This last possibility puts paid to a claim that has been made on many occasions, that the minor variations in the directions of chambered tombs and long barrows show that their builders were very casual about directions, and were happy enough if they could get them roughly right. Our hypothesis is capable of explaining why the chamber-tombs in an otherwise apparently coherent group are almost, but not at all precisely, parallel—say with a scatter of 4 or 5°. The differences in direction, which might in some cases have been the results of variations in the height of the distant land-horizon, might in others be the result of taper in height, that is, of differences in the slopes of monuments that were themselves used to set artificial horizons close at hand.
Apart from the rectangular and trapezoidal forms of long barrow, which are found often in an area stretching from Jutland (Denmark) to Western Pomerania, there is the near-triangular form already mentioned, not unlike the trapezoidal: it is a long isosceles triangle with very slightly concave sides, higher at the wide end. This is the form at the site of one of the best collections of well-excavated long barrows in Europe, the Sarnowo group in Kujavia (Poland). There are nine in all, ranging in length from 30 m to 83 m, and judging by a radiocarbon measurement, their dates are probably all within a few centuries of 4500 BC. They are all on spurs of land, with the wide ends always in the northeast quarter, and facing down gently sloping ground.
The Sarnowo barrows are in a parlous state, and it is at present difficult to assess more than their general orientations. (Even this is a dangerous undertaking, since two modern surveys display compass directions which may differ by as much as 14° on a single monument.) Nevertheless, there seems to be much the same pattern in the directions of the barrows as is to be found in a selection of four or five of their English counterparts. Three are conceivably aligned on the following stars: Aldebaran or the Hyades (nos. 2, 4, and 5); the Pleiades (no. 6); two perhaps simultaneously on Bellatrix and Regulus (nos. 1 and 9); one simultaneously on Deneb and Rigel (no. 7); and one on Sirius (no. 3). Only one (no. 8) seems to be aligned on the Sun—and even there it is possible that Orion’s belt is somehow indicated. All of these are possibilities within the approximate period 4500 to 4100 BC. The uncertainties are chiefly inherent in the disordered state of the remains, and archaeological plans that cannot provide exact orientations. Perhaps at some future date the Sarnowo stellar orientations will be studied more thoroughly. Perhaps other stars were observed across the mounds, as at the Wessex barrows. Whether or not the long barrows reflect back on earlier European practice, they are vital to an understanding of later stone and timber circles relating to Stonehenge. They are also intimately related to the Avenue that leads up to Stonehenge and to the strip known as the Cursus, to the north of both.
The Orientation of Long Barrows
There are more than sixty long barrows on Salisbury Plain, and many hundreds elsewhere in Britain and Ireland. They tend to be on high ground with open views of the surrounding country in two or three directions. In Britain, Ireland, and on the continent, there was a mild preference for a near east–west orientation, a fact already the subject of comment as long ago as William Stukeley’s Abury, a Temple of the Druids (1743). While crude statistical surveys of the orientations of large numbers of chambered tombs will obliterate most of their essential differences, there are a few simple rules of this sort that are easily appreciated, if not easily interpreted. As a purely descriptive measure, the key direction may be regarded as that from the narrow end to the broad. (One might have said ‘looking out from the entrance’ were it not that many barrows had blind entrances.)
Taking the chief regions of Britain and Ireland with remains of such tombs, there are definite tendencies that are more or less duplicated in places of similar geographical latitude. Cairns in Orkney are like those in Shetland, in that in both places most cairns tend to look southeast. Those who built the earlier passage graves of Brittany had also favoured this direction. Coming down to the northeast of the Scottish mainland, the tombs of Caithness resemble those of Ross and Cromarty, in that most look very roughly east. The nearby Clava cairns, on the other hand, look southwest, a quality they share with tombs of an outwardly different pattern in Ireland, the ‘wedge tombs’ that are especially numerous in the southwest of the country. (This last name derives from the fact that the burial chamber is trapezoidal in shape, although it is usually given a round cairn as cover, so hiding a certain similarity with the overall wedge shape of many English long barrows.) Surviving megalithic tombs in Ireland number about twelve hundred, and more than a quarter of these, mostly in the northern third of the country, have a small court at the entrance. Such ‘court tombs’, especially common in the Atlantic coastal regions of Mayo, Sligo and Donegal, often look northeast; and in this, if not in their shape, they resemble the long barrows of the Clyde region, across the water in Scotland. The passage graves of the Boyne valley on the eastern coast of Ireland tend to look east and southeast, as do the long barrows of the Cotswold–Severn area in England.
Such broad rules as these are subject to many exceptions, but they confirm the principle that custom changed appreciably with place and time. This is hardly surprising, bearing in mind that the time-span of the groups mentioned here covers more than two millennia. Contrary to a common belief, these tendencies tell us absolutely nothing about orientation towards the Sun. After studying several individual examples more closely it will become clear that interpreting rough proclivities of the sort outlined above is a dangerous business. Even without doing so, the dangers of summarizing motives of the architects of the long barrows too hastily can be seen from the fact that, in England as a whole, there are at least ninety long barrows along a roughly north–south line; and yet in no single region was the number great enough to have merited mention in the brief list of tendencies just given.
FIG. 7. A general plan of the Fussell’s Lodge long barrow, drawn by P. J. Ashbee.
Many chambered tombs from the fifth millennium BC still survive in eastern France. Relatively few barrows in Ireland and Britain have been assigned such an early date, but among them there is the mortuary house from the Fussell’s Lodge tomb—which radiocarbon dating puts in the calendar (corrected) range 4250–3950 BC. This barrow, roughly 12 km from Stonehenge and 5 km from Salisbury, has been well excavated (1957) and described by Paul Ashbee. When it was first erected, Salisbury Plain was heavily wooded and is unlikely to have had more than a few dozen families living on it. The tomb was an earthen long barrow, raised after a period of time over a mortuary house of still greater interest. This first structure, of wood, was at an early stage apparently covered with turf, and then with crushed chalk. Later a cairn of flints covered the burial area. This cairn stage might have followed the collapse of the timbers of the mortuary house, or might indeed have precipitated the collapse—in either case probably within a few decades of the foundation structure. The flint cairn had wings anticipating the later façade (see Fig. 7). The mortuary house was used as a place for the systematic deposition of the bones of the dead—skulls in one place and long bones in another. Many bones were missing altogether. The bodies had presumably been exposed to the elements, or buried and disinterred after decomposition. Despite the small population, building the mortuary house—barrow apart—would have required a high degree of social organization. It was bounded at east and west by two colossal oak trunks or split trunks, each—depending on length—weighing in the