A History of Ancient Britain (16 page)

But if their homes left little trace, those pioneers did implant a sense of permanence in the land by the building of monuments, and it is from some of these special places – special to
those who created them – that we get a first glimpse of the people themselves.

Human bones and skulls were excavated from inside a stone tomb built at Coldrum, in Kent, around 4000
BC
. The rich soil of Kent is still prime farming land – the
Garden of England, as it is known – and Coldrum tomb is surrounded by fields today. But the farmers would have encountered the woodland of oak and birch that had shrouded the landscape for
millennia. Among its dappled shadows moved red deer and elk, bears and wild pigs, and hunters. All of it was about to begin a steady, irresistible process of permanent transformation.

While the hunters had lived with the land as it was (give or take a few
clearings) the farmers were technologists who carried in their heads an image of the way the land
could be. They understood how to make the land work for them. Instead of fitting in alongside nature, they sought to rule over it. Coldrum tomb was the work of some of those newcomers to Britain
and it appears today as a simple, roofless rectangular chamber built of huge slabs of local sarsen stone. Once it may have been within an earthen mound but it is no longer possible to know for
sure. It contained the remains of around 17 people – adults, teenagers, young children and babies – possibly all belonging to the same extended family or tribe.

Holding one of those adult skulls, looking into the empty eye sockets and marvelling at the shine on the teeth, is a humbling experience. Archaeologists use expressions like ‘the Neolithic
Revolution’ to describe the change from hunting to farming. But it is bones like those from Coldrum that remind us it was all the work of individual people, spending the few years of their
lives trying to reshape the world. They were either among the very first to reach Britain, or perhaps those settlers’ children or grandchildren, and they lived their lives against the odds.
They brought a new idea, as fragile as a cutting, and transplanted it into soil that had never known the like. They crossed the sea and entrusted their own futures and those of their children to
the knowledge in their heads and the skill of their hands. Apart from anything else, they were brave.

The building of tombs to house the bones of the dead was new behaviour, Neolithic behaviour that came to Britain with the farmers. Finds of Mesolithic remains are so rare – the skeletons
from Aveline’s Hole, and Cheddar Man in Somerset – as to make it impossible to know what funerary rituals were practised in the main by the hunters. There have been a handful of
spectacular finds: a Mesolithic ‘cemetery’ was excavated at Vedbaek, in modern Denmark, in the 1980s and found to contain bodies laid in carefully cut graves. Some had their head or
feet resting on antlers; in one a young woman wearing a necklace of red deer teeth had been buried with a baby laid upon a swan’s wing. But such enigmatic rarities are exceptional and the
Mesolithic approach to death remains almost a total mystery.

Along with their seeds and domesticated animals, the first farmers to arrive in Britain brought from Europe a whole new approach to death and the dead. The decision to store their remains in
purpose-built chambers seems to indicate a new way of seeing the land. Having made the effort to open up the woodland for their animals and to plant crops, they justifiably felt an attachment to
their own small patches of territory – made by their
own toil – and wanted others to respect them. They had put down roots and as more time passed – as sons
and daughters stayed in place to work the fields cleared by their parents, grandparents, their great-grandparents – the roots grew deep, and deeper still. It became important for the living
to remember those who had gone before because the dead validated their continuing claim on the land. Their bones, the bones of the ancestors – or at least the bones of some representative few
of them – became symbols of a tenure that had lasted for generations. The land gave them life year after year and they gave their lives to it in return. Eventually the same soil that had fed
them would cradle their bones, so that the family’s connection to the fields transcended death itself.

Evidence like the Orkney voles and the very early cow bone at Ferriter’s Cove in south-west Ireland makes it clear the story of farming’s arrival in Britain is more complex and
subtle than we had ever imagined. Instead of one concerted push across the narrowest part of the Channel into Kent around 4000
BC
it now seems, as Sheridan and others
suggest, that many different crossings were made from departure points all along the Continent’s northern and western coastlines. In ones and twos, down through the centuries before 4000
BC
, European farmers were testing the ground all around Britain, in search of footholds.

Ireland provides yet another twist. While archaeologists in Britain have found only the merest traces of the earliest farmers, on the northern coastline of County Mayo is a vast archaeological
site that defies neat and tidy explanation. It appears to be the preserved remains of Neolithic farming on a truly massive scale.

Discovered in the 1930s by local schoolteacher Patrick Caulfield during routine cutting of peat for his fire, Achaidh Chéide – the Céide Fields – may contain the
earliest Neolithic field system in the world. What Caulfield found was the top of a wall of large stones now buried beneath many feet of peat. The investigation of the mystery was taken up by his
son Seamus, who was inspired to study archaeology as a result of what Caulfield Senior had begun to unearth; and Dr Caulfield has now spent 40 years of his life exploring the Céide Fields.
What is indisputable is that the ambition of the wall-builders in this part of Ireland’s wild west was, at some point in prehistory, truly heroic.

The principal weapon in Caulfield’s armoury has been a steel rod with which he probes the peat. The formation of peat is still not fully understood but it is thought to be a build-up of
vegetable matter on
ground waterlogged by rain. Under certain conditions fallen leaves, dead grass and other plant material fails to decompose quickly enough. Instead of
breaking down and being absorbed by the soil, it accumulates on the surface. Over hundreds or even thousands of years this accumulation can become several feet thick. The criss-crossing pattern of
Neolithic walls, along with everything else that was visible on the Céide Fields in ancient times, lies hidden today beneath a blanket of peat as much as 10 feet deep.

By laboriously working their way back and forth across the landscape, Caulfield and his teams of volunteers have been able to plot the pattern of the walls. The peat has the consistency of firm
butter and the probes slide through it easily. When they hit the top of a section of wall a sound rings back from stones that have been out of sight for millennia. ‘Five and a half thousand
years ago somebody lifted a stone into place,’ said Caulfield. ‘And we are now hearing it for the first time.’

A field system covering many square miles has already been mapped. Pollen grains found within cores of peat removed from the bog reveal the walls defined fields of grass – pasture for
livestock. Caulfield believes Neolithic farmers were managing huge herds of cattle and needed the field system to keep cows, calves and bulls separate from one another at different times of the
year. There is also pollen from pine trees, showing what covered the landscape before the farmers set to work with their axes; and also rare instances of cereal crops like wheat.

It is the scale of the Céide Fields that has made some archaeologists sceptical about Caulfield’s findings, or at least about the early dates. The only comparable field systems in
Britain and Europe were laid out sometime after 2000
BC
– one and a half millennia later. Caulfield has also found evidence of permanent houses on the Céide
Fields at a time when pastoralists in Britain were still semi-nomadic, driving their herds from fresh pasture to fresh pasture. Then there is the mystery of where the Irish cattle came from. In
Britain there were aurochs, the wild ancestors of domesticated cattle, but no such beasts existed in Ireland. So, apart from anything else, the animals Caulfield supposes were grazing in his neat
fields 5,500 years ago had to have been imported.

The whole scale of what has apparently been discovered there suggests it arrived fully formed, like the Balbridie timber hall. This was no gradual process – indigenous people clearing the
land a little at a time, keeping a few cattle and learning the necessary skills all the while. Instead Caulfield
believes it was a grand plan executed by experienced dairy
farmers from Europe.

The Céide Fields are, in short, controversial.

Whenever and however it arrived, farming eventually changed everything, in Britain and everywhere else. Despite the hardships, despite the cost to general health, it was demonstrably productive.
Practised skilfully it provided the kind of surplus and the kind of certainty of supply that hunters could only dream of. Hunters were always chasing their food, trusting nature to provide for
them. Farmers had taken control of nature. As a survival strategy, it was irresistible.

It would change the land and it changed us as well. The transition to farming eventually committed every man, woman and child to a lifetime of work. The daily grind was once the chore of turning
seed into flour, but we had unwittingly shackled ourselves to the millstones for all time. There could be no turning back. Because farming was productive it fed more children. With more children a
family could clear and work more land – and so produce more food, to feed yet more children.

The population rapidly increased to the point where farming was the only option; there were simply too many people ever to permit a return to hunting. They were enslaved by the grass; they had
made of themselves beasts of burden. If they had been nomadic in the beginning – herding their animals, returning to clearings to harvest grain – that time passed. With all that
fertility and productivity, all those children, the place gradually filled up. They could not drift around any more. Instead they had to stay put, make the best of it in one place for life. There
was no room for hunters any more either. There had come a day when we were all, finally, farmers – whether we wanted to be or not.

During the millennia farming took to cross Europe, the very beliefs of its practitioners – their view of the world and their place in it – had also been fundamentally altered. Once
the hunters had stood helpless while the deluges snatched the land away. Now the farmers were determined to hold onto it. Perhaps they felt that by tending the land, caring for it, they were
securing it against loss.

By the time that family set about building their tomb at Coldrum, in Kent, 6,000 years ago, they were following an approach to death that was already well established elsewhere. All across
Europe are burial mounds and chambers built by farmers to contain their dead and as time passed the practice became more and more elaborate. Within a few centuries of the
building of the Coldrum barrow, farmers in Britain were investing enormous effort and imagination in an attempt to do right by the land and the dead.

West Kennet Long Barrow, in Wiltshire, is one of the most famous Early Neolithic tombs. The ‘barrow’ is a long mound of chalk rubble nearly 330 feet long and aligned east to west. At
the wide eastern end a façade of enormous sarsen slabs – some twice the height of a man and weighing several tens of tons – symbolically ‘blocks’ the entrance to a
long, stone-lined ‘transepted’ passage which gives access to five chambers – two pairs either side and one at the end. While the chambers are for crouching in, the passage is big
enough to enable a man to walk upright and the whole interior, dimly illuminated by a small pane of modern toughened glass in the roof, is reminiscent of a chapel. It somehow demands, and usually
receives, respectful quiet. The huge amount of labour involved in the construction – not to mention the imagination – suggests it was the work not of one family but of an entire
community. More than a tomb, more than a memorial to loved ones, it is about creating another world – the community of the living imagining the community of the dead.

West Kennet is one of a class of tombs classified by archaeologists as the Cotswold-Severn group and the latest thinking suggests they were built and used over a relatively short space of time.
With names like Wayland’s Smithy (in Oxfordshire), Hetty Pegler’s Tump and Belas Knap (both in Gloucestershire), they are found all across the Cotswolds and in parts of north Wales.
They are also similar to monuments in the Loire: those French tombs may even have inspired the British examples.

The remains of just over 40 people were placed inside West Kennet itself over the course of as little as 25 years, and the different sexes and age groups were carefully split between the
chambers. Old and young were separated from one another, as were men and women, suggesting Neolithic society was carefully ordered.

There is little consensus about how such tombs were used. In addition to the Cotswold-Severn group there are many other types and styles. Rather in the manner of awkward teenage boys with their
music collections, archaeologists are committed to making lists, putting things in order and compiling classifications and groups. They have therefore identified numerous different sorts of
tombs.

There are those where the internal structure is made of timber and those where it is stone; around the Irish Sea there are the Portal Dolmens with
large chambers made of
stone slabs; sometimes the mounds are round, sometimes they are trapezoidal, rectangular or square; sometimes single chambers are entered from the sides of long, thin mounds; in others there are
passages leading to interconnected chambers from curving façades. In parts of Scotland there are Clyde Cairns, in parts of Ireland Court Cairns. Some of the variations occur within, as well
as between regions and different parts of the country. But for all the lack of uniformity it is at least fair to say the care of bones was a serious matter.