Stonehenge: Neolithic Man and the Cosmos

At first sight it might seem that a single building alignment—say that of a central ridge along it—cannot cater for two opposed solar extremes—for both midsummer rising and midwinter setting, for example. This is where taper in height might have come into play. Something like the technique to be explained in broad outline here might have been applied at the Skendleby 2 (Lincolnshire) long barrow and more certainly at Stonehenge itself. The directions in which the first glint of the rising Sun and the last of the setting Sun are seen depend appreciably on the altitude of the horizon. By directing a tomb to horizons of different altitudes, or alternatively, by creating an artificially elevated horizon out of the tomb itself, the directions of rising and setting can be adjusted, and under certain circumstances brought into exact opposition. (The Skendleby case is illustrated in Fig. 40 (#ulink_1af62872-f102-5cbb-8e4a-18ba3d231b06) in a later part of this chapter.)

This last possibility puts paid to a claim that has been made on many occasions, that the minor variations in the directions of chambered tombs and long barrows show that their builders were very casual about directions, and were happy enough if they could get them roughly right. Our hypothesis is capable of explaining why the chamber-tombs in an otherwise apparently coherent group are almost, but not at all precisely, parallel—say with a scatter of 4 or 5°. The differences in direction, which might in some cases have been the results of variations in the height of the distant land-horizon, might in others be the result of taper in height, that is, of differences in the slopes of monuments that were themselves used to set artificial horizons close at hand.

Apart from the rectangular and trapezoidal forms of long barrow, which are found often in an area stretching from Jutland (Denmark) to Western Pomerania, there is the near-triangular form already mentioned, not unlike the trapezoidal: it is a long isosceles triangle with very slightly concave sides, higher at the wide end. This is the form at the site of one of the best collections of well-excavated long barrows in Europe, the Sarnowo group in Kujavia (Poland). There are nine in all, ranging in length from 30 m to 83 m, and judging by a radiocarbon measurement, their dates are probably all within a few centuries of 4500 BC. They are all on spurs of land, with the wide ends always in the northeast quarter, and facing down gently sloping ground.

The Sarnowo barrows are in a parlous state, and it is at present difficult to assess more than their general orientations. (Even this is a dangerous undertaking, since two modern surveys display compass directions which may differ by as much as 14° on a single monument.) Nevertheless, there seems to be much the same pattern in the directions of the barrows as is to be found in a selection of four or five of their English counterparts. Three are conceivably aligned on the following stars: Aldebaran or the Hyades (nos. 2, 4, and 5); the Pleiades (no. 6); two perhaps simultaneously on Bellatrix and Regulus (nos. 1 and 9); one simultaneously on Deneb and Rigel (no. 7); and one on Sirius (no. 3). Only one (no. 8) seems to be aligned on the Sun—and even there it is possible that Orion’s belt is somehow indicated. All of these are possibilities within the approximate period 4500 to 4100 BC. The uncertainties are chiefly inherent in the disordered state of the remains, and archaeological plans that cannot provide exact orientations. Perhaps at some future date the Sarnowo stellar orientations will be studied more thoroughly. Perhaps other stars were observed across the mounds, as at the Wessex barrows. Whether or not the long barrows reflect back on earlier European practice, they are vital to an understanding of later stone and timber circles relating to Stonehenge. They are also intimately related to the Avenue that leads up to Stonehenge and to the strip known as the Cursus, to the north of both.

The Orientation of Long Barrows (#ulink_4a6cfec5-2165-5f22-b6e3-5e86fe2c8440)

There are more than sixty long barrows on Salisbury Plain, and many hundreds elsewhere in Britain and Ireland. They tend to be on high ground with open views of the surrounding country in two or three directions. In Britain, Ireland, and on the continent, there was a mild preference for a near east–west orientation, a fact already the subject of comment as long ago as William Stukeley’s Abury, a Temple of the Druids (1743). While crude statistical surveys of the orientations of large numbers of chambered tombs will obliterate most of their essential differences, there are a few simple rules of this sort that are easily appreciated, if not easily interpreted. As a purely descriptive measure, the key direction may be regarded as that from the narrow end to the broad. (One might have said ‘looking out from the entrance’ were it not that many barrows had blind entrances.)

Taking the chief regions of Britain and Ireland with remains of such tombs, there are definite tendencies that are more or less duplicated in places of similar geographical latitude. Cairns in Orkney are like those in Shetland, in that in both places most cairns tend to look southeast. Those who built the earlier passage graves of Brittany had also favoured this direction. Coming down to the northeast of the Scottish mainland, the tombs of Caithness resemble those of Ross and Cromarty, in that most look very roughly east. The nearby Clava cairns, on the other hand, look southwest, a quality they share with tombs of an outwardly different pattern in Ireland, the ‘wedge tombs’ that are especially numerous in the southwest of the country. (This last name derives from the fact that the burial chamber is trapezoidal in shape, although it is usually given a round cairn as cover, so hiding a certain similarity with the overall wedge shape of many English long barrows.) Surviving megalithic tombs in Ireland number about twelve hundred, and more than a quarter of these, mostly in the northern third of the country, have a small court at the entrance. Such ‘court tombs’, especially common in the Atlantic coastal regions of Mayo, Sligo and Donegal, often look northeast; and in this, if not in their shape, they resemble the long barrows of the Clyde region, across the water in Scotland. The passage graves of the Boyne valley on the eastern coast of Ireland tend to look east and southeast, as do the long barrows of the Cotswold–Severn area in England.

Such broad rules as these are subject to many exceptions, but they confirm the principle that custom changed appreciably with place and time. This is hardly surprising, bearing in mind that the time-span of the groups mentioned here covers more than two millennia. Contrary to a common belief, these tendencies tell us absolutely nothing about orientation towards the Sun. After studying several individual examples more closely it will become clear that interpreting rough proclivities of the sort outlined above is a dangerous business. Even without doing so, the dangers of summarizing motives of the architects of the long barrows too hastily can be seen from the fact that, in England as a whole, there are at least ninety long barrows along a roughly north–south line; and yet in no single region was the number great enough to have merited mention in the brief list of tendencies just given.

FIG. 7. A general plan of the Fussell’s Lodge long barrow, drawn by P. J. Ashbee.

Fussell’s Lodge (#ulink_5693b32c-207c-50a5-a55e-787fc9a19cff)

Many chambered tombs from the fifth millennium BC still survive in eastern France. Relatively few barrows in Ireland and Britain have been assigned such an early date, but among them there is the mortuary house from the Fussell’s Lodge tomb—which radiocarbon dating puts in the calendar (corrected) range 4250–3950 BC. This barrow, roughly 12 km from Stonehenge and 5 km from Salisbury, has been well excavated (1957) and described by Paul Ashbee. When it was first erected, Salisbury Plain was heavily wooded and is unlikely to have had more than a few dozen families living on it. The tomb was an earthen long barrow, raised after a period of time over a mortuary house of still greater interest. This first structure, of wood, was at an early stage apparently covered with turf, and then with crushed chalk. Later a cairn of flints covered the burial area. This cairn stage might have followed the collapse of the timbers of the mortuary house, or might indeed have precipitated the collapse—in either case probably within a few decades of the foundation structure. The flint cairn had wings anticipating the later façade (see Fig. 7 (#ulink_50bc9dcf-020d-5018-bb7b-e12c4369535c)). The mortuary house was used as a place for the systematic deposition of the bones of the dead—skulls in one place and long bones in another. Many bones were missing altogether. The bodies had presumably been exposed to the elements, or buried and disinterred after decomposition. Despite the small population, building the mortuary house—barrow apart—would have required a high degree of social organization. It was bounded at east and west by two colossal oak trunks or split trunks, each—depending on length—weighing in the region of 2 to 10 tonnes, assuming a green state. When the time came to erect an earthen long barrow on the site, its mound was enclosed within a retaining wall of nearly two hundred timber posts, a palisade bedded in a deep trench. The old mortuary house was at the eastern end of this enclosure, the whole lying roughly east—northeast. Into this frame were packed many hundreds of tonnes of chalk that had come from the ditches flanking its long sides, chalk that had been dug out with antler picks. Ashbee estimated that if men worked ten hours a day at the task of infilling, it would have taken no less than 487 man-days. Whatever the precise dimensions of the mound—and here a somewhat smaller mound than his will be preferred—it was certainly no light undertaking.

FIG. 8. The letters B show where the collections of bones were found. The central pit might originally have been used for a central support to a massive beam—or double beam—spanning the two main uprights. Note that the palisade trench interferes with the socket for one of these, showing that it is a later and independent structure.

The planning of the barrow must have been no less taxing, for there can be little doubt that it was done with reference to the peculiarities of the landscape in regard to the risings and settings of certain bright stars. Even more interesting is the case of the original mortuary house. At a cursory glance the posts bounding this are badly skewed, but it will be seen to have pointed within two or three degrees of 22° north of east. Since 20° is the approximate mean direction of the splayed sides of the later barrow, this is not very surprising.

To progress any further, we must make reference to certain striking resemblances between its plan and that of the first mortuary house on the site of the barrow at Wayland’s Smithy. As will be described shortly, the Wayland’s barrow had split trunks with the flat of the D-shaped section to the inside, and the trunks were of diameter 1.2 m. The pits were of much the same dimensions as at Fussell’s Lodge. The areas on which the bones were placed were at both sites about a metre across, although the length of the area at Fussell’s Lodge was greater. Lines of sight from the posts of what has been interpreted as a porch would have skimmed the two sides of the western trunk at Fussell’s Lodge had it also been about 1.2 m across, and the other is presumed to have been of much the same size. The stacked bones were found to lie in a neat line not very different from 22° to the east–west line. This can reasonably be taken as a first approximation to the direction of the axis.

Now it so happens that another long barrow, today virtually obliterated, was on the skyline at a distance of 1.85 km and in a direction just 21.7° south of west, as seen from the Fussell’s Lodge barrow. The sighting of one barrow from another will later prove to be so common that this line must be treated as important, and doubly so when we discover that it indicates the setting of the star Aldebaran over the neighbouring barrow at about the right period of prehistory. (As for the precise date, some of the deciding factors must first be explained.) Working from this assumption, we are no longer, therefore, entirely dependent on the edifice itself in establishing at least this property of its orientation. The observed altitude of the barrow (not the star) would have been about 1.32°, depending on the height and position of the observer. This raises an important point: the quoted altitude is based on the assumption that the observer is standing at ground level. A study of the relatively extensive and important collection of human remains from the Fussell’s Lodge barrow, by D. R. Brothwell and M. L. Blake, led to the conclusion that the average adult male stood 170 cm (5 ft 7 in) and the average adult female 157.5 cm (5 ft 2 in).

At a given date, any star has a particular position on the celestial sphere, that is, can be assigned a given set of sky coordinates comparable to latitude and longitude on the Earth’s surface. There are two particularly useful reference planes comparable to that of the Earth’s equator: one is the celestial equator above it, and the other is the ecliptic (see Chapter 1 (#u2230778b-d46a-5295-be1b-c9209983c560) for a simple account, and Appendix 2 for more detail). Taking the equatorial system for the time being, declination is the coordinate corresponding to terrestrial latitude. If its value is known, then using methods outlined in Appendix 2 one can say exactly where on the horizon the star would have been seen rising and setting at any date in the past from any given place—and conversely, what was the date at which it rose or set in such and such a position. A star of declination in the neighbourhood of –12.67° can be said categorically to have been seen setting over the now defunct barrow, but only if the star was visible down to the horizon. Aldebaran had this declination in 4365 BC, but for reasons to be explained, the star would not have been seen as low as the true (natural) horizon.

Whenever a distant natural horizon enters into the calculation it is necessary to take possible tree cover into account, since a star descending into even distant trees leaves one unable to decide precisely when it disappears. In the present example the horizon was topped by a barrow, however, so that tree cover can there be ignored. (Trees seen against the sky do not necessarily modify the effective horizon altitude when the Sun and Moon are being observed. If the trees are not in leaf, as at winter solstice and spring equinox, and the horizon is defined by a fairly sharp ridge, the Sun and Moon are often easily visible through the trees down to ground level.)

In the reverse direction of the axis at Fussell’s Lodge, 21.7° north of east, the ground above and below the tomb slopes at about 3° to the horizontal, this being effectively also the altitude of the eastern horizon. The ground is near at hand, and was no doubt cleared of trees. It is no accident that the slope of the final earthen barrow, according to a plausible reconstruction, was also of about 3°. One may see relatively faint stars at such an altitude. Over the barrow to the west, however, where the horizon altitude is lower, few stars are bright enough to be visible at the horizon proper. This difference needs to be explained.

How low in the sky one may detect a star depends on weather conditions, of course, but even under the most favourable conditions there is a limit to what is possible that depends on the star’s brightness. Astronomers classify the luminosity of stars by their so-called magnitude. The brighter the star, the smaller the magnitude. Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, has now a magnitude of –1.46. Only one other star then visible from Britain, Arcturus, has (and had) a markedly negative visual magnitude. Our concern here will be with only the brightest stars, of which about 45 have magnitudes less than 2, although not all of those are visible from northern latitudes.

Typical minimum altitudes for viewing the very brightest stars under favourable viewing conditions from the downs of southern England, are these: Aldebaran 2.00°, alpha Crucis 2.42°, Altair 2.01°, Antares 2.32°, Arcturus 1.43°, beta Centauri 1.86°, beta Crucis 2.35°, Betelgeuse 2.06°, Capella 1.48°, Deneb 2.35°, Pollux 2.24°, Procyon 1.71°, Regulus 2.44°, Rigel 1.53°, Rigel Centauri 1.58°, Sirius 0.74°, Spica 2.12°, Vega 1.48°. The cluster of stars known as the Pleiades is a difficult case, but it was probably rarely seen below 4°, with 4.4° more typical.

These ‘extinction angles’ are for specific viewing conditions, and the accuracy with which they are quoted here is rather excessive, although useful for purposes of comparison. Actual values are as uncertain as the weather itself. Climatic conditions were not identical to those of modern times, and even local air currents may affect the issue. Fortunately it will soon be discovered that in very many cases precise values are unimportant—that is, when the height of the actual (natural or artificial) horizon is appreciably greater than the extinction angle.

To return to Fussell’s Lodge. Since Aldebaran might have been seen only down to about 2°, it is necessary to review the earlier statement of what was seen over the neighbouring barrow. The declination, recalculated for this slightly higher altitude, turns out to be –12.07° and the corresponding date 4245 BC. The shift of more than a century from such a seemingly insignificant change of altitude draws attention to the importance of working with precise data.

If we are to believe that the star Aldebaran was observed setting along the axis of the mortuary house, how would it have been sighted? It is wise to consider the possibility that a distinction has to be drawn between an initial act of design and later acts of ritual observation. At the foundation of the mortuary house, however, the alignment would have been the same on both occasions: just as the designer had done, so others would have been able to look in the direction defined by the two massive vertical posts, each presumed to have been a split trunk (by analogy with Wayland’s Smithy, where the post holes are also ovals). The fact that the large posts define a line to Aldebaran’s setting raises an interesting possibility. The skull of a domestic ox was found by the eastern post, and it seems likely that this star—which in historical times was regarded as the eye of the bull—had already acquired an association with the bull, although not necessarily quite the same one.

The alignment on the setting Aldebaran will be acceptable only if the date is confirmed by independent evidence. To decide on what might have been seen in the eastern direction, at the altitude set by the natural horizon (very close to 3.0°), one must again decide on a precise azimuth. There is of course no barrow in this case, and simply reversing the line to the first barrow yields nothing of real interest, but from the very similar structure at Wayland’s Smithy there is reason to think that the line grazing two of the posts of what has usually been regarded as an ‘entrance porch’ will be significant.

For reasons to be explained shortly in connection with that other monument, the posts will be referred to as ‘scaling posts’. Taking the four relevant post holes at Fussell’s Lodge (see Fig. 8 (#ulink_9d66d7dd-4293-5ea4-b069-97ea1425d0cf)), and making estimates of post diameters on the basis of later evidence and of the lines of bones, the azimuth appears to be about 61.8° from north (with an error unlikely to be much more than half a degree). The star Spica rose at an altitude of 3° in this direction when its declination was 19.51°, a declination it had in approximately 4250 BC. The agreement in date is remarkable, but one should not make too much of it, in view of the various uncertainties.

The scaling posts fairly certainly served a similar function, defining lines to the rising and setting of other stars, both over natural ground and over certain artificial horizons. For the time being only the first sort of alignment will be considered. Unfortunately, even here there are two possible arrangements. It will be found repeatedly hereafter that viewing was apparently at right-angles to certain lines in the barrows and their associated ditches. Briefly, the question is whether, in looking across such a line, the line is defined by a part of the barrow’s structure on the near or the far side of the barrow from the point of view of the standing observer—or in this case, on the near or far side of the quadrangle of scaling posts. This often makes a difference of a few centuries to a derived date, although occasionally it rules out a solution completely. For some barrows, making the right choice will prove to be of fundamental importance, but for the moment all plausible results will be quoted.

As shown on Fig. 8 (#ulink_9d66d7dd-4293-5ea4-b069-97ea1425d0cf), there are two more alignments to be found yielding dates in rough agreement with the others. With estimated dates in parentheses they are: to the rising of beta Crucis (4220 BC) and to the rising of beta Centauri (4220 BC). (The posts nearer to the monuments are very close to aligning on the setting of Deneb to the north and the rising of Rigel to the south, but if this was the intention, the line does not seem to have been as accurately engineered as the others.) It is here assumed that the observer was standing on level ground.

A few brief remarks are in order here, in view of the coherence of these results. The posts were only two metres apart, and various assumptions have been made as to their sizes and positions in their sockets. The line to the rising of Rigel (grazing the sides of the two posts in a way to be discussed in connection with Wayland’s Smithy) was over a nearby natural horizon of about 4.6°, assuming no tree cover. Whether or not there was forest cover, the Deneb alignment is poor, but there is much evidence from elsewhere of the enormous importance of this star. It is assumed that nearby trees were removed in Deneb’s direction. (The hill over which Deneb set was destined to become the site of a sizeable Iron Age monument, Figsbury Ring.) Dropping Deneb from the process of averaging dates from the six stars, an astronomical date can be quoted for the mortuary house of 4235 BC (rounding to fives). The probable error here is anything up to a century either way. With Aldebaran (4250 BC) more confidence is in order, since the neighbouring barrow is a far more accurate marker than nearby posts; and yet the Aldebaran date might just possibly relate to activity on the same site before the mortuary house was built. The radiocarbon range for charcoal from one of the D-post pits, perhaps relating only to a clearing operation, was 3230–3150 bc, which when corrected produces a range of calendar years from 4250 to 3950 BC. The agreement is not perfect, but respectable.

There are one or two conclusions to be drawn from these findings. The first concerns the purpose of the various structures. When the mortuary house was covered with a cairn, that might have obliterated some of its earlier sighting-line properties, although trunks would have had a longer lifetime than smaller timber. Some of its astronomical properties, however, as yet to be described, almost certainly remained to it. These probably—but not necessarily—involved observation across the cairn from short ditches, small versions at the eastern ends of the later (much enlarged and deepened) ditches that flanked the great barrow.

FIG. 9. The Fussell’s Lodge long barrow, viewed from the north. An outline of its probable appearance at the time of its foundation. The shading is added to suggest the lie of the walls and roof.

The mortuary house was no doubt a self-sufficient edifice with a wider spiritual function than this name for it might suggest. The argument that it was a religious focus is supported by what can be said of the visibility of the various stars. There are stars that are so close to the north pole of the sky as never to rise or set. Whether or not they are visible depends only on cloud cover and whether the Sun is up or not. The visibility of stars like Aldebaran, Spica and beta Crucis that do rise and set is obviously limited twice over, restricted as it is by the horizon and the need for the Sun to be below the horizon. It emerges that there was no season at which all the phenomena of rising and setting mentioned in conjunction with the Fussell’s Lodge mortuary house could have been seen. The conclusion is that it was erected, and its site carefully chosen, on the basis of knowledge about risings and settings acquired over a reasonably long period of time, indeed with long-term meaning, and recorded in wood or stone in relation to the terrain. This is a small point, but it makes it unlikely that any astronomical ritual enacted at Fussell’s Lodge was designed around celestial events appropriate to only one season—that of a founding burial, for example. Observation of the stars at such sites must have been a fundamental rather than a purely ephemeral affair.

It is not yet possible to offer a convincing argument for a conclusion that will be reached at a later stage, to the effect that the scaling posts had an architectural function in establishing directions that would be needed in the later building. For this the more complete evidence of Wayland’s Smithy is called for. It is conceivable that those posts also supported a platform on which the dead were exposed, before the larger bones were finally brought into the mortuary house; but on the whole this seems unlikely, for the platform would neither have been very substantial nor well fitted to the purpose.

One can only guess at many of the finer details of the mortuary house, such as the height of the massive uprights, and whether they bore another split trunk of comparable girth as a lintel between them. This might have made for a less leaky house than otherwise, but the sheer weight and rarity of such a splendid trunk makes the idea improbable, as does the fact of slightly different depths at the two ends—suggesting posts of somewhat different heights. Fig. 9 (#ulink_0adb311e-a455-5271-8ef6-a5feb002c133) is offered here as a mere outline of the arrangement at the time of foundation, and in it no attempt is made to indicate supporting timbers, apart from a short intermediate trunk that could have been interposed to take most of the weight of the roof. (It is placed in Ashbee’s ‘pit B’, which is 60 cm deep and 50 cm across. The fill was found to contain burnt bones, and the area was covered with bones, but not from the earliest date.) Access to the interior was probably from the eastern side of the southern D-post. The form suggested for the roof will be justified in a later section.

FIG. 10. A general plan of the long barrow at Wayland’s Smithy (after R. J. C. Atkinson). This shows both phases of the tomb, and later field ditches superimposed on them.

Wayland’s Smithy (#ulink_b516033b-e05d-5e5d-82d9-c7c2edd1fb60)

The chambered long barrow at Wayland’s Smithy was extensively restored in the 1960s. It is trapezoidal, and despite its asymmetry shows great regularity in its geometrical design (see Fig. 10 (#ulink_d2ae9f89-cd1a-5118-9110-94a4a92254bc)). An earlier mortuary house found during its excavation closely resembled in overall style the mortuary house at Fussell’s Lodge, and the two, taken together, provide valuable information as to astronomical practice. They offer a challenge, too, because although they are so similar in form, their orientations are radically different.

It is hard to think of a more famous long barrow than that at Wayland’s Smithy. Here lived an invisible smith, who would shoe travellers’ horses at a groat apiece: the owner would leave horse and coin at the spot, and return to find the horse shod. Francis Wise printed the traditional story in 1738, and it has been retold often since then, perhaps the best known versions being those in Walter Scott’s Kenilworth and Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, who was born nearby. The name of Wayland, always a craftsman of some sort, is not uncommon in Germanic mythology. The oldest literary reference to him is in the Anglo-Saxon poem Deor, but there is a reference to Wayland’s Smithy in a charter of king Eadred, dated 955, while the Franks Casket in the British Museum, from the early eighth century, depicts the same character. In later Berkshire stories, Wayland the Smith was not always so well-disposed, as the imp Flibbertigibbett discovered. When hit on the head by a large sarsen

stone, thrown at him by the smith, the imp went away snivelling—as a proof of which the sarsen stone is still to be seen at Snivelling Corner, 2.5 km to the northwest. (It has to be added that Wayland’s abilities were as nothing compared with those of a British Parliament that in 1974 managed to throw the entire monument from Berkshire into Oxfordshire—an unfortunate act, bearing in mind the archaeological habit of listing monuments by parish and county.) Stones of this kind are typical of the downs to the northwest of Marlborough, and the barrow that has somehow become associated with the name of Wayland can be regarded as the easternmost of the group of stone-chambered long barrows on the Marlborough Downs, although it is relatively isolated from monuments of the same period. In style, it fits most comfortably into the Cotswold-Severn class of chambered tombs, but again only as an outlying example.

FIG. 11. The central area of Wayland’s Smithy, phase I.

At Fussell’s Lodge, in looking along the line of the barrow in either direction, one looks upwards to the distant horizons. At Wayland’s Smithy, which is almost on the highest ridge of the downs, the surrounding terrain lies below, except to the east. Along the prehistoric track known as the Ridgeway, which passes close by, lies Uffington Castle, 2 km to the east. This is a natural plateau with the remains of an Iron Age hillfort. Adjacent to it is the Uffington White Horse, a figure large enough to be visible from many miles distance, when not hidden by the downs that enfold it. Formed out of chalk exposed where the turf has been cut away, it is of indeterminate age. It was once supposed to be Saxon work, and is now said to be of the late Iron Age, but in a later chapter it will be suggested that the White Horse has Neolithic origins. Whatever the answer, the neighbourhood of Uffington has long been a very special place.

The barrow at Wayland’s Smithy was newly excavated in 1962–3 by Richard Atkinson and Stuart Piggott, who confirmed earlier suspicions that it had been constructed in at least two phases. The first structure (at the centre of Fig. 10 (#ulink_d2ae9f89-cd1a-5118-9110-94a4a92254bc)) had contained a wooden mortuary house lying between two extremely sturdy end-posts made out of split tree trunks, each 1.2 m across the dividing diameter. The turf had been stripped from the ground before a pavement of sarsens was laid on the chalk. The skeletal remains of at least fourteen persons were found on the pavement. A bank of timbers, which Atkinson took to have rested against a mortised ridge pole, and sarsen stones to both sides of their bases, had formed the walls. The central tomb was at some stage covered by an oval mound outlined by sarsen slabs up to a metre tall, but these were not set into the ground. That particular mound was a cairn of small sarsen boulders at its base, topped with chalk rubble taken from ditches to the east and west. The oval structure, which even with its ditches fits into an area of only 15 by 20 m, was later covered completely by the final tomb, and is no longer visible.

One curious fact about the skeletal remains in the older tomb is that many of the smaller bones were missing, particularly hands, feet, kneecaps, and lower jaws. The absence of jaws is intriguing, in view of the fact that in some cultures with a literature testifying to their beliefs—the Egyptian, for example—the jaw-bone was preserved separately, and was supposed to have the spirit of the dead person attached to it. It is often missing from Irish barrows, and near the south entrance to the circle at Avebury a fragment of skull was found in the topmost layer of rubble, together with no fewer than five mandibles. A similar collection was found at the Sanctuary, not far from Avebury, and such examples could be multiplied. Perhaps the mandible was associated with the voice of the dead.

Just as at Fussell’s Lodge, there are posts at Wayland’s Smithy arranged in a quadrangle at one end of the first mortuary house—here the southern end. One pair of posts is nearly parallel to the eastern kerb of the later structure, which was about 22.3° west of north. The ditches are not straight, but the average angles of reasonably straight sections are about 19.5 and 20.5° west of north. Putting a median line through the central tomb by eye, it lies at about 21° west of north, but judging by what was found at Fussell’s Lodge, the lines grazing the D-posts are probably what mattered. The directions of their flat faces are about 22° north of east. The fact that these are almost at right angles to the line of posts mentioned earlier, and to the later east wall, makes us suspect that—even for the first structure—we should be paying special attention to angles in the neighbourhood of 22°. A very straight Iron Age ditch (ditch 400 on the plan of the whole, see Fig. 10 (#ulink_d2ae9f89-cd1a-5118-9110-94a4a92254bc)) was in a direction 22.4° west of north. Even more significant: the virtually straight section of the Ridgeway between the tomb and Uffington Castle lies at an average of 21.5° north of east, that is, nearly at right angles to the directions under discussion. (For a map of the area see Fig. 80 (#litres_trial_promo) in Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo).)

In his report of the excavation of 1962-3, Atkinson pointed out that after the massive tree-trunks had rotted and collapsed, many small boulders from the surface of the mound fell into the void created. This suggested to him—in view of their large diameters—that the timbers may have projected far above the top of the mound, and that ‘perhaps carved or painted, they may have formed a landmark visible for miles around’. Were they, perhaps, together with some celestial object, observed from a point on the Ridgeway, say from the dip in the path, 800 m east of the tomb, or even from the shoulder of Whitehorse Hill? It is extremely probable that such sightings took place.

The visitor to Wayland’s Smithy today sees only the later barrow on the site, a trapezoidal mound nearly 55 m long and tapering from about 14 m wide at its southern end to under 6 m at its northern. The ditches that originally flanked it, as much as 4.5 m wide in places, and of graded depths (of roughly human proportions), are today completely filled and invisible. The southern façade originally had six large sarsen stones, the highest rising to a height of about 3 m on either side of the entrance to the burial chamber. (The arrangement roughly resembled that of timber façades known from earlier barrows.) Two stones are now missing. The eastern long side will here be taken as having been at 22.3° west of north, with the façade precisely at right angles to it and the western long side at 13.7° west of north.

Earlier excavators of Wayland’s Smithy reported a much disturbed interior, with the disordered bones of perhaps eight skeletons, including that of a child. The chamber was in the form of a cross, the main corridor being 1.8 m high at the crossing, and 1.35 m in the transepts. Before the second barrow was built, the ground had been cleared by fire, and a specimen of charcoal from a tree branch or small trunk yielded a radiocarbon reading corresponding to a calendar date in the probable range 3800-3440 BC. The degree of silting was thought to point to an interval of perhaps not more than fifty years between the two barrows; but this was to assume that the ditches were not regularly cleaned, and much of the evidence of this book will be that this was very probably—indeed religiously—done. Bearing in mind the strong similarity of the first mortuary house at Fussell’s Lodge and its Wayland’s Smithy equivalent, these dates imply that the overall architectural style might have been preserved for four centuries or more.

After the Iron Age ditch was dug, perhaps even before, it seems that the area between it and the barrow came under the plough. During the Romano-British period the ditch was re-cut, and a fourth ditch was cut to the southeast of the barrow. What is particularly interesting is the fact that the angle of that third ditch is almost identical to those incorporated into the older structure. Why this persistent orientation, not to say precision, and why was the line of the Ridgeway displaced by exactly a right angle from it?

The near-northern line is towards the setting of Deneb in the fourth millennium. No precise discussion of dates should ever begin with this star, however, since it has the property that its horizon positions change very slowly with the centuries. This fact, while it is annoying for anyone who wants to use a Deneb direction to establish a date, would have been an excellent reason for early peoples’ fidelity towards it. To give an idea of just how constant was this star: its declination (angular distance) from the celestial equator in 4200 BC was almost exactly 37°, and this gradually reduced to 36.22° around 2800 BC before increasing again. (It reached 37° around 1400 BC, and had not quite reached 39° by 200 BC.) Its risings and settings, which depend on that declination, changed correspondingly little over this enormous period of time, and if any religious ritual required its observation at an early date, it would not be at all surprising to find that a similar ritual continued to be used, especially at a site like Wayland’s Smithy, which lay close to centres of intense human activity for so long. It is no doubt for reasons relating to the behaviour of Deneb that the directions of the eastern edge of the second long barrow and the central line of the Iron Age ditch 400 differ by only about a tenth of a degree, while they might be two millennia apart in age. To reinforce the point: Deneb had almost exactly the same declination in 1600 BC as in 4000 BC, so that the direction of the star’s setting was the same at both times. This does not mean that it had not changed in the intervening period; but even then it had changed little.

There are other conspicuous lines, such as that of the façade, the flats of the split trunks, and the Ridgeway itself, that are at right angles to the Deneb line. From the dip in the Ridgeway, and looking along it and up over the barrow, at 21.55° south of west, Aldebaran could have been seen setting around 4200 BC, when its declination was –11.83°. Alternatively, the setting Betelgeuse could have been seen along the same line four centuries later (3780 BC), and for the moment there is no way of deciding between these alternatives. There is a ‘disused pit’ marked on the Ordnance Survey actually on the Ridgeway, close to the optimum point for viewing either of the two stars, and it would be interesting to know whether the pit is of prehistoric origin, or whether its position is merely fortuitous. (The monument was constructed in a place cleared of woodland and sarsens, and the finds of pottery and stone implements on the site have raised suspicions that there might have been a trading centre here.) From the shoulder of Whitehorse hill, the setting of Aldebaran would have been seen around 4300 BC. The rising of Altair in the reverse direction over the shoulder of Whitehorse hill (with or without tree cover, since the extinction angle is paramount) occurred at about the same period of history, and this might be an indication of the date of the track itself. Betelgeuse, at the later date, had no very bright star as its ‘opposite’.

Turning to the posts at the southern end, which so closely resemble those at Fussell’s Lodge, it emerges that—within the limitations of accuracy set by relatively close posts—looking southwards along the direction set by the western edges of the D-posts (16.8° east of south), alpha Crucis would have been seen rising, the optimum date being around 3940 BC, or 3890 BC if we take the other edges (making a direction 16.0° east of south). Two of the scaling posts align perfectly at 23.1° with the eastern edge of the northern D-post and the direction of Deneb’s setting, around 4040 BC, but there are the usual large uncertainties in a Deneb date.