Another famous ley line in southern England is the 22-mile Glastonbury Ley, running through Glastonbury Tor in Somerset, a hill that local legend holds was the mystical land of Avalon, and Gorsey Bigbury, a 130-foot-diameter henge monument some 11 miles to the north.11 There are seven sites on the proposed ley line: it begins at Saint Nicholas’s Church in Brockley, 18 miles north-northwest of Glastonbury, passes through Holy Trinity Church at Burrington, the Gorsey Bigbury henge, Westbury Camp, a small stone at a crossroads in the village of Yarley, through the ruins of Saint Michael’s Church, which stands on top of Glastonbury Tor, and ends at Saint Leonard’s Church at Burleigh, some 3 miles farther to the south. Westbury Camp is an Iron Age hillfort, and the stone at Yarley is a medieval boundary stone. As for the churches, all four date from the Middle Ages, after the eleventh century, and only one of them, Saint Leonard’s, is known to have been erected on the site of an earlier church, dating from before this period. And at none of these churches is there evidence of a stone circle, henge earthwork, or menhir nearby. The Glastonbury Ley actually consists of only one known megalithic site, Gorsey Bigbury, and doesn’t even include Glastonbury itself. Glastonbury Tor is a natural hill, not an artificial mound like Silbury Hill, and although it does appear to have been occupied as a settlement during Neolithic times, despite extensive archaeology, no evidence of a stone circle, menhir, or any other megalithic monument has been uncovered.
Enthusiasts draw attention to the syllables ley and leigh being found in the locations Brockley, Yarley, and Burleigh along this supposed ley line. We have seen how Watkins had proposed that the frequency in which these and similar syllables were found in the names of sites along his plotted alignments implied that ley or leigh was the original name of his “old straight tracks.” He was, however, completely wrong. The origin of this word has nothing to do with trackways, let alone mystical power lines. The suffixes -ley, -lea, -lay, and -leigh, found in English place names, all derived from the Old English word leah, which referred to a woodland clearing.12 And there are thousands of them. Randomly place a pin anywhere on a map of England and you will inevitably find a place bearing this suffix somewhere nearby.
Another often-cited ley line is the so-called Silbury Hill Ley, said to go through Avebury and Silbury and to terminate at Marden Henge approximately 6 miles to the south.13 These three sites are indeed megalithic structures, but if the line is drawn through the center of Avebury and the summit of Silbury Hill, it misses Marden Henge by about half a mile. To get them to line up, going through the summit of Silbury Hill, the proposed ley only touches the western edge of the Avebury ring and the eastern edge of Marden Henge. The premise of ley lines, originally proposed by Watkins, is that they were marked out by menhirs, just a few feet in width. Marden Henge is more than 200 feet in diameter, and Avebury is over 1,000 feet. Critics say that unless an alignment goes through the center of a monument it can hardly be used as a ley marker; if we start using sites that cover such a large area, rather than just employing the middle of them, then we can draw ley lines just about anywhere.
Fig. 8.3. Sites in Scotland and northern England discussed in this chapter.
The other famous ley line said to pass through Avebury, known as the Avebury Ley, joins an ancient settlement on Windmill Hill, about 2 miles northwest of the stone circle, with another settlement on Martinsell Hill, 6 miles to the southeast of Avebury.14 Windmill Hill was occupied in Neolithic times, although no evidence of any kind of megalithic monument has been found there, while Martinsell Hill was the site of an Iron Age hillfort. Nevertheless, even if we choose to use them as ley markers, of the other five sites on the alignment, one is a tumulus, one is a long barrow dating from before the Megalithic period, and another is a crossroads (at Bayardo Farm) where there is what appears to be a natural stone buried in a bank. The remaining two are linear features: the Ridgeway, an ancient road, and Wansdyke, a long defensive ditch and embankment. The Ridgeway is thought to be the oldest track in England and does date from Neolithic times, but Wansdyke was built by the Britons to hold back the invading Anglo-Saxons during the fifth and six centuries CE. But even if we use these features as ley markers, they cross the proposed alignment and run for 80 and 20 miles, respectively. Clearly, this stretches the size of ley markers way beyond the width that makes any kind of logical sense.
If ley lines really do exist as alignments of megalithic sites, then surely there would be one between Avebury and Stonehenge, the two best known and most elaborate megalithic monuments in Britain. They lie only 17 miles apart, which is the usual sort of length of proposed ley lines found in most books and websites dedicated to the subject. A straight line drawn on the map to join the center of these two monuments passes through six of the kind of sites generally used by ley hunters to plot their alignments. However, none of them are confirmed megalithic monuments. We have the West Kennet Long Barrow, which dates from before the period in question; Saint Mary’s Church at Alton Barnes, which, although over a thousand years old, retains no evidence of standing stones in its vicinity; Casterley Camp, an Iron Age hillfort; a couple of late Bronze Age tumuli near Stonehenge; and the Cursus (see chapter 5), dating from around four hundred years before the Megalithic era. But if we suspend disbelief and accept that this might represent a deliberate alignment of ancient monuments, do six such sites falling between two stone circles represent something that would occur more than by chance alone? Typical of ley lines are the two we have examined that are said to cross at Stonehenge: the Stonehenge Ley, an approximately 19-mile alignment consisting of eight sites, and the 20-mile Old Sarum Ley consisting of six sites. It would seem that finding six to eight ancient sites along an approximately 20-mile line is considered convincing evidence by most ley hunters. So let’s try an experiment.
On a detailed map, I have just drawn a completely arbitrary 19-mile line passing through Stonehenge. It runs from the summit of Knowle Hill, near the village of Bowerchalke, to a tumulus beside the A342 road in the district of Everleigh. Starting with Knowle Hill, 12 miles south-southwest of Stonehenge, these are the sites and features—the same as those generally employed by ley hunters—the line passes directly through:
It follows, almost perfectly, the course of an old track called Stoke Down for nearly 2 miles. (Ley lines are said to follow the course of old roads and footpaths.)
A tumulus three-quarters of a mile west of Hunts Down.
A Neolithic earthwork of unknown purpose called Cross Dykes, south of the village of Burcombe.
Saint John’s Church, Burcombe, built on the foundations of an Anglo-Saxon chapel dating back at least 1,100 years.
A tumulus 1.5 miles west of Upper Woodford.
and 7. Two round barrows on Normanton Down.
Stonehenge.
The middle of the Cursus to the north of Stonehenge.
A tumulus near Baden Down Farm.
The tumulus at Everleigh, which is actually one of three ancient burial mounds, built close together in a line crossing our alignment.
If we leave out Knowle Hill, which is just the starting point, by pure chance we have no fewer than eleven typically employed ley features on a 19-mile line drawn completely at random: three more than the Stonehenge Ley and five more than the Old Sarum Ley, both approximately the same length as our totally imaginary alignment. And these are two of the most cited ley lines in Britain. It seems to me, at least, that the notion of ley lines being alignments of megalithic monuments—or for that matter any ancient monuments—fails to stands up to scrutiny.
Watkins began the whole idea by proposing that his “old straight tracks” were delineated by alignments of menhirs, so it is curious that so few actual standing stones are found along the famous ley lines we have examined. However, although long-distance alignments may be down to pure chance, it does seem that individual monoliths were sometimes deliberately aligned close to stone circles. The largest series of stones of such an alignment are found in North Yorkshire. Five menhirs, up to 22 feet high, s
tood in a line, about 200 feet apart, crossing fields in the district of Boroughbridge: the Devil’s Arrows mentioned earlier in this chapter. If we continue this line about 5 miles to the northwest, it passes through the Cana Barn and Hutton Moor henge monuments. Five standing stones and two huge henge circles, falling in a line running only 5 miles, does seem more than just coincidence. Another example is found at the other end of England, in Cornwall. There, we find that a line drawn from the center of the Merry Maidens Stone Circle, near the village of St. Buryan, passes through two aligned stones called the Pipers to the northeast and runs through at least three other standing stones before reaching the sea at Merthen Point, which would seem beyond a fluke for a line less than 1.5 miles long. There are many examples of single rows of megaliths falling in straight lines where the stones are placed fairly close together, within a few feet of each other. On Dartmoor in Devon there are dozens, the longest being a line of more than eight hundred monoliths, up to 8 feet tall, stretching over a mile between the Dancers Stone Circle on Bledge Hill and a Neolithic artificial mound at Green Hill to the north. Shorter single-stone rows are more common, such as an alignment in South Wales consisting of eight stones up to 9 feet tall (two are fallen and two have been removed since the nineteenth century), which runs for 120 feet near the village of Llanychaer, and the Madacombe stone row on Exmoor in Somerset, now consisting of twelve relatively small standing stones, which archaeologists have determined was originally made up of an alignment of many more, almost 1,000 feet long.
Local alignments aside, what exactly was the purpose of the solitary menhirs? Did they serve as some kind of shrine in places with populations too small or not prosperous enough to build a stone circle? Did they serve some astronomical function, like various stone-circle monoliths, such as king stones, seem to have served? Where they, perhaps, giant sundials to mark the course of the year? Menhirs were not unique to the British Isles. Similar, isolated, freestanding monoliths are found in great numbers across the English Channel in Brittany. There are hundreds of lone megaliths in this historical French region, where they are also known as menhirs, as a variant of the Celtic language is still spoken in Brittany today. The largest menhir in the British Isles is the one in the Rudston churchyard in Yorkshire, which stands 25 feet high. At least a dozen French menhirs are taller than this, the largest being the now fallen Er-Grah monolith at the coastal town of Locmariaquer. It is about 67 feet long and broken into four fragments and is estimated to have weighed an astonishing 342 tons. The tallest one that is still standing is the 37-foot-tall Menhir de Kailhouan in the district of Plésidy.15
Fig. 8.4. Ley lines around Stonehenge and Avebury.
The Breton menhirs are generally bigger and older than those in the British Isles and seem to date from the cairn-building period between 4500 and 3000 BCE (see chapter 3), whereas the earliest of those dated in Britain were erected after this period and were contemporary with the stone circles. As the practice seems to have died out in Brittany before it was adopted in Britain, it would seem unlikely to have been a tradition copied from France. Erecting single standing stones is not unique to either country. They exist all over Europe and beyond and date from Neolithic until medieval times. In diverse cultures they were erected for a variety of reasons: as the simplest form of monument to commemorate an event, honor an ancestor, or venerate a god, or for a whole host of other reasons. Perhaps the solitary menhirs should not be considered monuments directly related to stone circles at all.
9
The Migration of the Beaker People and Other Cultures
IN BRITAIN, THE MEGALITHIC AGE lasted for over three thousand years before it ended with the Roman invasion of the mid to late first century CE. There had, however, been four earlier large-scale migrations from continental Europe through which the use and building of stone circles continued unabated. In fact, the monuments became ever more elaborate. Astonishingly whatever purpose the stone circles served, it seems to have appealed to a succession of completely different cultures.
The first mass influx of foreigners into the Megalithic British Isles came from what is now the Netherlands. Beginning around 2600 BCE it was driven by rising sea levels flooding this low-lying region. No one knows what the migrants called themselves, but archaeologists have termed them the Bell-Beaker or simply Beaker people, named after a distinctive type of bell-shaped pottery vessel, or “beaker,” found in their graves, graves that were very different from the kind of burials being practiced by the contemporary Britons. After a brief period of building passage tombs in a few areas, the Megalithic culture seems to have abandoned elaborate interments, opting instead to bury their dead, either intact or as cremated remains, in simple pits, unmarked by any kind of lasting monument (see chapter 6). The Beaker people, on the other hand, buried their departed beneath round barrows.1 A group of wonderfully preserved examples are the Nine Barrows near the village of Priddy in the county of Somerset. This cluster of 4,500-year-old, circular earthen mounds, averaging about 65 feet in diameter and rising to about 10 feet high at the center, stands close together on a high ridge of land to be seen for miles around. These are the same kind of mounds that exist in the hundreds around Stonehenge and Avebury, usually marked on the map as “tumuli” (see chapter 8). The round barrow was nothing like the long barrow or dolmen of the pre-Megalithic era or the passage tomb of the early Megalithic age, as it contained no inner chamber. It was a solid construction of earth and rubble: a circular hillock surrounded by a ditch from which the material was excavated to build the mound over a simple grave.
The Beaker people first settled in southern England, but within a century they had established a presence as far north as the top of Scotland. However, this was clearly not an invasion. No archaeological evidence has been found that the Beaker people and the native population engaged in fighting to any discernible extent. No defenses were erected around settlements, and no human remains have been unearthed exhibiting the kind of injuries sustained in battle. On the contrary, the two peoples seem to have lived and worked harmoniously together, while at the same time retaining their cultural identities.2 Specific burial customs usually reflect a society’s religious traditions, and in Britain, for both groups, these remained unchanged. Archaeological excavations in and around Durrington Walls, the largest known contemporary settlement in Britain (see chapter 5), for example, have revealed that both pit and round-barrow burials occurred side by side for centuries following the newcomers’ first arrival.3 That they should seemingly have maintained their religious differences is strange indeed, when the evidence reveals that they were both involved in the continued building of stone circles. Far from ending or watering down the Megalithic age, the influx of the Beaker people appears to have initiated its most extravagant phase.
The first stone circles, erected between 3100 and 2600 BCE, had generally been straightforward rings of monoliths, with nothing more than an outlying king stone located in the direction of the sunrise or sunset at a specific time of the year. Then, around 2600 BCE, the grandiose, larger-scale stone circles, often enclosed by massive henge constructions, suddenly began to be built (see chapter 6): an abrupt development that coincided precisely with the arrival of the Beaker people. Archaeologists believe the reason that these much larger, more elaborate monuments were suddenly erected was due in part to the increase in population and consequently the workforce necessary to create them. Today few scholars doubt that the construction of the Sarsen Circle and the subsequent developments at Stonehenge were joint efforts by the native and Beaker people living together at settlements such as Durrington Walls.4 Another reason for concluding that the newcomers were actively involved in creating these monuments is a unique variation found at some of their larger round barrows. In addition to the surrounding ditch, they were encircled by an outer embankment—exactly the same as a henge earthwork. That this was adopted by the Beaker people only after they had settled in Britain, and at exactly the time that identical earthworks began to be creat
ed around stone circles, indicates that the henge was a collective innovation.5 Most archaeologists are in agreement that Avebury, for instance, was a collaborative undertaking by both cultures living alongside one another at nearby settlements, such as one on Windmill Hill, about a mile northwest of the site. But such combined enterprises did not end with Stonehenge and Avebury. Evidence of the same kind of cooperation in constructing stone circles is found all across Britain, and it continued right through the extraordinary period of megalithic monument building between 2600 and 2000 BCE.6 This is the era that saw not only the creation of large-scale henge circles but also the building of stone avenues, linear embankments, satellite rings, and enormous artificial hills (see chapter 6).
Clearly these illustrious stone circle complexes were not a new idea brought to Britain by the Beaker people: they never constructed such monuments themselves on the continental mainland.7 The native Britons, on the other hand, were already building stone circles—and had been for five hundred years. All the evidence points to the new, more elaborate megalithic structures being created through a mutual endeavor by the two cultures. Yet if their burial customs are anything to go by, both retained their separate religious practices. Ancient cultures seldom opted to build temples to foreign gods unless they were enslaved or conquered, and as we have seen, this certainly was not the case during the period the Beaker people and the native Britons were living peaceably together. And it was not only larger monuments that were built; transformative new elaborations also were added to stone circles once the newcomers arrived. All this would seem to suggest that these monuments were something other than religious shrines. They may have served some practical function that was beneficial to both groups. Such reasoning is further supported by the fact that cooperative work on megalithic complexes ultimately involved yet another cultural group.
Wisdomkeepers of Stonehenge Page 15