A History of Ancient Britain (25 page)

In the Neolithic period, however, there was no cloth; and so O’Gibney’s greatest challenge was to think himself back into the mind of a long-distance mariner of the ancient past, and
then set about tackling the problem of how to make what is essentially a large sheet. His solution was a logical one: employ precisely the same materials that were available for the hull of the
curragh. Using hazel rods and strips of cowhide he managed to fashion a ‘sail’ he was convinced was large enough to power his super-curragh.

I was with him aboard the vessel (thankfully accompanied by a crew of expert curragh-men – O’Gibney was the first to admit that, while he had worked out how to build a curragh, he
had not the first clue about what to do with one in the water) when we put his Heath Robinson means of propulsion through its paces for the very first time. To begin with we simply rowed the vessel
in the time-honoured manner and even the purists among the curragh-men were soon loudly agreeing that O’Gibney had built a fine boat. Curraghs have no keel – no single timber running
the length of the bottom of the craft – and so tend to sit very high in the water. Even laden with men and a heavy rolled-up sail made of hazel and leather, we rode the soft swell as
naturally as a seabird.

Fortunately for all concerned it was a perfect sailing day, for soon the moment came when we had to work out how to raise our Neolithic sail into position. It had been lying along the bottom of
the curragh all the while – as heavy as a man and half again as long – but O’Gibney is a fellow with the energy and enthusiasm of half a dozen and he was quickly to the fore with
a plan.

‘This’ll be a bit of fun lads,’ he said, a master of understatement. ‘So we’ll all just have to stay calm.’ He had worked out a tripod arrangement in lieu of
a single mast. Once we had manhandled the thing into an upright position – a feat involving much anxious stumbling and grabbing at ropes as seven men and seven oars jockeyed for position
aboard a wallowing craft without a deck – we lashed a leg of the tripod into place either side of the craft and placed the third into a specially prepared leather socket at the stern. Using
all of his considerable strength, O’Gibney then hauled on a rope arrangement that slowly raised the woven sail towards the top of the
tripod. Satisfied it was high
enough, he secured the ropes and carefully encouraged the stiff cowhide to stretch fully down and so catch the best of the wind.

I cannot recall seeing a happier face than that of Clive O’Gibney as the vessel gently, but perceptibly, began to pick up speed through the waves. ‘I’m thrilled,
delighted,’ he said. ‘All the hard work that everyone put in, everyone coming from every part of Ireland because they’d heard this fella was trying to make a sail out of
wicker.’ The skipper, comfortably ensconced in the stern, manoeuvred the steering oar with a practised hand and set us fairly skipping away from shore. ‘But it’s one thing
imagining it – it’s another to see it working,’ added O’Gibney. ‘I wanted to hear it, feel it – and that’s what we’re getting now. It’s one of
the best experiences!’

Sat there among the crew it was suddenly easy to imagine boats just like O’Gibney’s, powered either by oars or makeshift sails, carrying people between the great megalithic sites of
Neolithic Britain – along with ideas, beliefs and, sometimes no doubt, precious artefacts.

On display in the Museum of Dublin is one of the most breathtaking Neolithic objects ever found in Britain or Ireland. It is a 5,000-year-old ceremonial mace-head made with astonishing skill and
imagination. The raw material was quite obviously part of the inspiration for the finished piece – a fist-sized lump of creamy white flint with veins and blotches of a reddish toffee colour
seemingly stirred through it, so that it has the appearance of a giant boiled sweet. Apart from anything else it looks good enough to eat.

But the natural beauty of the stone is at least matched by the artistic genius of whoever undertook the hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours required to make something so perfect. Using only
tools of stone, wood and antler the artist had first to shape the nodule into the symmetrical proportions of the basic mace-head. The mace’s two supposed ‘striking’ surfaces were
worked anew to create scores of diamond-shaped facets that catch and reflect the light so that they seem to shimmer. Countless hours and days were then spent drilling the perfectly smooth hole to
take a wooden shaft. For a craftsman without metal this would have entailed endlessly patient effort with a wooden bow-drill, the spinning of the bit made more abrasive and effective by the use of
sand or ground quartz.

As well as technical expertise, the artist has also demonstrated a level of imagination that even manages to hint at a sense of humour. In addition to the hole for the shaft he, or she, has
added two intricately worked,
interconnecting whorls – so that together the three clearly suggest two wide eyes and a gaping, astonished mouth. The effect is enhanced
even further by the way the artist has exploited the location of two splotches of ginger-red veining, to make it look as if the head has wild ginger hair and a ginger goatee beard. By any standard,
in any era, it is a pocket-sized masterpiece and reveals a level of sophistication and refinement that is not seen on any other artefact of the period.

The making of such a mace-head 5,000 years ago hints at nothing less than the existence of a privileged elite able to commission and own such objects. It speaks, in fact, of the emergence of an
upper class – of chieftains or even priests, who carried symbols of power that advertised their prestige.

The mace-head was found buried at the heart of yet another ritual landscape. The Brú na Bóinne – the Palace of the Boyne – is the collective name for the complex of
tombs, standing stones, stone circles and henges scattered across County Meath. Together they add up to one of the most important ancient megalithic landscapes in the whole of Europe, a palace
indeed. The megalith-builders were at work in the Brú na Bóinne, however, as early as 3200
BC
– before the bluestones were imported to Stonehenge, before
the circles were raised on Orkney – and some archaeologists believe this part of Ireland may be where that special brand of Neolithic religion actually began.

Easily the most famous site is the giant passage grave of Newgrange, just the other side of the Boyne from Clive O’Gibney and his curragh-sailing dreams. Full-scale excavations were
conducted there by the archaeologist Michael J. O’Kelly from the early 1960s until the mid 1970s, after which he had the mound and its ‘façade’ reconstructed in exuberant
style. A larger quantity of quartz and granite pebbles had been recovered in front of the entrance, leading O’Kelly to believe they had once formed a shining white wall extending either side
of the opening to the passage itself. With this vision in mind, conservators set to work with a will – but found it was only possible to realise O’Kelly’s interpretation by
reinforcing the interior of the mound with concrete.

The site as it appears today is certainly striking – and popular with tourists – but has been described as looking like the prototype for a new style of hat to be worn by
stewardesses on some Irish airline. More recent analysis of the original excavation results has prompted the suggestion that the quartz and granite pebbles may simply have formed a bright pavement
in front of the mound. Around the outside of the mound are about 100
large boulders described as kerbstones. Almost a third of these are decorated with the spirals, circles,
chevrons and zig-zag lines that characterise the megalithic art of western Europe.

Controversial though the reconstruction undoubtedly is, it should not detract from the wonder of the interior of the tomb. The long, low passage is instantly reminiscent of that at Maes Howe
– which it predates by perhaps hundreds of years. It opens into a cruciform, corbel-vaulted chamber 20 feet high with three recesses that once contained the remains of the dead. This too
recalls the Orcadian tomb but Newgrange it is more primitive, more rough-hewn – somehow more ‘Stone Age.’ It feels like a very early realisation of a dream or a vision – one
that would be refined over time and in other places.

Best of all at Newgrange, there is clear evidence of ancient commitment to venerating the voyage of the sun. Long before the excavations of the 1960s and 1970s it was known locally that a
decorated lintel stone was to be found in a position above and behind the entrance. Careful work by O’Kelly and his team revealed the stone was, however, part of what they subsequently called
a ‘roof-box’, a window to let light into the passageway. The architects of Newgrange had possessed such skill and accuracy they had been able to align the passageway with the mid-winter
sunrise – a feat in itself but complicated here by the fact that the chamber floor is six feet higher than the ground level at the entrance. By carefully aligning the angle of the roof-box to
compensate for the gentle slope of the passage they could coax the rays of the last sun of the year all the way to the back wall of the chamber.

Even on a crystal clear 21 December – and those are few in County Meath – the effect lasts only 17 minutes or so before the chamber is plunged once more into darkness. But on those
occasions when it works the rays penetrate far enough to illuminate a very special carving, pecked out on the wall of one of the recesses. It is the earliest known example of something called a
triple spiral – one continuous line, winding and unwinding with no beginning and no end. Interpretations of its meaning are too numerous to list but there is surely a link between the form at
Newgrange and the coils and whorls at Copt Howe in Great Langdale and every other Neolithic circle and spiral worked into rocks and mountains all across the land.

So the spiral is about time, and the lives it governs. Individual lives begin and end but life flows through us, from one to another down the generations so that together we are something more,
something infinite.
Sun and Moon rise and set in an endless cycle of light and dark, life and death. As well as containing the remains of the dead, places like Newgrange,
Maes Howe and Stonehenge also held the promise of rebirth. If the old sun was dying then the new sun, with its promise of spring and summer to follow, could not be far behind.

Archaeologists are increasingly of the opinion that the great circles of Brodgar and Stonehenge, and the passage graves of Newgrange and Maes Howe, are all memorable phrases within one splendid
conversation between the people, the stone, the land and the sky. From the Orkney Islands of Scotland, to the Preseli Mountains in south Wales, to Stonehenge in the south of England and to
Brú na Bóinne in the east of Ireland – it is all connected.

The exquisite mace-head staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed from within its case in the Museum of Dublin insists, by its very existence, upon a powerful person to bear it. And that object too is
evidence of connections; because although it was found at Brú na Bóinne the flint from which it was made likely came from Britain, even perhaps as far away as Orkney. Whether it was
exported in finished or unfinished form can never be known but there is enough evidence to suggest that the great sites of Britain and Ireland inspired successive generations; and as the Neolithic
elite moved between Orkney and Wiltshire and the east of Ireland and elsewhere, so ideas spread.

Within sight of Newgrange lies another passage grave – Knowth, surrounded by 17 smaller chambered tombs like chicks around a mother hen. Stunning though Newgrange undoubtedly is, it is
knocked into second place by its near neighour. A total of around 400 decorated stones adorn Knowth, some as a kerb of boulders around the outside of the mound, and many more incorporated into the
internal structures. It is believed to comprise, amazingly within this one location, around half the megalithic art in all of western Europe.

Knowth contains not one but two passage graves, non-identical twins lying back to back within the same womb. The western tomb is the lesser of the pair, with a chamber that is simply wider and
taller than the passage leading to it. That on the eastern side, however, is a marvel of Neolithic engineering and it is there that the mace-head was found, together with a decorated pin of bone or
antler.

The task of excavating Knowth has effectively been the life’s work of Irish archaeologist George Eogan, who has studied the site for over 50 years. The passages and chambers are not
normally open to the public, but Eogan
granted me privileged access. Now a man of advanced years, he was nonetheless fearless in leading me into the partially collapsed
eastern passage – all 140-odd feet of it – the far end of which can only be negotiated using techniques normally required by pot-holers. The reward for all the effort in those last
several claustrophobic feet of the passage is the corbelled chamber beyond – a space in which only a relative handful of people have stood in the last 5,000 years.

Eogan first breathed the air inside that hallowed vault nearly 50 years ago, and has described the experience of reaching the end of the passage that day with all the excitement and anticipation
of a latter-day Howard Carter. ‘It suddenly came to an abrupt halt, and I felt as if I were suspended in mid-air,’ he said. ‘But, still not suspecting what might exist before me,
I flashed my lamp around. And there was an astonishing sight: a great space with corbelled sides narrowed beehive fashion to a single closing slab at the top. That was only part of the structure.
When I flashed the light downward, what I saw was even more remarkable: a great chamber with a rounded ground plan. I descended into the chamber, how I did so I cannot think, but I must have jumped
two metres or more from the top of the orthostats.’

Like that at Newgrange, the chamber Eogan landed in during the summer of 1968 is cruciform in shape. (He had actually made his final approach through a void leading up and over the lower course
of upright stones forming the walls of the interior – a product of the partial collapse that makes the approach so uncomfortable today.) But once he had regained his bearings he found
something particularly special – a basin more than three feet across, carved from a single block of stone and elaborately decorated, with deeply incised lines around the outside and on the
inside with arcs and rays, as though representing the risen sun. Lying in the basin and scattered around it were cremated human remains.