*
The ancient site of Blick Mead lies just 2.75 kilometres (1.7 miles) to the east of Stonehenge, on the edge of the valley of the Salisbury Avon.h The site came to public prominence because it lies just south of the A303 and would be directly threatened if that road were to be widened, enlarged or buried within a tunnel. The archaeological excavations at Blick Mead have been quite small in scale, but they have involved both academic archaeologists and many local volunteers. It is a fine and continuing example of community archaeology.
Blick Mead lies just outside the ramparts of an Iron Age fortified site known as Vespasian’s Camp, which was probably constructed around 500 BC. 7 Modern research into Blick Mead began in 2005 and has mainly been concentrated around the Blick Mead freshwater spring. Research into early maps and estate records has shown that although the area has had at least two ponds, presumably fed by the spring and maintained there to water livestock, there has been little disturbance of the ground below the modern surface. Excavations around the spring have further revealed extensive evidence for Mesolithic settlement in the area, starting around 8000 BC (when, incidentally, the grooves near Stonehenge would still have been visible), and continuing through to the onset of the Neolithic period, in the early fourth millennium BC.
The sheer abundance of struck (i.e. worked) Mesolithic flints found at Blick Mead is remarkable and suggests that this was not a briefly occupied, one-off settlement. By 2018, the excavation had revealed a total of 30,608 Mesolithic flints.8 People returned repeatedly to Blick Mead for some four millennia and they must have been aware that groups of hunter-gatherers had been there previously – simply because of the accumulation of debris on the surface. Very often the supposedly ‘random’ migrations of nomadic bands of hunters follow quite closely defined routes. This helps to avoid conflict with other bands living in the area. It also reflects the fact that game tends to move seasonally and certain areas become harder to exploit in certain seasons. So it is entirely feasible that Blick Mead could have provided a temporary base to several hunter-gatherer communities at different times of the year.
Examination of the many animal bone fragments found at Blick Mead has revealed that about 60 per cent were from giant wild cattle known as aurochs. These huge animals can provide sufficient meat to feed about 200 people and it seems inconceivable that they would have been hunted down and killed merely to provide food for a small family-sized band. Radiocarbon dates suggest that aurochs were being hunted for almost two millennia, from 6650 to 4722 BC. There is also evidence for long-distance travel. A piece of Welsh slate had been fashioned into a tool type found widely on the Weald of Kent, and known as a Horsham point. Analysis of the chemical composition of the enamel of a tooth from a large, Alsatian-type dog found here showed it had spent much of its life in eastern England, possibly even from as far away as the Vale of York.
The site has also produced evidence for at least one probable house, which had been constructed in the shallow hollow – known as a ‘tree-throw pit’ – that is left when a mature tree is blown over in a gale. There was also good evidence that part of the pit had been built up with local pebbles. Finds from the pit suggest that it was occupied sometime in the late fifth millennium BC – in other words, very shortly before, or actually during, the transition into the Neolithic and the new era of farming.9 Sacred places such as Blick Mead would have helped provide stability in what might otherwise have proved turbulent times.
Springs are known to have been important to prehistoric people all over the world, but not just for practical reasons. They were widely understood to provide more than just a supply of drinking water for people, game and domestic animals. Water was seen as a reflector of images and thence a mirror on, and symbol of, life itself. But disturb the tranquil surface and the image distorts, breaks down and vanishes. So water can also become a symbol of death and of the time and process of dying. Below the surface is the realm of death itself and perhaps other worlds and dimensions, inhabited by the powers of nature and the spirits of the ancestors. In many societies, offerings of prized possessions were placed into the waters near springs when somebody died. These were very special places indeed. But the stream and ponds at Blick Mead possessed another, very unexpected and highly unusual secret that would have marked them out from all other sacred springs.
As anyone who regularly buys bottled water knows, spring water can vary hugely in taste and purity. This is not just caused by the rocks and geology alone. The waters from the Blick Mead spring include a naturally occurring red alga known as Hildenbrandia rivularis, which has the remarkable ability to stain flints and stones lying on the beds of the seasonally flowing stream and nearby pond. But the colour of the stain is truly extraordinary: a pinkish-reddish-turquoise, whose tint and intensity will vary according to the strength of sunlight and shading.10 The staining is likely to have been even more marked in Mesolithic times, when levels of water flow would have been higher and would have discouraged the less colourful competing algae that are present in the water today. Given the often rather dreary greys, creams and browns of most flint nodules, the algal-coated stones from the Blick Mead ponds are more than just startling. Even to modern eyes, the bright colours appear truly miraculous, but to the Mesolithic gaze, they must have seemed to be imbued with an extraordinary, deeply spiritual quality.
*
Stonehenge is by far the best-known Neolithic site in Britain, if not in Europe, and the more we investigate its origins and construction, the more extraordinary it becomes. The coloured spring at Blick Mead and the glacial cracks on Salisbury Plain were most remarkable and were regarded as very special by contemporary Mesolithic communities; but interest in the area continued – indeed grew – in the subsequent Neolithic period. However, it was the movement of large stones that really seemed to fire the modern imagination, especially in the decades following the last war. This was also the time when the Loch Ness monster acquired a new life and I wonder whether both were seen as antidotes to the rather drab world of the 1950s.11
The stones in question were not the huge monoliths and lintels that give Stonehenge its distinctive form and shape; these are made from sarsen, a locally occurring rock. The distinctive bluestones (which, despite their name, have a greenish tinge when freshly quarried) are very much smaller than the sarsens that surround them; the larger sarsens weigh about forty tons, the bluestones closer to four. It had been suspected for some time that the bluestones originated outside the area, but it was not finally proven until 1923, when their geological source was shown to be in the region around the Preseli Hills of south-west Wales.12 But how did they get there?
The earliest archaeological theories favoured the use of rafts and the emphasis was entirely on practicality. All explanations to do with the movement and erection of the stones at Stonehenge were treated as engineering problems. In other words, what was the simplest and most efficient way of achieving a particular task? But we have no reason whatsoever to suppose that prehistoric people thought in such a way. Again, as with the axe ‘trade’, we were imposing modern ways of thinking on people who lived in a very different world, a long time ago. Certainly we know that prehistoric people were capable of performing some remarkable feats of construction, but we must not assume that they were obsessed with speed, cost-effectiveness and efficiency in quite the same way as we are. We will discover shortly that when it comes to the movement of bluestones, we must be very careful indeed before we jump to the ‘obvious’ conclusions.
The ultimate practical solution to the movement of bluestones from Preseli to Salisbury Plain – a distance of over 225 kilometres (140 miles) – would be natural. In other words, they weren’t moved by people, but by glaciers, during the Ice Age. Indeed, there is a known and named glacier, the Bristol Glacier, a branch of the much larger Irish Sea Glacier, that moved large quantities of ice from the Irish Sea to the south and east. The glacier scoured out the Avon Gorge and could possibly have moved pieces of bluestone from Preseli to S
alisbury Plain. The idea of transportation by an Ice Age glacier gained much popular support following the publication of a paper in the highly influential scientific journal Nature, in 1971.13 I recall the controversy this caused in the archaeological world but I, in common with most of my colleagues, remained decidedly unconvinced. Having said that, archaeology gave the theory a very fair hearing and in 1991 a long and detailed pro-glacier paper was published in the leading journal of prehistory.14 And even that failed to convince many of us.
It was also about this time that evidence began to emerge that Preseli bluestone was being quarried in south-west Wales by the Neolithic communities there. And despite the glacial theory, there were still no discoveries of unworked bluestone anywhere in the Stonehenge area. By contrast, natural, unworked rocks of sarsen stone occur widely across Salisbury Plain and the surrounding area, where they are often known as ‘grey wethers’,i because of their slight resemblance to sleeping sheep.15
Then in 2003 the Stonehenge Riverside Project got under way. The approach of its archaeologists was much broader. They were interested not just in bluestones, but in how the many components of Stonehenge came into being and how they related to the nearby River Avon and to other, slightly less well-known prehistoric sites, such as the neighbouring henges at Durrington Walls and Woodhenge. The Riverside Project has given rise to further research, much of it devoted to the source and movement of the bluestones, and this has been accompanied by a series of geophysical and aerial surveys that have given us a much better picture of the complexity of the prehistoric landscape around Stonehenge. To describe this work as exciting is missing the point. I suspect we will be pondering its implications for many generations – and of course this will inevitably stimulate further research. And even then, I doubt if we’ll ever understand this remarkable place fully.16
The new research has forced prehistorians to abandon many of the rather simplistic, mechanistic suppositions we had previously made to explain how ancient people performed certain practical tasks. We had always assumed that because there was a large natural waterway, the Bristol Channel and the Severn Estuary, between Preseli and Salisbury Plain, people would have made much use of it when moving the bluestones. But that fails to take into account the underlying motives that inspired ancient communities to transport the stones in the first place. If it was just a matter of acquiring cheap rock for an unimportant structure then yes, a raft would probably have been the right decision. But Stonehenge was never a cheap structure and besides, people were building it for very complex social, historical and spiritual reasons. So we shouldn’t simply assume that the bluestones would have been moved in the most efficient, cost-effective manner. That would be rather like suggesting that the Queen should have travelled to Westminster Abbey by bus for her coronation: quick and cheap, yes, but not entirely appropriate to the person, or the occasion.
In the final three decades of the twentieth century, growing prosperity gave rise to an increasing number of so-called rescue or contractual excavations, in which land was excavated ahead of commercial development, for roads, houses, industrial areas and gravel quarries. There was also an upsurge in university research, much of it funded by European sources. This new work showed that the Neolithic population of Britain and north-western Europe was much larger than had previously been supposed and that the landscape was more fully developed and integrated. It became clear that, quite early in the Neolithic period, the new farming settlements did not sit in lonely isolation within small clearings in vast tracts of ancient forest. People tended to settle in naturally open or lightly wooded landscapes and then they would start to clear even more land for arable and grazing, as the community expanded.
It soon also became apparent that the growing number of Neolithic and Bronze Age farms and settlements kept in regular touch. There are, for example, close similarities in the styles and motifs of pottery decoration right across Britain, from southern England to Orkney and the Highlands. Houses too, were closely similar and recent research has shown that live animals were often moved many hundreds of miles. So by the early fourth millennium BC, regular communication between different communities was an essential component of social and economic life. To have worked effectively, this would have required a mutually agreed network of roads, tracks and navigable rivers. Many of these routes would probably have marked out and run along the edges of tribal and community boundaries. In other words, the landscape was rapidly becoming partitioned and developed. Such landscapes, however, only work well if the settlements within them remain on good terms and the people communicate regularly with each other. And this is where ideology and religion entered the picture.
While the glacier/human debate about the Stonehenge bluestones was in its final stages in the late 1990s, one or two archaeologists began to wonder whether the stones had been moved from south-west Wales by water, as was still commonly supposed, or by a different route, overland. By this time, too, there was a growing body of evidence that the movement of people, objects and livestock was not just about trade and exchange but was an important way of maintaining peace and social cohesion. Very often these exchanges took place during important ceremonies to do with the main ‘rites of passage’ in peoples’ lives: at birth, marriage and death. As today, these were occasions when people from many regions would have come together for a family and community gathering.
If this theory is correct, then it makes little sense to transport something like the bluestones by sea, as the whole point of moving them was to allow everyone in the areas they passed through to see and admire them. So the stones’ journey was part of much larger ceremonies. It was about coming together to show communal appreciation and respect. I would imagine the passage of a bluestone through a settlement might have been rather like the journey of a medieval king or queen’s corpse from the place where he or she died to their eventual final resting place, in Westminster Abbey. The surviving Eleanor Crosses of eastern England (named after Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I) are a good example of this. These fine monuments are found from Lincolnshire to Hertfordshire and were erected by Edward I between 1291 and 1295 to mark the overnight resting places of his wife’s body, on her last journey to London.17 I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there weren’t similar monuments, probably erected by local people and maybe made from wood or fired clay (so they are unlikely to have survived), in the various places where the bluestones might have halted on their journey (or journeys) to Stonehenge.
The latest work carried out by Dr Mike Parker Pearson and the Riverside Project team has convincingly proven that the bluestones were moved overland from Preseli and probably once formed the walls and roof of a chambered tombj that was transported block by block all the way to Salisbury Plain, where the stones were used at Stonehenge and at a newly discovered site, which they named Bluestonehenge, built on the Avenue, the ceremonial routeway from the River Avon.18 We can only guess at the emotions people experienced, as a procession or succession of bluestones slowly passed through their communities, but I strongly suspect they were profound. I can remember as a child the feeling of awe, mixed with fear and wild over excitement, as on 2 June 1953 I watched Her Majesty’s magical golden coach pass through a wet and gloomy Trafalgar Square on its return from the coronation service in Westminster Abbey. I will never forget that day. I suspect the witnesses of the bluestones’ journey south towards Salisbury Plain would have treasured similar memories for the rest of their lives, too.
As we can see from the debates surrounding the movement and route of the bluestones, prehistorians have had problems getting inside what one might call the ‘mindset’ – the way of thinking – of Neolithic and Bronze Age people. We have had to rethink our interpretations at a very profound level and we must be very careful not to make another set of patronizing assumptions: prehistoric societies were not simpler than ours are today. The people were certainly less technologically advanced than us, but that does not mean that their imaginations were less developed or
creative.
Take buildings as basic as a house, or a place of worship. Today, the two are completely separate and the way people behave in each is entirely different. We still regard churches and places of worship as special in many respects. Whatever our beliefs, or lack of them, most of us appreciate that structures like Stonehenge and certain great cathedrals possess numinousk qualities that transcend daily life. Nobody knows what might lie behind the ‘magic’ of these places and I suspect it will always defy rational analysis; but when I visit them I can feel it – and that’s enough for me. I have no wish to destroy it by seeking explanations. I leave that for people who have had the misfortune never to have experienced such things. I cherish the fact that, for me, it’s there – and out of reach – far beyond truth or meaning.
a See Scene 5, pages 78–81.
b Which we visited in the previous Scene, pages 54–5.
c Although I have: Stonehenge: The Story of a Sacred Landscape (Head of Zeus, London, 2016).
d The old A344 (now closed).
e A hole dug to receive a post. Quite often these will preserve a post ‘ghost’, a darker stain in the soil left by the long-decayed post.
f The word ‘solstice’ is derived from two Latin words: sol, meaning sun, and sisto, meaning to stand still.
g Gerald S. Hawkins, Stonehenge Decoded (Dell Publishing, New York, 1965).
h Avon is the Celtic word for ‘river’. There are six River Avons in Britain.
Scenes from Prehistoric Life Page 9
