A History of Ancient Britain (15 page)

In contrast to the old, phallic, masculine portrayal of the hunters, the passage graves themselves may represent a movement towards an appreciation of a more feminine nature. As the fertility of
animals and plants became central to the well-being of society, so the old phallic images were no longer enough by themselves. Now they were assimilated within – allowed to penetrate –
the feminine shapes represented by passages and womb-like chambers.

The Mesolithic way of life was being consigned to the shadows cast by stones. By 5000
BC
the technology of farming had trundled across Europe as irresistibly as a
battalion of tanks. But on the north-west coast of the continent that advance was halted. Just as it would defy Caesar, Napoleon and Hitler, the English Channel stopped the farmers in their
tracks.

All of this is giving to the movement of farming, and its farmers, a sense of purpose, a grand vision. But there was no crusade. In the life of planet Earth, the actions of individuals –
warlords, politicians, farmers and the like – are the twitches of ticks on an elephant’s back. If there was any momentum it was of a kind so deep and so subtle as to be utterly
imperceptible to mere humans. French historians working in the twentieth century were best at suggesting how to think about time in relation to human history. Beneath everything is inertia, the
tendency for nothing to happen. Above that is a motion so slow its currents and rhythms could be sensed only by an immortal with all the time in the universe. These are the rhythms of geological
time that move tectonic plates, raise mountains and transform mud into stone by the use only of pressure and time.

Fernand Braudel, leader of the Annales School after the Second World War, developed this as the concept of the
longue durée –
the long term. He imagined time like an ocean.
On the surface are bubbles and flecks of foam that come and go in the blinking of an eye. These are the moments we humans can perceive, the actions of individuals and the stuff of years. The
bubbles and flecks ride on waves that are like the lifespans of nations and empires, and the substance of centuries at least. Finally, down in the dark are the great, impossibly slow ripples within
the deep that support, and occasionally move, everything above.

So the planet spun through space. Geological forces shaped continents,
built mountains and lowered valleys. Climate dictated what thrived, and what perished and died upon
the skin of the Earth. For a time after the last Ice Age – a time we still ride upon ourselves, mere flecks of foam – it was warm and wet enough in part of western Asia for a kind of
grass to grow that attracted the butterfly attentions of humans living there. For as long as the grass grew, it changed the people and made them live differently. Flecks of foam, generations of
farmers, came and went, helplessly unaware of the wave that carried them, far less the deep ocean of time that lay beneath. Decades, centuries and millennia passed until finally the plants were
growing in northern and western Europe as well. It was a process imperceptible to the people involved but less than a blink of time in the
longue durée.
If the idea for farming
arrived from anywhere, it came from the planet and the grass.

So the day dawned when people in the north and west of Europe looked out across the stretch of water separating them from land they knew to be out there beyond the mist and rain. They knew it
was there because there had already been contact – and in both directions. People are curious and it is impossible to imagine a time when that curiosity was not compelling some of them
– hunters in Britain and farmers in France – to set out on journeys just to see what was on the other side of the water.

It followed eventually that, with no greater hope than the possibility of clearing some more fields and grazing this year’s young, some or other farmers’ sons put to sea in small
boats to try their luck on the island that would be Britain.

The south-east of England is closest to Europe and for a long time archaeologists assumed somewhere like Kent would have seen the first landings. This was the traditional version of events
– the one taught to generations of archaeology students for much of the twentieth century: farming simply crossed the Dover Strait into the south-east of Britain before spreading north and
west in the manner of determined Roman legionaries.

But there was a problem. The earliest Neolithic remains in Kent had been dated to 4000
BC
; and since farming was known to have been established on
the other side of Channel by at least 5000
BC
it begged the question why another thousand years had apparently passed before it travelled the last 20-odd miles.

Archaeologists like Alison Sheridan, however, are convinced farming followed several different routes at several different times. And while the
rival camp insists British
hunters acquired the knowledge of farming for themselves – perhaps during fact-finding trips to the Continent – she is certain the skills were brought here wholesale by European
immigrants.

Sheridan envisages the first of them departing from somewhere in north-west France and making landfall not in Britain but in south-west Ireland. These earliest forays began, she says, around
4500
BC
, but they were a ‘false start’ that had fizzled out by 4250
BC
. A little later there were pioneers from Brittany who did better,
establishing themselves at various points in the west of Wales and Scotland, and on the coastline of the more northerly half of the island of Ireland. The earliest megalithic tombs – from
4200–4000
BC
– are passage tombs with closed chambers found in Pembrokeshire. In shape and style these are similar to tombs in Brittany – further evidence
of the point of origin for this strand of Neolithic behaviour. Only from 4000
BC
onwards, says Sheridan, were colonists making use of the more familiar Channel crossing,
departing from the north-west of France around modern Calais and heading for locations on the south coast of Britain.

And according to Sheridan and others the farmers did not stop there. Colonists in this third wave travelled all the way up Britain’s east coast, and then to parts of the west coast and
around Ireland as well. Finally, in a reversal of the D-Day landings, a fourth wave of farmers from the Normandy area was loading boats and crossing to southern Britain from 4000
BC
onwards. Sheridan’s ‘big picture’ of the arrival of farming in Britain also allows for the possibility of a (relatively brief) time of overlapping lifestyles, with
Mesolithic hunters and Neolithic farmers sharing the land – maybe sometimes even oblivious to one another’s existence. But at a site called Ferriter’s Cove in County Kerry,
south-west Ireland, bones of domesticated cattle have been found among Mesolithic material.

A radiocarbon date from one of them suggested the cow had been slaughtered sometime between 4500 and 4180
BC
– prompting the site’s director, Professor Peter
Woodman of University College Cork, to imagine a spot of poaching. By way of explaining such early evidence of a domesticated beast in Mesolithic Ireland, he suggested an opportunist hunter might
have rustled a cow from his Neolithic neighbour. Sheridan cautiously accepts this as perhaps the last straw for a struggling pioneer. Finally discouraged, he packed his family and belongings aboard
his little boat and headed off back to France.

Although woven around a handful of bones, Woodman’s interpretation of what might have been happening at Ferriter’s Cove 6,500 years ago is a
welcome thread of
story-telling. Apart from anything else it helps us visualise real people behaving in ways that are instantly recognisable, and believable. It also reminds us how resourceful archaeologists and
other scientists have had to be in their search for clues to explain how, why – and especially when – people started farming in Britain and Ireland.

Sometime around 4,500 years ago an owl flew down the stone-lined passageway of a chambered tomb on the tiny island of Holm of Papa Westray, in Orkney, before perching on a stone lintel. It had
fed some hours before and now, in the near-total darkness of the chamber, it regurgitated from its gut a small, furry pellet – all that remained of the animal it had taken from among the long
grass near the shore. Now the owl’s prey, or its crumpled skeleton at least, would spend the coming millennia nestled among the human skulls and long bones already piled on the tomb’s
floor.

The tiny animal’s remains were recovered from the tomb by archaeologists. They might easily have been overlooked among the more arresting human remains, but were caught in the fine mesh of
a sieve used to check the excavated sediments for tiny clues. When analysed by animal bone specialist Keith Dobney, from Durham University, they were found to belong to the species
Microtus
arvalis orcadensis
, the Orkney vole.

Now the Orkney vole is a special little creature – quite distinct from his cousin
Microtus agrestis
, the field vole, who inhabits mainland Britain. The Orkney vole’s nearest
relatives (genetically speaking) are those living in the Rhine Valley in Germany, and perhaps in Brittany, and studies have shown
arvalis orcandensis
’s ancestors arrived in Orkney at
least 5,500 years ago. ‘It’s clear the voles aren’t swimming from Europe to Orkney on their own,’ said Dobney. ‘Which means that humans are involved.’ In fact it
is thought the voles arrived as accidental stowaways inside sacks of grain carried to Orkney by early farmers – not from the British mainland but direct from the Continent.

European voles in Orcadian chambered tombs; domesticated cattle bones among the scraps left behind by an unscrupulous hunter, who had no respect for foreign prospectors – these are some of
the tracks in the faint trail leading all the way back to the first British farmers.

The image of hunters and farmers existing side by side – whether happily or not – is a helpful one. There is some consensus among archaeologists that the lifestyle of the first
farmers retained elements of the Mesolithic traditions. As well as planting crops like wheat and barley and herding some domesticated cattle, pigs and sheep it seems completely logical they
would have supplemented their diet by continuing to hunt. Mesolithic hunters might even have begun the practice of opening up clearings in the woodland. Since grass would
grow in the open spaces, deer and other prey would be attracted there and hunters could lie in wait to take advantage. So the earliest farmers may have planted their first crops in what were, to
all intents and purposes, Mesolithic ‘fields’.

There is little evidence of permanent settlement either, at least in the early centuries, and archaeologists have imagined the farmers being at least partly nomadic, herding their animals from
one temporary camp to another. It is also thought that while they deliberately planted stands of wheat and barley, they were unlikely to have stood over them while they grew. Instead they would
have concentrated on moving the animals from pasture to pasture, only returning to the crop when it was time for the harvest.

At Balbridie, in Aberdeenshire, however, archaeologists began excavating what they thought would prove to be a Dark Age great hall. They revealed a huge building all right – more than 80
feet long by over 40 feet wide and made of massive timber posts – but radiocarbon dates showed it had been built and used between 3900 and 3700
BC
. It was Neolithic
– and Early Neolithic at that. Grains of wheat and barley were recovered from the postholes and also in a considerable concentration at one end, suggesting the interior may have been partly
used for storage. Whatever they did at Balbridie – whether it was a grain store, a meeting place, a setting for feasts or mysterious ceremonies – they did not do it for very long. It
seems that within a generation or so of its construction the hall was burnt down.

The Balbridie hall appears out of its proper time – fully formed and without any intermediate stepping-stones to link it to what had gone before – and yet it is not alone. At nearby
Warren Field, in Crathes near Aberdeen, another large timber building returned Early Neolithic dates. Excavated in 2005, the Warren Field hall was built sometime between 3800 and 3700
BC
. Even more fascinating, archaeologists also found a line of pits running for nearly 200 feet along a nearby ridge. These were big holes, up to 10 feet across, and when the largest of
them was excavated it was found to contain fragments of stone tools, including those of stone axes.

But it was the radiocarbon dates obtained from burnt wood in the pits that presented the real conundrum. Charcoal from the lowest levels was found to be around 9,500 years old, meaning they had
originally been dug by Mesolithic hunters. They were probably still visible as depressions in the
ground 4,000 years later when the farmers decided to reopen them. For
reasons unknown they put more burnt wood into the holes, along with fragments of their tools – a conscious and deliberate reuse of pits they must have known had originally been dug by people
who had lived and died long before them. It was, at the very least, an act of remembrance.

While large timber buildings are conspicuous oddities in the Early British Neolithic, such structures are more commonplace on the Continent. For as much as a thousand years before anyone was
digging the postholes for the Balbridie hall, farmers in parts of what are now Germany, Holland and Poland were building and using large timber structures. Analysis of the cereal grains in
Balbridie suggested they too were of European origin; so it seems plausible that the land around Aberdeen was being farmed about 6,000 years ago by people who had brought with them a fully formed
and sophisticated farming culture.

Across most of Britain the survival of Early Neolithic homes appears patchy, to put it mildly. It presents a confusing picture, with some built of stone and some of timber; some rectangular or
square in shape while others are oval or circular. It may well be that many more structures have been scrubbed from the archaeological record by later land use and modern development, and it is
also possible to build quite substantial structures that do not require deep postholes or other foundations likely to be spotted by archaeologists. The evidence as it stands, however, suggests the
first farmers were moving around the landscape much as the Mesolithic hunters had before them, using just temporary, even portable dwellings, travelling light.