“We shall cross the sea,” he said. “Perhaps we shall not come back. But even if we do not, other voyages will be made, in the future, and men will return. You must do as I have done. Use the boats, and trade: that is the best way for our family.”
For when Krona had originally lamed him and severely reduced his ability to hunt, he had unknowingly done Taku a great favour. Necessity had driven the hunter to find another way to subsist, and as the settlement grew, he had seen what the other hunters had failed to understand, that such a community must trade. Since the farmers were few in number and busy clearing the land, he had seen his chance and begun to act as a carrier of furs and game, a middleman on the five rivers. Now he perceived that bigger opportunities would open out with a crossing over the sea and he was determined to be a part of this new activity. He operated by instinct – for he had never seen a developed trading community such as already existed on mainland Europe; but his instincts were good.
The voyage was a success. The farmers got all the livestock they needed; the cattle enclosure had to be enlarged; and Taku had also found some small sheep with the finest wool. But most important of all, he and his son saw the larger settlements and the vigorous trade that was developing on the mainland.
“You were right to make peace with the settlers,” Taku confided to Magri. “They are even more powerful than we thought.” And to his son he said: “We need bigger boats now. We must trade across the sea.”
As the new era of prosperity developed at Sarum, only one nagging problem remained to trouble Krona as he entered the last phase of his old age – for he was nearly fifty now – and that was how to find a leader for the two communities to succeed him.
Liam was not in doubt.
“Name our son,” she urged. Their elder boy was thirteen now. In a few years he would be a man. As she gazed at her old husband with pride and tenderness, she was sure she could look after him and keep him alive long enough to see his strong young son become a fitting leader. “They will follow him, even if he is young, because he is your son and you have chosen him,” she argued.
But Krona knew it could not be.
“One day my son will be chief,” he promised Liam, “but not yet.”
It would be a difficult choice. For despite the peace that seemed to have settled over the place, the hunters still lived a life apart, worshipped the moon goddess, and made no attempt to raise livestock or sow corn themselves. He needed to choose a man who could command authority amongst the dominant settlers, but who was sympathetic to the hunters as well.
The solution to this problem presented itself unexpectedly.
When old Magri had brought the two girls to Krona’s camp, the chief had decided to give one of them to a promising young farmer named Gwilloc, who was distantly related to him. Gwilloc was a tall man of twenty-two with a long, intelligent face; the other farmers called him the dark man because his hair, his thick beard and his eyes were all jet black; and his dark and swarthy look was made more striking by his tallness. He spoke little, but when he did, his words were listened to with respect. Gwilloc accepted the girl from Krona without complaint and before long there were three children, all of them with striking dark good looks; Krona noticed with interest that these children seemed to be equally at home with both the settlers and the hunters, and he smiled at Magri’s wisdom in making the gift of the girls. In a few generations, he could see, the two peoples, despite their different cultures, might merge into one.
But such a blending would take time, and meanwhile, it was young Gwilloc who now presented Krona with a new and unexpected development.
At the time when Taku was preparing for his voyage across the sea, Gwilloc came to Krona and asked permission to stake out a new farm.
“My brother and his family will take over the farm we have been sharing,” he explained: “for he has three sons now. It is time for me to start a new one.”
This request was reasonable enough. But when Krona asked what place he had in mind the young farmer named a spot outside the valley.
“But our farms are all in the valley,” Krona said. “There is good land there.”
“The land opposite the valley entrance, to the south wes’ of where the rivers meet, is even better,” Gwilloc replied. “And there,” he added to the old man’s surprise, “my woman will be nearer her own people.”
This was a new idea that had not occurred to Krona before.
“We gave our word to the hunters to stay in the valley,” he said. “I promised to protect their hunting grounds.” Such an extension of their settlement would provoke exactly the kind of bad feeling he was trying to avoid. “You are a fool,” he told the young farmer.
“What if I can persuade the hunters to agree that my farm should be here?” Gwilloc asked, undismayed.
Krona shrugged. If that were the case, then he would have no objection.
“They will not agree,” he said.
But to his surprise, ten days later, Magri and another hunter approached him and proposed that Gwilloc’s farm should be situated exactly at the spot he had requested.
“But that is on a hunting ground,” he said.
Magri nodded.
“But this farm would lie at the entrance to the western valley; and the hunting there is less good than to the east. If there are to be new farms, let them be in the western valley,” he replied; the other hunter nodded.
“We promised to stay in the northern valley,” Krona persisted. “And we keep our promises. There is plenty of land there.”
The second hunter smiled.
“You make promises, but look at the way your farms advance. Sooner or later the hunters know you will want to leave the valley. Better to have Gwilloc, whose woman is one of us, than another of your farmers.”
“The children of Gwilloc already begin to hunt with our children,” Magri explained. “In time they will respect our hunting grounds the more if they have lived amongst our people. It is better this way.”
At this moment Krona saw who it was who should succeed him as chief.
In the five years that followed, Krona lived contentedly. In the third year, during a particularly long and harsh winter, old Magri died and automatically, since he was the next oldest, Taku filled his place as the spokesman for the scattered bands of hunters. The following spring the medicine man became sick and at the time of the harvest, he too died; his place was taken by his assistant: a cool-headed young man who was in much awe of Krona and who was careful to do nothing to upset the hunters.
From the time that he set up his new farm opposite the valley entrance, Krona took care to watch Gwilloc closely and to give him every chance to prove himself as a worthy leader.
Whenever there was a council or discussion of importance, he called him to his side; and frequently he sent him with instructions to act for him in smaller matters. Gwilloc was quick to respond, and since he well understood both communities, his words carried weight. He was a good farmer and the land he had chosen was well-sited. He and his family prospered.
The marks of Krona’s favour were immediately understood by the farmers and since Gwilloc’s reputation was high, no words were raised against him as he quietly but steadily established himself as the old man’s successor.
Each year the old warrior moved about less and he was aware of a stiffening in all his limbs. The great bull neck began to sag, and his powerful form grew thinner: but even near the end, he was still an imposing figure. Whenever the sun was warm, he could still be seen in front of his farm, attended now by several of the younger women to help Liam, and, as ever, watching the swans make their nests on the banks of the river below.
It was in his usual place, on a sunny afternoon in late spring, that Krona quietly and suddenly died. He had reached the considerable age of fifty-four.
The next day a council was held and Gwilloc was immediately chosen as the new chief.
Gwilloc’s first act as chief began a process which was to continue for nearly fou
r thousand years, a process which would alter the landscape of Sarum for all time to come.
“We must honour Krona, who founded this settlement and who kept peace in the place where the five rivers meet,” he announced. “We must not let his greatness be forgotten.”
There was general agreement, but some uncertainty about what to do.
“We should build a pile of stones over his grave,” said one farmer. But several of those present felt this was not enough.
Finally Gwilloc supplied the answer.
“We shall build him a house,” he said, “where his soul may live at peace for ever.”
And so he selected a place on the high ground a few miles north of the valley entrance; it was a deserted spot at the top of a ridge, with a magnificent view over the high ground and the valley below. There, on his orders, the hunters and settlers came, each day, clearing the whole area of trees before they began to build. First they made a small house of wood and placed Krona’s body inside it. Beside him they put his club, the sack of wool on which he used to sit, and they killed one of the swans he liked to watch and placed it there as well.
But next, they did something that had never been done before. First they sealed the wooden tomb; then, using deers’ antlers as picks, on either side of it they dug two enormous parallel ditches in the chalk, a hundred feet long and ten apart, piling the earth in the centre to create a mound. Day after day they continued. The mound grew. Soon it completely covered Krona’s wooden tomb, which lay at its south east end. But still the work went on until the hundred foot mound rose over six feet high along its entire length.
This work took two months of hard labour to complete; when it was done, Gwilloc made them pack the chalk sides and the top of the mound hard. The final result was a long, impressive monument that rose out of the ground like a huge, upturned boat. By day, it struck the eyes with its harsh, white glare; and under the moonlight, it gave off a pale, ghostly glow.
“Now Krona has his house,” Gwilloc said. “Here he lives for ever.”
Both settlers and hunters looked with wonder and delight at the huge earthwork that they had made; and each knew that, from now on, this clearing on the high ground would be a holy place.
On Gwilloc’s instructions, the medicine man then sacrificed a lamb to the sun god, and a deer to the moon goddess of the hunters as well, so that nothing should be left undone as they laid the old chief to rest.
Often in the years that followed, when he had difficult decisions to make, Gwilloc would come alone to the clearing on the high ground and sit silently beside the long white tomb that he had made.
“Tell me, Krona, what I must do,” he would ask. At such times, it seemed to him that the old man’s spirit spoke to him quietly, giving him good advice; and he would return to the valley, strengthened.
This was not the only manifestation of Krona’s abiding presence: for often, when the summer thunder rolled over the ridges the people of Sarum would look at each other and say:
“That’s Krona, rumbling in his house.”
Years afterwards, when he in turn had chosen one of Krona’s sons to succeed him, Gwilloc marked out for himself and his family a similar though more modest tomb half a mile away, so that his spirit also should remain properly housed near the place where the rivers met.
And so began at Sarum the first building of the great earth tombs known as long barrows that are the distinguishing mark of Neolithic Britain and which have lasted for over five thousand years. From this time on, through generation after generation, other tombs would arise out of the ground in the Sarum area as farming communities cleared and settled the land. Sometimes the barrows became the tombs of families or groups, but others continued to be built as memorials to some individual great man. Their use spread further afield over Britain. As millennia passed they took on many forms – some round, some saucer-shaped. But it is on the high rolling downland of Salisbury Plain that to this day one of the greatest concentrations of all can be seen, where several hundred barrows overgrown with grass – brooding presences from the island’s ancient days – dot mile after mile of the landscape.
As Magri had predicted, not only did the settlers leave the northern valley in time and spread over many of the old hunting grounds, but other settlers, too, came from across the sea.
For the arrival of Krona was only one of many similar migrations, both to the island of Britain and to the more distant land of Ireland in the west, to which the settlers came in a steady trickle, braving the dangerous northern waters in their tiny craft. They built small wooden farmsteads, sowed corn or raised livestock, or, like those at Sarum, they did both. Their earthwork enclosures were used as meeting places, where cattle could be bartered, or sometimes for defence; they built barrows; they cleared the ridges for their flocks of squat brown sheep. Wherever they settled, they dominated the land. And out of this sporadic settlement grew the great civilisation known as the Neolithic culture of Britain.
It took about two thousand years.
This next two thousand years of Britain’s history are reasonably well documented by archaeologists. The barrows, settlements and implements of the farmers have been found in quantities which allow scholars to identify many varieties of culture. One area somewhat to the north of Sarum, has given its name – Windmill Hill – to the culture which produced surface flint quarries and causewayed earthworks. In Yorkshire to the north, the settlers found the lustrous stone called jet, which they used for making necklaces and ornaments. And in Cornwall, Wales and the Lake District, communities of miners developed, who cut into the volcanic rock of those regions and made axes superior to any seen before. Cut off from the rest of Europe, the island continued to develop its own rich and distinctive life.
It may be supposed, though it cannot be proved, that the island’s original and sparse population of hunters was absorbed by the gradual infiltration of these Neolithic farming folk. But although the land under agriculture could support much larger communities, the numbers of people were still very small. The population of settlers in the entire island by 2,000 B.C. may have been no more than forty thousand souls – a huge increase from the old hunting community – but still leaving vast tracts of the country completely untouched. And who knows what primitive folk may have continued to roam, undisturbed, in these deserted wastes.
But the Sarum area in the heart of Wessex, with its upland soil which was so easy to till with the light plough, was not only agricultural – it became one of the natural centres of Neolithic Britain. The ridges and trackways along which hunters like Hwll had once travelled now brought traders from far away. From the south, traders from along the coast, or even across the sea, could come to the natural harbour under the shelter of the hill and make their way up stream to the place where the five rivers met. Situated at this junction of ridgeway and waterway, it was natural that Sarum should become a place of importance.
Around 2,500 B.C., a further change occurred in Britain. Wonderful flat-bottomed pottery appeared, as it did elsewhere in Europe, which, on account of its shape, archaeologists have called Beaker, and which may be traced to sources in Iberia, and on the river Rhine. About this time also, the islanders acquired from across the sea first copper and then, soon after, the new alloy of tin and copper known as bronze. With this they began to make weapons, fine jewellery and many small implements. But bronze was soft. Though easy to work with, it did not revolutionise either warfare, or more important, agriculture. Its effect on the island was not profound.
But the glory of the island, and of Sarum in particular, during these long centuries was not made of metal, nor was metal important in its construction. The glory of the island was made of stone.
This was the magnificent collection of circular stone temples that rested on the high ground: the henges. Even today, they are awesome to look upon. Huge stones, each weighing many tons, were set up with a sharp, geometric precision on the bare ridges. Some of them cover several acres. Their engineering is extraordin
ary: and the power of those who could organise the huge teams of men needed to erect them is impressive. They stand as stately memorials (relegating even the barrows to insignificance) to the science and the ambition of the rulers of those days.
These henges are known nowhere else in northern Europe; but in Britain they are found all over the island, from Cornwall to the northern tip of Scotland. Their development lasted many centuries: they were first made of earth, then of wood and finally of stone. They were always circular, and their entrances usually oriented on an axis that pointed them towards the rising sun at the summer solstice. But that was only the beginning of the science of the henges, and to this day, archaeologists and mathematicians are still studying the religious and astronomical properties of these remarkable temples. The largest concentration of them lies in the area around Sarum. Thirty miles north west lay the huge henge at the village of Avebury. Nearer were several smaller ones including a fine henge made of wood. But the greatest and most impressive henge of all is Stonehenge on the high ground north of Sarum.
It was begun early – soon after 3,000 B.C. At first it consisted of a circular earth wall enclosure, its entrance oriented on the rising sun at summer solstice. Just inside the earth wall, soon afterwards, was set up an inner circle of fifty-six posts, evenly spaced. There were also large stones framing the entrance. Around 2,100 B.C. a stone circle was begun near the centre with bluestone rocks, It was one of the most remarkable feats of Neolithic engineering: for each of the sacred bluestones stood over six feet high, weighed four tons, and had been brought, at a time when the builders had not the benefit of the wheel, a distance of some two hundred and forty miles by sea, land and river from the distant Preseli Mountains of South Wales. The completed circle would have required over sixty of these stones.
But around 2,000 B.C. something very strange occurred. For some reason, the building with the bluestones which was half completed, suddenly stopped. The bluestones were removed from the site. And then, miraculously a new building was begun. It had a stately avenue that led from the entrance between earthwork walls for six hundred yards across the rolling high ground. Its gigantic grey stones dwarfed the previous bluestones. Its design and its magnificence was unlike anything that the island had ever seen before.
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