren’t perceived as being relevant.
Because the prehistoric builders of Silbury Hill had deliberately chosen to include sarsens, rather than restricting themselves to the lighter chalk rubble, archaeologists have concluded that their inclusion must have been symbolic rather then purely functional. But what did they symbolise?
To answer that crucial question is to unlock the secrets of the Neolithic mind – and perhaps even to gain a fuller understanding of why Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill were built in that extraordinary boulder-strewn landscape in the first place. But to do so, we must look at other, seemingly unrelated prehistoric monuments – and to scholarly disciplines not normally associated with conventional archaeology.
Start the slideshow (8 pictures)
Laid to rest
The first clues are found in the burial mounds of Britain and Ireland. In Wiltshire itself, close to Silbury, are two elongated mounds, or long barrows, that would normally be interpreted as burial monuments. But these two earthen structures contain no burial chambers or human remains; instead, they seem to represent eternal resting places for sarsen stones.
One, South Street Long Barrow, less than two kilometres west of Silbury, has around ten small sarsen stones located where the funerary chamber and human remains would normally be. Others are incorporated in clusters into the matrix of the mound.
The second non-funerary mound, Beckhampton Road Long Barrow, also includes a number of sarsens – and both monuments were deliberately built on top of natural sarsen boulders.
Elsewhere, standing stones were actually erected inside burial chambers – for example, in Ireland at Loughcrew in Meath and Carrowkeel in Sligo, and Bryn Celli Ddu in Anglesey, Wales, as well as in Brittany. At a great burial mound at Fourknocks in County Meath, prehistoric people had placed an oval cross-section cobble – probably representing a human soul – next to a human skull. Nearby, at another burial place at Knowth, Stone Age people put egg-shaped cobbles on the sacred space immediately outside the tomb.
This suggests that rocks, stones and boulders may have symbolised or embodied dead ancestors or their spirits, and this theory is supported by extensive historical evidence. This tradition has been in the folklore of Britain and Ireland for millennia, evolving over thousands of years in several phases.
The most ancient – the pre-Christian, prehistoric phase – includes stones that were seen as being spiritually alive. They were perceived as being able to move, speak, drink, dance and even bleed. Indeed, according to ancient tradition, the stones of Stonehenge itself originally danced, while two standing stones in Oxfordshire are said to ‘walk’ down to a local river to drink.
Several standing stones in Ireland were believed to speak, scream or foretell the future: the Stone of Destiny in Tara was said to scream in approval when the rightful king touched it, while others functioned
as oracles. In County Cavan, the Crom Cruach stone was considered a god and was said to be accompanied by a dozen ‘standing stone’ assistants.
Other Irish folklore describes standing stones as ancient pre-Celtic giants turned to stone by druids, and in several other cases, natural rocks (as distinct from standing stones) were seen as, or were associated with, prehistoric deities. Other stones were seen as embodying or containing the souls of the dead – or even the souls of unborn children.
In Wales and Ireland, ancient warriors would deposit their souls in the form of stones before engaging in battle, collecting them later if they survived. The stones that remained were, by definition, the souls of the fallen. Piles of stones associated with such traditions still survive near Galway in Ireland and in Powys and Mid Glamorgan in Wales.
But this anthropomorphisation of stones and rocks isn’t simply an ancient British and Irish phenomenon, but a tradition with a worldwide distribution: humans in general can be transformed into stones in more than 20 different cultural traditions, including those of Lithuania, Greece, China, the Pacific islands, Greenland, Alaska and Brazil. In India, tradition says that one can be reincarnated as a rock. In Scandinavia, rocks are seen as petrified giants, trolls and dead humans. Icelandic folklore holds that the dead live on inside stones.
These disparate pre-scientific cultures sought answers to the same fundamental spiritual questions and came to startlingly similar conclusions, in which our souls somehow continue to reside within the natural world. Strangely shaped or mysterious rocks tended to be prime candidates as embodiments of the souls of the fallen or of ancestral spirits. It imbued the natural world with spirituality – and forced humanity to respect it in spiritual terms.
Stone souls
All of this archaeological and folklore evidence from cultures around the world suggests that Silbury was, after all, a burial place for the dead – not for their bodies, but for their souls. It also suggests that the bizarre landscape of ancient Wiltshire may have been seen as spiritually more powerful than anywhere else in Britain. If this was the case, the chieftaincies in the area would certainly have exploited that religious significance and could conceivably have prospered as a direct result of the spiritual authority that the landscape would have conferred on local rulers.
Wiltshire’s stone monuments should now be seen as having possessed an additional dimension, for in Neolithic times, the great stones of Stonehenge and Avebury may have been viewed as spiritually alive – not merely as temples to the gods or ancestors, but actually embodying those spirits and deities themselves.
Where did the sarsen stones come from?
Between 60 and 40 million years ago, silt and sand were laid down, either as river-borne alluvium or as marine sediments, across parts of southern England. Then, around 35 million years ago, these layers
of sand were covered up by additional deposits and were subsequently saturated with silica-rich groundwater.
Over time, the concentration of silica increased further – possibly as a result of increases in acidity or the evaporation of the water in which it was dissolved. When the water could no longer hold the silica in solution, the mineral precipitated out and filled the pores between the grains of sand. As the precipitation continued, the silica began to act as a mineralogical glue, sticking trillions of grains of sand together to form a two-metre-thick layer of solid rock, known as sarsen, immediately below what had originally been the water table.
Over the past three million years – particularly during the last ice age – water erosion and freeze-thaw processes exposed, eroded and broke up this crust of sarsen into millions of loose boulders that remained scattered across the landscape. Many of these massive rocks gradually slid down valley sides, accumulating at the bottom of the slope.
This bizarre, boulder-strewn terrain survived until medieval and early modern times. But as agriculture increased and became more intensive, water erosion washed soil from ploughed fields down onto valley bottoms, burying huge numbers of sarsen stones. Many of the remaining rocks were then cleared in order to increase the amount of arable land. And as towns developed and grew, large numbers of sarsens were broken up for use as building material. Today, only a few small areas are left – notably Fyfield Down, Overton Down, Lockeridge and Piggledene in Wiltshire and Portesham in Dorset.
How was Silbury Hill built?
Silbury is the largest man-made hill in Europe and one of the three largest in the world. Built by Neolithic tribesmen in around 2400 BC, it has been a World Heritage site since 1986. Yet it’s Britain’s biggest archaeological mystery: for hundreds of years, people suspected that it was a giant tomb for an ancient king, but successive generations of investigators have failed to find any evidence of human burial.
During the 20th century, archaeologists concluded that it was a non-funerary religious monument – perhaps built as a stepped truncated cone, in some ways reminiscent of Egypt’s first pyramid, the Mesopotamian ziggurats and the Mesoamerican pyramids in today’s Mexico. However, the most recent research shows that Silbury Hill was never a step pyramid and never contained the mortal remains of a king or anyone else. But a new investigation, led by English Heritage archaeologist Jim Leary, has revealed exactly how the monument’s complex interior was constructed.
First, the builders removed the turf and topsoil from the entire circular area on which the mound would be built. Then, a low mound – just 80 centimetres high and ten metres across – was constructed, but not of any material available onsite. Instead, the builders seem to have deliberately gone some distance away to obtain pure gravel – presumably for some unknown ritual purpose.
The next phase doubled the mound’s diameter by piling up a mixture of imported turf and soil around the edge of the gravel, transforming it into a flat disc-shaped platform, which was then revetted with a wattle fence, held up by a series of wooden stakes.
Several pits (two were found in an excavated section, suggesting there could be up to six in total) were then dug into the surface of the gravel mound, into which were placed a mixture of yew berries, flint flakes from tool-making activity, and animal bone – presumably the remains of ceremonial or religious activities conducted nearby. The mound was then enlarged using a mixture of chalk, gravel, soil, turf and 200–400 small sarsen boulders – each material from a different geological source – to make it five metres high and 30–35 metres across. The chalk rubble was obtained from a ditch that now encircled the monument.
The mound then underwent a series of five expansions – each made up of chalk rubble extracted from the ditch – making it 25 metres high and 70–80 metres in diameter. Finally, the prehistoric builders included 15–20 clusters of broken sarsen stones in the chalk rubble as the hill reached a height of around 42 metres and a diameter of 160 metres.
It’s unclear whether any rituals were carried out on the summit, but the remains of several animals were found in excavations carried out during the mid-20th century, indicating that some form of sacrificial ceremony took place there.
July 08
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