The chambered long barrow at Wayland’s Smithy was extensively restored in the 1960s. It is trapezoidal, and despite its asymmetry shows great regularity in its geometrical design (see Fig. 10). An earlier mortuary house found during its excavation closely resembled in overall style the mortuary house at Fussell’s Lodge, and the two, taken together, provide valuable information as to astronomical practice. They offer a challenge, too, because although they are so similar in form, their orientations are radically different.
It is hard to think of a more famous long barrow than that at Wayland’s Smithy. Here lived an invisible smith, who would shoe travellers’ horses at a groat apiece: the owner would leave horse and coin at the spot, and return to find the horse shod. Francis Wise printed the traditional story in 1738, and it has been retold often since then, perhaps the best known versions being those in Walter Scott’s Kenilworth and Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, who was born nearby. The name of Wayland, always a craftsman of some sort, is not uncommon in Germanic mythology. The oldest literary reference to him is in the Anglo-Saxon poem Deor, but there is a reference to Wayland’s Smithy in a charter of king Eadred, dated 955, while the Franks Casket in the British Museum, from the early eighth century, depicts the same character. In later Berkshire stories, Wayland the Smith was not always so well-disposed, as the imp Flibbertigibbett discovered. When hit on the head by a large sarsen2 stone, thrown at him by the smith, the imp went away snivelling—as a proof of which the sarsen stone is still to be seen at Snivelling Corner, 2.5 km to the northwest. (It has to be added that Wayland’s abilities were as nothing compared with those of a British Parliament that in 1974 managed to throw the entire monument from Berkshire into Oxfordshire—an unfortunate act, bearing in mind the archaeological habit of listing monuments by parish and county.) Stones of this kind are typical of the downs to the northwest of Marlborough, and the barrow that has somehow become associated with the name of Wayland can be regarded as the easternmost of the group of stone-chambered long barrows on the Marlborough Downs, although it is relatively isolated from monuments of the same period. In style, it fits most comfortably into the Cotswold-Severn class of chambered tombs, but again only as an outlying example.
FIG. 11. The central area of Wayland’s Smithy, phase I.
At Fussell’s Lodge, in looking along the line of the barrow in either direction, one looks upwards to the distant horizons. At Wayland’s Smithy, which is almost on the highest ridge of the downs, the surrounding terrain lies below, except to the east. Along the prehistoric track known as the Ridgeway, which passes close by, lies Uffington Castle, 2 km to the east. This is a natural plateau with the remains of an Iron Age hillfort. Adjacent to it is the Uffington White Horse, a figure large enough to be visible from many miles distance, when not hidden by the downs that enfold it. Formed out of chalk exposed where the turf has been cut away, it is of indeterminate age. It was once supposed to be Saxon work, and is now said to be of the late Iron Age, but in a later chapter it will be suggested that the White Horse has Neolithic origins. Whatever the answer, the neighbourhood of Uffington has long been a very special place.
The barrow at Wayland’s Smithy was newly excavated in 1962–3 by Richard Atkinson and Stuart Piggott, who confirmed earlier suspicions that it had been constructed in at least two phases. The first structure (at the centre of Fig. 10) had contained a wooden mortuary house lying between two extremely sturdy end-posts made out of split tree trunks, each 1.2 m across the dividing diameter. The turf had been stripped from the ground before a pavement of sarsens was laid on the chalk. The skeletal remains of at least fourteen persons were found on the pavement. A bank of timbers, which Atkinson took to have rested against a mortised ridge pole, and sarsen stones to both sides of their bases, had formed the walls. The central tomb was at some stage covered by an oval mound outlined by sarsen slabs up to a metre tall, but these were not set into the ground. That particular mound was a cairn of small sarsen boulders at its base, topped with chalk rubble taken from ditches to the east and west. The oval structure, which even with its ditches fits into an area of only 15 by 20 m, was later covered completely by the final tomb, and is no longer visible.
One curious fact about the skeletal remains in the older tomb is that many of the smaller bones were missing, particularly hands, feet, kneecaps, and lower jaws. The absence of jaws is intriguing, in view of the fact that in some cultures with a literature testifying to their beliefs—the Egyptian, for example—the jaw-bone was preserved separately, and was supposed to have the spirit of the dead person attached to it. It is often missing from Irish barrows, and near the south entrance to the circle at Avebury a fragment of skull was found in the topmost layer of rubble, together with no fewer than five mandibles. A similar collection was found at the Sanctuary, not far from Avebury, and such examples could be multiplied. Perhaps the mandible was associated with the voice of the dead.
Just as at Fussell’s Lodge, there are posts at Wayland’s Smithy arranged in a quadrangle at one end of the first mortuary house—here the southern end. One pair of posts is nearly parallel to the eastern kerb of the later structure, which was about 22.3° west of north. The ditches are not straight, but the average angles of reasonably straight sections are about 19.5 and 20.5° west of north. Putting a median line through the central tomb by eye, it lies at about 21° west of north, but judging by what was found at Fussell’s Lodge, the lines grazing the D-posts are probably what mattered. The directions of their flat faces are about 22° north of east. The fact that these are almost at right angles to the line of posts mentioned earlier, and to the later east wall, makes us suspect that—even for the first structure—we should be paying special attention to angles in the neighbourhood of 22°. A very straight Iron Age ditch (ditch 400 on the plan of the whole, see Fig. 10) was in a direction 22.4° west of north. Even more significant: the virtually straight section of the Ridgeway between the tomb and Uffington Castle lies at an average of 21.5° north of east, that is, nearly at right angles to the directions under discussion. (For a map of the area see Fig. 80 in Chapter 4.)
In his report of the excavation of 1962-3, Atkinson pointed out that after the massive tree-trunks had rotted and collapsed, many small boulders from the surface of the mound fell into the void created. This suggested to him—in view of their large diameters—that the timbers may have projected far above the top of the mound, and that ‘perhaps carved or painted, they may have formed a landmark visible for miles around’. Were they, perhaps, together with some celestial object, observed from a point on the Ridgeway, say from the dip in the path, 800 m east of the tomb, or even from the shoulder of Whitehorse Hill? It is extremely probable that such sightings took place.
The visitor to Wayland’s Smithy today sees only the later barrow on the site, a trapezoidal mound nearly 55 m long and tapering from about 14 m wide at its southern end to under 6 m at its northern. The ditches that originally flanked it, as much as 4.5 m wide in places, and of graded depths (of roughly human proportions), are today completely filled and invisible. The southern façade originally had six large sarsen stones, the highest rising to a height of about 3 m on either side of the entrance to the burial chamber. (The arrangement roughly resembled that of timber façades known from earlier barrows.) Two stones are now missing. The eastern long side will here be taken as having been at 22.3° west of north, with the façade precisely at right angles to it and the western long side at 13.7° west of north.
Earlier excavators of Wayland’s Smithy reported a much disturbed interior, with the disordered bones of perhaps eight skeletons, including that of a child. The chamber was in the form of a cross, the main corridor being 1.8 m high at the crossing, and 1.35 m in the transepts. Before the second barrow was built, the ground had been cleared by fire, and a specimen of charcoal from a tree branch or small trunk yielded a radiocarbon reading corresponding to