The Winter Solstice at Bru na Boinne by Penny Dolan

In four days time, on the 21^st of December, it will be the annual Winter Solstice. On that morning, a remarkable event takes place at Bru na Boinne, a Neolithic site in County Meath in the Ancient East of Ireland and within sight of the Hill of Tara. This area holds an ancient group of tombs and monuments, constructed around 3,200 BC, and said to be older than the Great Pyramid at Giza or Stonehenge. 

 

Each year, at midwinter, the Solstice sun shines into one particular tomb, the largest of several  grass-topped mounds. The beam of light enters through a cunning opening and reaches along the pitch-dark corridor, deep into the core of the passage tomb. There, for a few minutes, the light widens to shine around the cruciform space where the bones of the dead ancestors waited. Why these people needed to send news of the returning sun so deep into the place of the dead, and in this way, we can only imagine.

This annual alignment was, somehow, designed and constructed centuries ago but now, every year, a small group of lucky people wait within the deep darkness to witness the first Solstice light slide into the tomb themselves, while crowds gather outside on the grassy slopes, wishing they could be there in the darkness too.

However, ordinary visitors can experience a false dawn daily, standing within the burial mound as the tour guide turns off the torch. For a second, one feels a flicker of fear at being buried in the dark forever but then, as eyes adjust to the darkness, the thin thread of daylight appears again. Not a true Solstice, but still a memorable effect. How, one wonders, was this all planned and built and why? And who observed it, beyond the eyeless corpses?  Looking up, the roof of the central chamber is remarkably beautiful, comprising a series of flat stones laying one over the other in concentric circles. If one stone should shift, what then? 

This major tomb or temple, as described above, wears a more recently historical name. This tomb is called New Grange, after one of the granges or store-houses built there by Cistercian monks in medieval times, who valued the wide and fertile valley of the once-navigable River Boyne.

This same fertility must have attracted the early people to the valley in Neolithic times, creating a community of farmers and traders settled and wealthy enough as a group to support the construction of these sacred monuments. Beyond that, we know little. Externally, the tomb doesn’t feel as magical as I might wish, because not long ago, the circular walls were re-faced with large, white imported stones of a kind found scattered around the site. Their crystalline quality, one theory suggested, enabled the great tomb to be brightly visible for miles around, an idea that appealed to the various funding bodies, although to me the bright cladding adds a strange rather than a magnificent quality.

Even so, at the entrance, one must feel impressed, noting the angled roof-box set above the main entrance to let in the midwinter light,  and the enormous boulder placed to guard the doorway. After all this ages, the huge stone still bears rolling, circling carvings that have become emblematic of Bru na Boinne.

Similar carvings decorate the walls of the Knowth tombs nearby on the complex site, where one large grass-topped tomb is surrounded by several smaller mounds and evidence of henges and kist burials. The gigantic “kerbstones” set into the outer walls would have been, so the guide explained, specially chosen for their textures, soft colours and shapes. The surface of each stone inspired its own decoration, whether it is swirling and interwoven waves, circular “sun pattern” carvings or both or even an early sundial on a flat rock, each forming part of this ancient art gallery.

Meanwhile, inside the tomb at Knowth, a smaller and less crowded space than New Grange, there were a couple of chambers, and a chance to gaze down one simple passage, lit by lamps. I waited till all the others had gone and stood there awhile, taking in the more than magical atmosphere of this place. Then I hurried out into the warm, blessed sunlight again.

All good wishes for your own Winter Solstice celebrations and all your holiday festivals.

Penny Dolan

Cairnholy and Wayland's Smithy: Neolithic connections

Here is the massive, and massively impressive, neolithic chambered long barrow of Wayland's Smithy, a step and a stride off the prehistoric track called the Ridgeway, near Uffington in Oxfordshire. The barrow was restored in the early 1960s following excavations by  Stuart Piggot and Richard Atkinson, and is believed to have been built in two phases: a small timber burial chamber built around 3590 and 3550 BCE and a later stone-chambered long barrow around 3460 to 3400 BCE. So... very, very old. As we live locally, we often take Polly our dog there, and she enjoys exploring it.

The barrow is entered by a passageway situated behind the middle two stones of the imposing facade. It was presumably blocked by a door once upon a time, and leads into a cruciform chamber.

As Polly likes to demonstrate, you can turn right, or left, or go straight on. In each case you will find yourself in a small 'room' where bones of the dead once lay. Enormous capstones roof the chamber, but if you stand on top you can now peek down through gaps which were doubtless filled in when the tomb was in use.

Behind the burial chamber, the mound of the long barrow stretches for over 180 feet (56 m), subsiding in height as it goes, and lined on either side with marker stones.

But the purpose of this post is not to tell you about Wayland's Smithy per se - you can look it up online or find books to tell you all about it and the legend associated with it. No: what I want to do is show you pictures of another long barrow far to the north, which we came across by accident this summer, on holiday in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. It is Cairn Holy, near the village of Carsluith.  Here, up a rocky path, on the flank of a hill with views of the sea, are two chambered cairns. Or that's how the notices describe them. To me, no expert, but keenly familiar with the long barrows of Oxfordshire and Wiltshire, they are simply miniature versions of Wayland's Smithy. Here is the facade of Cairn Holy 1. It's a little gem.

With me and Polly for scale, you can see how much daintier it is than mighty Wayland's Smithy, but nevertheless the similarities are striking. Behind two tall central stones - the entrance stones, one might call them -  is a narrow passage and then a burial chamber or kist.

This box-like construction may have been the original tomb, with the elaborate facade and long barrow added at a later phase. No bones have been found in the acid soil, but part of a jadeite axe lay here - jadeite traded or brought from the Alps - and a stone carved or engraved with a spiral pattern, which is now in Edinburgh. Behind the entrance a long barrow slopes back down the hill, edged with marker stones in precisely the same way as at Wayland's Smithy.

Just a short distance up the hill is the second tomb, Cairn Holy 2, built to a similar plan. Silhouetted against the light like a finger pointing to the sky is the tallest of the two entrance stones, and you can clearly see the lid or capstone of the box-like chamber. In this tomb, a flint knife and arrowhead were found, and fragments of five or six neolithic 'Beaker' type pots.

In the picture below you can see Polly taking an archeological interest in the entrance. And there's the sea in the distance. Such a view!

She was absolutely fascinated. What could live in there? And then she explored the roof.

The point of this post is not so much to show you pictures of our dog even though she is clearly the Keenest Brain in Dogdom, to quote Dodie Smith. Rather, I wanted to share the thought that struck me while I was clambering around this breathtaking site: Cairnholy is around 350 miles north of Wayland's Smithy: a distance that even by car travelling on a motorway takes six and a half hours. Yet having visited both, I feel convinced that the people who built Wayland's Smithy would, immediately, have recognised and understood the architecture and cultural purpose of Cairn Holy. And vice-versa. They would have known exactly what the other structure meant, and what it was for.

I don't know which was built first, but in view of the recent revelation that the domestic architecture of Skara Brae in distant Orkney both pre-dates and is replicated by the internal planning of hut dwellings at Durrington Walls near Stonehenge, it wouldn't at all surprise me to learn that Cairn Holy predates Wayland's Smithy. That this culture, this style of funeral monument, worked its way south, not the other way about. Our neolithic ancestors were not, we are discovering, parochial. They travelled widely by land and sea, and traded in ideas and beliefs as well as artefacts.

But what precisely those beliefs might have been? Like Polly, we can only wonder.

The Magic of Flag Fen - Katherine Langrish

Around 1300 BC, a Bronze Age community living close to a rich wetland area near what is now Peterborough decided to build a massive wooden causeway leading from a point on dry land (now known as Fengate) across the marshy pools and waterways to a natural island about a kilometre out. The causeway was constructed as five long rows of tall sharpened stakes driven into the marsh, with a criss-cross of timbers and brushwood laid between them on which people could walk. It's been estimated over 60,000 individual timbers were used to build the causeway, which followed the line of an earlier, Neolithic track - but the low-lying areas around the island were gradually becoming inundated. The site, known as Flag Fen, was discovered in 1982 by the archeologist Francis Pryor (well known to fans of the popular archeology show Time Team). Archeological investigation has been going at Flag Fen ever since, and there is now a fascinating museum and visitor centre. I’ve long wanted to go there, and my wish came true one bright sunny day a few months ago.

People lived on the margins of the fen in roundhouses like this one, farming, hunting and fishing. They kept sheep, an ancient breed similar to these in the picture below, which were trotting loose about the rural site.

The day I was there, house-martins were flying like darts in and out of the roundhouse, working away to feed their young, who were peeking shyly out of the mud nests plastered to the beams. I wonder if this would have happened in 1300 BC when the fire would have been continually smoking? Perhaps the martins would have built their nests under  the shaggy eaves.

Anyway, within these snug., safe houses - Francis Pryor has described how during the great storm of 1987 he stood in the doorway of the first reconstructed roundhouse on this site, watching sheet-metal roofs tear loose and blow away from the nearby industrial site - our Bronze Age ancestors lived and worked, and, setting out along the causeway they had built, performed ceremonies and made ritual offerings to the waters.

The acid, anaerobic peaty waters don’t preserve bones very well, but they are excellent for preserving wood, leather, and metal. Many bronze swords and spearheads were given to the marsh; gold earrings, pins and brooches have also been found. To whom or what were these dedicated? Perhaps to the dead, the ancestors – there are burial mounds on the island – or perhaps to the spirits of the water and the wild. We may guess; probably we will never know.

There's even a section of excavated causeway visible in situ, albeit housed for protection inside a hut where it's kept from drying out (and therefore crumbling into dust) by a constantly dripping sprinkler system. To stand looking down on the actual timbers which prehistoric people once trod is fascinating even if not, in such a context, terribly romantic. However the photo below doesn't show that the concrete walls of the hut have been painted with trompe l'oeil murals of the prehistoric fen in spring, summer, autumn and winter, stretching away to the horizon, populated with gulls and herons and moorhens and wild ducks.

In his book Britain BC Francis Pryor writes:

The post alignment is indeed a causeway, but it’s far more than that. The main evidence for this is provided by the nearly three hundred finds of prehistoric metalwork made to date. They were found within the area of the posts, and also along their southern side, but not along the northern side which faced ‘out’ ... into the wide-open fen. It’s tempting to view this in symbolic terms: the open fen to the north was seen as being hostile or untamed. It was on this side of the posts that we found the remains of dogs, and the only complete human skeleton. They were in extremely poor condition after lying for thousands of years in the acid peat ... but I reckon the death occurred in the Iron Age – a period when Flag Fen was still in use as an important ceremonial centre. Given what we know about the so-called ‘bog bodies’ of Britain and Scandinavia in the Iron Age, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that the individual [and dogs] had been killed before being thrown into the waters.

Francis Pryor, Britain BC, p 281

Here, above and below, are some of the many beautifully preserved sword blades, and wooden tools.  It’s obvious that prehistoric people used wood for many purposes – as handles and hafts for axes, picks and wooden hammers, and shafts for spears – but wood rots easily, and finds such as these are amazingly rare.

Even more exciting, the museum houses a collection of no less than eight prehistoric log boats, all more or less intact, some with carved decorations and even lifting handles, discovered at a nearby site called Must Farm. These are in the process of being preserved, like the Mary Rose.

If you're anywhere near Peterborough, do visit if you can. We went on a sunny Tuesday morning in early summer. We had the site to ourselves, to wander around and marvel. The sheep trotted past and took shelter under the trees. Fish splashed in the fen; I heard a cuckoo. It was easy almost to imagine oneself back in the past... 

  

Of Ships and Suns - by Katherine Langrish

In all kinds of mythologies there are stories about sailing across the sea to a mystical land.  Maybe peoples of all races and all times have this in their blood: anyone who’s ever stood at the seashore and seen the sun rising or setting over the ocean must have wondered, like young Peer Ulfsson in my historical fantasy ‘West of the Moon’, what it would be like to find the lands beyond the sun:

He clambered across the cargo and up the curve of the ship into the stern, where he stood for a moment holding the tiller and gazing out westwards.  The sun was low, laying a bright track over the water: a road studded with glittering cobblestones.  It stung his heart and dazzled his eyes.

He felt a surge of longing.  Life was a tangle that tied him to the shore.  What would it be like to cut free, shake off the land, and go gliding away into the very heart of the sun?

That ships and suns go together can be seen from the Egyptian sun god Re with his two boats: the sun boat or Mandjet (Boat of Millions of Years) which carried him from east to west across the sky accompanied by various other deities and personifications, and the night boat, the Mesesket, on which the god travelled through the perilous underworld from west to east, to rise again in the morning.  

How old is Re?  Well, judging by the dates of temples dedicated to his worship, his cult rose to its zenith in the 5^th Dynasty, beginning approximately 2500 BCE.  The dead were expected to spend eternity travelling with him across the sky. (Later his cult was superseded by the resurrection cult of Osiris.)  The photo above this paragraph shows the full-size Egyptian ship known as the Khufu ship, 143 feet long and built of Lebanon cedar, which was sealed into a pit at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza: the remains of many other solar boats have been found in different locations in Egypt.

Rock engravings in Scandinavia, dated to the Bronze Age any time between 1500 and 400 BCE show the same correspondence between ships and suns.  Here are some examples, reproduced in ‘The Chariot of the Sun and other Rites and Symbols of the Northern Bronze Age' by Peter Gelling and Hilda Ellis Davidson, showing ships embellished with sun discs and spirals. 

But people have been heading out to sea for literally hundreds of thousands of years.  Here’s a link to an article which seems to show that even before we were modern humans, hominids such as homo erectus ‘used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from Northern Africa to Europe’ – island-hopping as they went and leaving stone hand axes on Crete dating to at least 130,000 BCE.   How amazing – how utterly mind-blowing is that?  Modern humans crossed to Australia 60,000 years ago, and to North America earlier than 13,000 BCE. 

Whatever drove them to make these discoveries?  A nomadic hunter-gathering lifestyle is one thing: but setting off in a boat or on a raft on a one-way trip into an unknown ocean is quite another, especially with no population pressure pushing you on.  I can’t help but wonder if there was maybe a religious, a mystical element to these early voyages of discovery.  Maybe, standing on the sea shore, gazing at the sun rising or setting (depending which side of which continent they were), early peoples believed themselves to be embarking on journeys to follow the sun to the land of gods and the happy dead?  

And those left behind, watching them depart, must have felt a huge sense of awe, wonder and mystery about what befell the seafarers. As it says in ‘Beowulf’, when the dead king Scyld Scefing is set adrift in his ship-funeral:

Then they set up / the standard of gold

High over head: / let the sea bear him:

Gave him to the flood / with sad hearts

And mourning minds.  / Men cannot

Say for certain, / neither court-counsellors

Nor heroes under heaven, / who received that cargo.  

Who received that cargo?  By the time the Beowulf poem was written down, England was Christian.  But the poem leaves us in doubt as to the eventual supernatural landfall of a pagan king: it was an age which could still hold Christian and pagan beliefs in relatively comfortable simultaneity – an age which, maybe, knew it didn’t have all the answers.

And people down the centuries have been buried in ships, like the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo ship, dating from the early 7^th century AD, and the Oseberg ship, circa 800 AD,  which carried the bodies of two women, priestesses or queens, and the Gokstad ship, built of oak felled around 890 AD, sheltering the body of a man, perhaps a king.  The 10^th century Muslim traveller Ibn Fadlan wrote an eyewitness account of a Viking ship-funeral in Russia: a chieftain interred in his ship along with many grave goods and sacrifices, including that of a slave girl who ‘saw’ into the land of the dead in a kind of drugged trance, after which she was strangled and stabbed and laid beside him to accompany him on his mystical voyage.  According to Ibn Fadlan’s account, she had voluntarily offered herself as the sacrifice, and we needn’t be too sceptical.  In all probability she utterly believed she would be accompanying her lord to the Otherworld.  He was her passport to immortality.  

So ships and suns and voyages into the west have been part of the human imagination for many thousands of years.  After Re the sun god, there came Odysseus, Jason, Maelduine, Brendan, Oisin and many a nameless adventurer with them.  There came the Christian hermits who sailed out to remote islets in the Atlantic, and the saints who founded monasteries on Holy Islands like Iona and Lindisfarne. 

So let’s set sail for the western isles, the land of the gods, the land of the dead, the land of the ever-young.  Bid farewell to Middle-Earth.  This way to Aeaea, Avalon, Tir na n’Og, Valinor, Eldamar, the Hesperides and Hy Brasil.  Hush! Can you hear the seagulls crying?