History
Richards Mountain Pages
Everyone knows about Stonehenge, and the numerous castles that dot the British Landscape, but there is a lot more history to be found if you look around. This is not a history site, so I'm not going to detail the history of every castle, church and village in the Kingdom. Instead this small patch of the site looks at those mysterious relics of ancient history - those bits that have become part of the landscape, those bits that we still know so little about.

So where are these relics? - Well they're everywhere. Most amount to little more than the odd marked stone, or pile of rocks, but there are plenty of impressive sites to be found. A list of these sites would be rather dull (even just the best bits). So instead I've written a discussion of the various relics below. Some relics are fully understood. Blackhouses for example were inhabited upto as late as the 1970's. However, many of the older sites are at least partly a mystery. There are hypothesis as to their use, but here I've tried to keep an open mind. To understand these sites, you need to visit them, absorb the landscape and let the stones talk to you.

Stone Circles
Perhaps the best known of the ancient sites of Britain are the stone circles - Stonehenge in particular. No-one is quite sure what these places were for, but there are certainly quite a few around. The leading suggestion is that they were a form of observatory. In ancient times there would certainly be a need to tell aspects of time (particularly time of year) - indeed the tomb of Maes Howe in Orkney proves that solar movements were known about (as a blast of light shines right through the entrance only at dusk around the winter solstice. But would the ancients really need to know, or be interested in the complexities of planetary movements that have been attributed to certain alignments of stones?
You can find more pictures and details on my stone circles page.


Other Circles
Stone preserves well compared to other materials, so it is no surprise that the stone circles are so prominent. In recent times a number of circles of other materials have been found. Barely a mile from Stonehenge lies Woodhenege - a structure of concentric rings of wooden poles now so eroded that the only evidence are the concrete place markers put where the holes were.

More recently still the sea uncovered the remains of a ring of wooden boards surrounding a tree planted upside down. Seahenge, discovered on the Norfolk coast seems to have little to do with the heavens, and more to do with tree worship. However before jumping to conclusions we should consider the landscape. Norfolk is a great big dump of finely ground glacial material. There are no big rocks to be found lying around, so the use of trees makes sense. We can never know if it had any spoecific alignments, as we have no clues as to what the top of the eroded monument looked like.


And Its Not Just Circles Second only to Stonehenge in importance, the stone structure at Calanais is not a circle. Its shape appears to be a deformed Celtic cross with a burial at its centre. But is it necessarily a Celtic cross? My opinion is that there is a connection with the shape of the distant hills - said to look like a reclined woman. It is this profile that gave the adjacent village its name, and so must have been noticeable to those that first settled there. The alignment of stones could even be interpretted as a representation of that female figure, with the burial in its womb.
For a journey around the stone of Calanais, visit my Lewis page.

Solitary Stones
Even more abundant than the stone cirscles, are the solitary standing stones dotted around the countryside. A few on the coast (e.g. near Harlech) have been identified as navigational aids for those on the sea. They may have indicated a safe place to land, or they may have been used in alignment to indicate a safe passge to shore. Once ashore the purpose of the inland stones is less obvious. My opinion is that they are still navigational markers. My evidence for this comes from two lines of such stones - one around Harlech, and one on Orkney.

The Orkney line leads from Skara Brae neolithic village on the coast, inland to where an inland lake and a sea lagoon almost meet. The thin strip of land that separates them has many isolated standing stones, as well as the rings of Brodgar and Stenness. Once past the lakes the stones become less frequent, but seem to lead between the hills to Waulkmill Bay - a very sheltered shallow harbour on a rocky coast (just as Skara Brae is beside one of the few sandy stretches on its coast).

If standing stones are thought of as navigational markers, then the avenues of standing stones leading to some stone circles can be regarded as routes of high importance marked by symbolic navigational stones. Then again perhaps they just held a fence that allowed the people to drive animals to slaughter in the circle.

Settlements
Apart from Skara Brae on Orkney there are few remains of ancient settlements. In most places the only clue is a change in the colour of grass growing over the buried ruins. Perhaps of more interest are the settlements of more recent times - places like the blackhouse village of Garenin on Lewis. The design of the traditional blackhouse is welll suited to the windy Hebrides. They have thick low slung walls with a thatched roof held down by old fishing nets, ropes, and rocks. Despite their low profile, they are surprisingly spacious inside. Because the blackhouse is made from local natural resources, they tend to blend into the scenery from a far.
Graves
There may be few remains of settlements for the living, but many for the dead survive - mainly because of their solid construction. Most of these are simple mounds (known as tumuli). the high ground around Stonehenge is littered with such bumps. Some mounds hide more sophisticated chambered tombs such as Wayland Smithy (on the Wessex ridgeway), and West Kennett Long Barrow a short distance from the stone circle of Avebury. However the most impressive of all the covered tombs can be found in Orkney. Maes Howe is a superb chamber with room for twenty people and stacks of headroom. It was built with stones weighing many tons.

Also on Orkney, you can find the impressive Tomb Of The Eagles, where bodies were placed for the sea eagles to pick clean, before the bones were placed in storage inside.
You can find out more about the numerous ancient sites on Orkney on my Orkney page.

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