Long barrows in Northern Europe frequently occur in tight clusters, and conventional wisdom is that this was not so in Britain—although this is largely a question of definition. Colin Renfrew has claimed, on the basis of the distribution of around 120 long barrows in Wessex, that the region was divided into five territories, each with its group of long barrows and a so-called ‘causewayed enclosure’. The prime example of such a site, but perhaps not the oldest, is at Windmill Hill itself.
FIG. 5. Earth-covered long barrows, all well within an hour’s walk of Stonehenge. The crosses mark the barrows, the directions of the lines represent the approximate directions of the barrows (with the cross always the lower end) and the lengths of the lines are proportional to the estimated lengths of the barrows (but they are not to the scale of the map). The average length is about 40 m. The circle marks the main surviving circle of stones at Stonehenge, to the same scale as the barrow-lines. The naming of barrows might seem odd, if it is not realized that they are conventionally numbered within parishes. There are more than fifty long barrows on Salisbury Plain as a whole.
The deep ditches that flanked the long barrows and provided the soil for the covering-mound were in some cases three metres or more deep, and occasionally ran in a U-shape round one end of the barrow. In some instances they formed a virtually complete perimeter. They were often shallower, say the height of a man, and they play an important part in our story, for it will be argued that significant observations of the sky could have been made by people standing at suitable points in these ditches.
In Britain, as well as on the continent, the grave mound often covered a wooden mortuary house. The forms of some of these will be discussed in the following sections. The evidence has often been taken to point to structures in the shape of a ridge-tent, with very heavy end-posts supporting the ridge-pole, on which inclined and close-packed rafters rested. This ‘tent’ interpretation has been offered for structures found in Denmark, Poland, and Germany, and in all of these centres examples have been found of burning in the timber structure. The first structure was in some cases first covered with a layer of stones (in Britain often flints), over which was laid turf. Those responsible for excavating them have remarked on the excellence of the verticals in the pits that held the posts—which might have been seven or eight metres high and must often have weighed as much as two or three tonnes apiece. Excavators of shafts on English sites—Normanton Down (Grinsell’s no. 330) is a good example—have commented similarly on the evident use of a plumb line in the digging of shafts and the dressing and setting of stones. These marks of technical competence are of some importance to our later argument that the posts helped to create a network of sight lines within the structure, for the very fact that the plan of a mortuary house at the heart of a long barrow lacked symmetry must then mean that this was deliberate. That the same plan can be found in more than one barrow serves only to strengthen the conclusion. And if our explanation of it is to be rejected, then another explanation must be found for what must have been a deliberate act.
Customs seem to have varied, but in many cases in Britain it appears that the dead were first exposed to the elements, and the bones only moved to the mortuary house at a later stage. (This is not a customary reading of the evidence in northeastern Europe, although barrows there may contain several interments.) In some cases at least, the covering mound of the earthen barrow proper was added only after the house had stood for many months, or even years. The sheer weight of the soil or stone or chalk rubble covering the mortuary house could then cause its collapse, as was the case at Fussell’s Lodge (Clarendon Park, barrow 4a), 12 km southeast of Stonehenge—where the house was an oak structure, about six metres long and a little over a metre wide. In this particular case the house contained the remains of more than fifty men, women and children. It was certainly well established before the end of the fifth millennium BC.
Apart from human remains, several long barrows have been found to contain the skulls of oxen as well as their hooves. This has been thought to hint at the hanging of hides (with horns and hooves still attached) as cult objects. Evidence for such a cult from the Bronze Age has been found in the form of wooden horns at the corners of a rectangular wooden temple-like structure at Bargeroosterveld, in Drenthe (the Netherlands). These are important pieces of evidence as to religious practice, and might be connected with astronomically guided ritual, the cult of the bull linking with the celestial bull, Taurus. What seems to be an example of this, requiring a new interpretation of the Uffington ‘White Horse’, will be given in Chapter 4.
Of the many hundreds of long barrows recorded in Britain, a large proportion seem to have been used to house multiple burials—typically five or six, but occasionally twenty or thirty or more. It has been argued that such long barrows indicate an egalitarian society. This presupposes what is not at all certain, that long barrows represent the norm rather than the exceptional means of burial; that they are for the family unit, and not shared, as religious centres might have been shared among a much more extensive group; and that bodies were placed in them close to the time of death. Variations in grandeur, complexity, and grave goods, seem to indicate variations in wealth and political power. A little light is thrown on this question by two facts taken in conjunction. First, there is the sheer magnitude of the enterprise of building a long barrow: this required, say, between 5,000 and 15,000 man-hours. Second, as time progressed, the number of burials in each long barrow seems to have fallen drastically, often to one or two. The great investment of time and labour has therefore been often seen as a symptom of a steady growth of political or religious hierarchies, the barrows having been set aside for the burial of highly favoured personages. The social function of the tombs might of course have been much the same, whatever the number of burials, large or small.
It does not follow that the religious meaning remained constant. In places as far apart as Ile Carn in Brittany and Corrimony in the northeast of Scotland, individuals were selected for burial alone in a vast tomb. On what social or religious grounds this favoured treatment was meted out is a difficult ethnographical problem, but it is one that should not be addressed without reference to barrows that were used for no burial at all. Horslip, Beckhampton Road, and South Street, for example, all in Wiltshire, have left no evidence that they were ever used for burial. If barrows generally are to be understood as adjuncts of a religion of the stars, capable of religious meaning even in the absence of burials, all arguments for the distribution of social power based on the number of burials will need to be reviewed. What if, for example, in the gradual reduction in the number of burials at certain places and times, we are seeing no more than a slow transition from a religion based mainly on ancestor-worship to one at a higher level of abstraction, based, for instance, on a more sophisticated and extensive mythology of the heavens? Selection for burial might in this case have been made on spiritual grounds, and might in principle have had no implications for a decline in the breadth of the power base. Spirituality might as well have resided in an epileptic, an innocent chosen by lot, a captive, a priest, or a prince. A barrow without burials could mean simply further progression along the same spiritual road. The whole question of a possible religion of the heavens is one that cannot be easily evaded.
There are well over five hundred known long barrows in continental Northern Europe, of which more than a hundred have been investigated professionally. Relatively few have been adequately charted for our present purposes. Rough statistical analyses have occasionally been made that divide the compass into eight or sixteen sectors and take counts of general orientations of the tombs. Across Europe, orientations have seemed to show a definite tendency to cluster around certain preferred directions, and the same tendency has often been remarked in Britain. Such coincidences tell us virtually nothing of value, however, if the aim was everywhere to be astronomically precise, since the most probable astronomical orientations—whether involving Sun, Moon, or star—depend heavily on factors that are ignored in such simple accounts, notably geographical latitude, irregularities in the height of the local horizon, and even the form of the monument itself. Poor statistics make a poor