FULL MOVIE: Standing with Stones - an epic journey through prehistoric Britain & Ireland

sometimes if you want to shed a little light on things you have to go groping around in the dark and let's face it when it comes to our prehistoric sites the truth is we're in the dark about most of them a little light can reveal some remarkable clues but what it can never do on the other hand is show us the bigger picture imagine that our modern architecture could stand the test of time and that in five thousand years all that was left were the shells of our buildings there'd be nothing to tell the difference between an office block and a hospital or a church hall in a jazz club or even a warehouse in an aircraft hangar and that's the problem with so many of our ancient sites they look similar in appearance but were they similar in function across the length and breadth of the British Isles we have a breathtaking richness of archaeological heritage some mysterious and alien some less so this film is about that heritage and it's only by being here standing with these ancient stones that we can begin to get a sense of that bigger picture begin to understand what these extraordinary places are all about I'm not an academic and I don't claim to be an expert but I have been exploring primitive cultures and prehistoric sites for many years now the plus side of that is that whilst embracing current archeological knowledge and theories it does also give me the freedom to offer some contentious ideas from time to time without getting the sack the downside of that of course is that sometimes I might be talking rubbish who knows the purpose of this film is not to give a history lesson about our Neolithic and Bronze Age ancestors but to explore and experience what they left behind and as we travel across the British Isles maybe we can shed some light on these mysterious places and the people who built them so follow me you believe it or not this wall is about five thousand years old but look what it's a part of this is the balla wall barrow at Lands End right down at the southwestern tip of mainland Britain and its structure is unique in the whole of the British Isles but its purpose well that's something else there are burials here and the burial site is very rarely just a burial site and what's more excavations have uncovered Bronze Age artifacts here as well which means that this site could have been in continuous use for 2,000 years and I wish I could tell you what it had been used for over all that time the complexity of this site is fascinating some burials face outwards to the sea or the rising and Setting Sun others are internal in what would originally have been a dark and enclosed space the intersection was probably built a long time before the outer ring and like so many ancient sites it's not unusual to have differences of opinion about when they were built and what they were actually used for archeologists have a difficult task teasing the information from the earth and without thorough excavations over a wider area sometimes the conclusions have to be based on very small strands of evidence we know there are Bronze Age burials here but does that necessarily mean it's a Bronze Age building we'll come back to the subject of dating later to begin with it's clear to see that contrary to the way our ancestors are so often portrayed this kind of structure could not have been conceived by people who were savages or indeed primitive on its own this site is a mystery but it does hold clues and that's something we'll see time and time again of the sites will be visiting as we travel across the British Isles we'll pick up more clues along the way and hopefully gain a greater insight into the lives of our distant ancestors if I was to visit all the sites there are you probably still be watching this film in a year's time this end of the country is probably the richest in its wealth of prehistoric sites within just a few minutes of where I am now besides any number of standing stones and cans there's the merry maidens stone circle trigger seal stone circle Denine Maiden stone circle bears buzz goin on stone circle there's pending Val fo gue Karn unifo goo Chun quite Lanyon quite there's loads of them we'll get glimpses of as many as we can but as well as some of the better known sites we're going to travel to places that you may never have had the opportunity to visit and quite a few you probably never knew existed you know those clues I mentioned this isn't one of them and to further confound you this is not a stone circle every region has its idiosyncrasies and that's what fascinates me all across Britain you find stone circles standing stones cans dolmens barrows henges perhaps these other structures can shed some light on the oddities such as this one this little monument is called men and tall and myth has it that passing through this hole can cure your ills it's even said to aid women's fertility people believe all sorts of things but in reality and you'll hear it said a lot on this journey we just don't have a clue what it was for what we do know is that even a modest arrangement such as men and tall leaving aside the size of some of the sights were yet to visit would have taken considerable time and effort to create and that scale of time and effort could only be afforded by sizable communities that's communities of people with a unity of thought often hidden away in intimate secluded settings the traces of our ancestors can still be found frozen in time it would be easy to walk straight past these archetypal Bronze Age maize carvings but even such small remnants give us tantalizing glimpses into both the mundane and more mystical aspects of their lives it's partly because we tend to look out for big impressive monoliths that many important signs of our ancestors day to day lives sometimes pass unnoticed here at router on bodman more the remains of a Bronze Age village is almost lost in the landscape but a closer look reveals the true scale of the site which was probably home to large numbers of people out on open moors are often the remains of what could have been huge ceremonial sites like the three circle complex of the hurlers long since absorbed into religious folklore as men turned to stone for dancing on the sabbath many smaller sites like the gleaming white quartz circle further south at dulo can be easily missed tucked away behind hedges and farm walls people pass them by unknowingly leaving them to be appreciated only by the local inhabitants Dartmoor is one of my favorite places in the whole of England and I've been exploring here for over 20 years 365 square miles of rolling Moors with a huge variety of prehistoric structures it's so unspoiled in archaeological terms that it gives us a much clearer idea of what the whole country used to be like miles of moorland covered in stone circles cans and kists settlements barrows standing stones and these stone roads are a bit of a mystery and Dartmoor has the greatest concentration anywhere there's over 60 of them dotted across the moor and of such variety they must have had lots of different functions here I'm Mary Vale right in the middle of Dartmoor and this site has a bit of everything there's settlements all around there's Hut circles over there there's a big stone circle with a huge standing stone over there there's cans dotted all around and these stone rows right in the middle of it all and you want to see what's in the middle of this row it's only small but this little funereal box called a kist does imply that this was a processionary pathway so what do we have here a temple in the centre of a big community in many cases the roads lead to cans or stone circles but of all the rows across the moor none of them point in the same direction some people have theorized that they may have had astronomical alignments but frankly a line will always point at something and there's so much inconsistency that the idea doesn't hold water it seems much more likely that the rows didn't relate to anything outside the community but there's something else to bear in mind these barren landscapes are entirely the work of our farming ancestors about 12,000 years ago the whole moor was covered in forest it was about this time that hunter-gatherers began felling trees to make the first clearings the reason was simple enough if you can encourage animals to graze in the clearings that you've made then hunting is a much much easier job so people would stay around their hunting grounds settlements would develop until about four thousand years ago domestic farming had become a way of life so did these rows lead people across open more or through dense forests upon this high ground you get a real sense of the past spreading out across the landscape are all the signs of a fully rounded community here we're on the southwest side of the mall on Tom gutter tour way over there in the distance is higher heart or tall and you might just be able to make out down there the drizzle Coombs stone rows these wonderful evocative names are sometimes the lingering legacy the long forgotten history for instance over there behind higher heart or tour there's a valley called evil comb and I really wish I could tell you stories of black magic and ritual sacrifice but actually the name comes from the valleys tin mining past and an evil was just a short-handled pick that the miners used to use to extract ore from the rocks so sorry to disappoint on that one but still good for frightening the kids though let's go and have a look at those rows you remember that little kissed we saw in the middle of the road Maryvale this is a perfect Bronze Age example it's about 4,000 years old and basically it's a stone box and it would have held the remains of an individual or even a family sometimes with a cover stone and then the whole thing would have been covered with a mound of Earth called Kem this is yellow made just north of gasset or that you can probably see out there behind me is where we were earlier and this place is incredibly unusual it's a quadruple stone circle it's strange there's no alignments amongst the stones to suggest astronomy and there's no central kissed to suggest an elaborate burial just these enigmatic rings there are theories it's supposed to have been a cam here but nobody knows what came first how it developed or what it was actually used for and I think it looks like a target it's village hunting practice near a spear to the middle winds that's what it is ten miles to the east is another oddity that leaves you wondering this is the gray weathers double stone circle they're probably early Bronze Age about four thousand years old and when they were excavated in 1898 both circles were found to be strewn with ashes no one knows whether it was from cremations or domestic burning or how old the circles were before the burning took place they're aligned north-south the southern circle being slightly bigger and it's been suggested that they were a place for the gathering of the clans but I think that's silly you wouldn't create a neutral territory and have one side bigger than the other we can only guess what they were for it's crazy you go from falling over stones around every bend to really having to hunt them out it seems strange that moving east through England you find less and less sight but actually it says a lot about our ancestors through the ages when communities are successful settlements continue to develop people only move to new pastures when the land stops providing and in the West Country that's exactly what happened even today there's very little building because the land just isn't hospitable fortunately for us though it means that our ancestors hard work is still there to see when you look at the development of societies in other countries it's clear from places like the great pyramids or the Acropolis that the cities have continued to develop without enormous cultural movement most other cities in the world have grown through either knocking down or building over the ancient structures in places where those ancient monuments are still there to be seen they've lost their original meaning but somehow they've kept a level of importance for the people of course that could just be a question of wonder you have to ask would the Great Pyramid still be there if they'd only been 30 feet tall sometimes like nine stones in dorset our ancient monuments stand neglected by the roadside virtually unnoticed by passing motorists and unvisited by all but the enthusiast the passing centuries have left many ancient sites with a mysterious anonymity we respect them but we don't understand them and their social importance has long since disappeared we protect them and ignore them in equal measure Nolton henge is a perfect example this Bronze Age site is part of an enormous settlement that sprawls across the surrounding countryside it's hard to see a lot of it now but this raised mound originally rose an astonishing 17 feet out of the ditch around it the careful placing of this Norman Church would have been a very powerful way of putting an end to any earlier non-christian goings-on now it's crumbling ruins sits like a weary trespasser on unguarded land this is the chestnuts in Addington Kent and I wish I have one of these in my garden it's the remains of a Neolithic Long Barrow that was used well into the Bronze Age and there are other sites like this in the southeast not far from here the remains of another Long Barrow called cold room looks out across the open hills and Moors which haven't changed much for thousands of years but in and around towns that have been changing constantly for hundreds of years the land has been progressively divided into smaller and smaller plots so structures were pulled down as their relevance in society faded no longer showing the way so much is simply in the way thankfully not here though it's easy to see how history covers its tracks especially in cities the constant redevelopment can leave few signs of buildings from decades ago let alone hundreds or thousands of years so you may well wonder what on earth we're doing in the middle of London and what they could possibly be to see here I think you'd be right absolutely nothing now almost nothing there is something here unnoticed by passers-by an all trace of its importance long forgotten in here is the London stone truth is we don't know its origin but we do know that it's been here for a long time and it's actually part of a much bigger stone was broken here in the 18th century we also know that it's been moved back and forth across the road in the last few hundred years but a few possible clues remain in folklore there are stories that say that it was once part of a stone circle on this site others say that it was the pillar or the top of a pillar in Brutus's palace it's also reputedly the stone to which all measurements were made to London so if you see a mild stone this is London 27 miles it's too heater you know there are thousands upon thousands of prehistoric sites around Britain and if you just count stone circles nothing else just stone circles there's nearly a thousand of them it's incredible that out of all those sites most people only seem to know this one now obviously I'm not being dismissive of Stonehenge itself just the fact that when visitors come to marvel at the imposing monoliths they miss the scale and significance of the entire complex there are literally hundreds of prehistoric sites spreading for miles in all directions earthworks long barrows avenues of stones burial sites and the massive cursors they all showed that this was a huge thriving community woodhenge a couple of miles northeast is the remains of a complex timber structure probably an enclosed circular building which sat on its own raised mound long since flattened by plowing West Kennet Long Barrow to the north at three hundred and fifty feet long is the largest chamber tomb in England and Wales and a little further north again is Silbury Hill the biggest man-made mound in Europe it's estimated that to build this giant would have taken five hundred men working everyday for ten years the term henge originally came from Stonehenge in Old English it refers to the hanging stones or lintels but it came to mean something quite different and ironically Stonehenge itself is not strictly speaking a henge henges have a ditch inside the raised bank but at Stonehenge the ditch lies on the outside which implies that they had quite different functions the true henge of this vast Wiltshire complex is Avebury every is over 20 miles north of Stonehenge a short day's walk for our ancestors and it is without doubt the grandest ceremonial site in Britain today its splendor is really only visible from the air but when it was built it must have been a breathtaking sight when a pree was excavated in the early part of the 20th century the surrounding ditch was found to have been sheer sided and 30 feet deep on the outside of the ditch was a wide teres running at the foot of the bank which towered 20 feet above the central earth work our ancestors excavated a hundred and fifty thousand tons of choc rubble to create the ditch an immense undertaking for something clearly of immense importance and it wasn't the only one in the region 50 miles to the west in Somerset stands the deceptive stone circle of Staunton drew it looks pretty boring doesn't it an enormous stone circle with a small router one at each end but it's bland appearance on the landscape gives no clue as to its original scale and importance this circle is over a hundred metres across now in diameter that makes it second only to the vastness of Avebury some years ago the ancient monuments laboratory of English heritage carried out a magnetometer survey across the whole site and what they discovered is breathtaking inside the circle when nine concentric rings of wooden posts each post a metre apart and each post a metre or more across and you don't use a post a metre or more across unless you need it to be tall and on top of that the whole site was surrounded by a ditch and a raised bank he may have been wood but this would have been every bit as impressive as the stone circles of Stonehenge and Avebury but perhaps there is a reason for the posts not to have been so tall the design of a henge implies that the banks were for spectators the inner terrace at Avebury adds weight to this idea suggesting a level walkway for finding your place before climbing the bank exactly as we still do at arena's today there would be no sense in having posts so tall that they obscured the spectators view and they need only be the height of a man for the audience to see the whole spectacle from there raised position on the massive Bank so why create an artificial forest where spectators could see but participants could not for me the most likely answer is blood sports and shopping as that may sound to many it's important to remember that this was a time when most of Britain was covered in forest and the most skilled hunter would probably have been held in high esteem possibly even beyond his own community the deep ditch would stop animals escaping into the crowd while the forest of posts would create an enclosed but nevertheless real hunting ground and then again this amount of huge posts could easily have supported a floor exactly the same design concept is at the great colosseum of Rome but preceding it by thousands of years we can only wonder with the extraordinary variety of sites in the region many of them of such immense size I think this whole area of Wiltjer through Somerset must have been the capital of prehistoric Britain and there's another important aspect of these chalk glands that's that where there's chalk is Flint the very basis of prehistoric currency imagine a land where the slag heaps you create your building rubble is full of money with the raw materials for X making under their feet the people of Wiltshire would have had enormous wealth there was a huge cultural shift in the Bronze Age the increase in farming and settlement building meant that for the first time people had to defend their territory and so the warrior culture was born and with it the use of horses though in the offing tonight horse was excavated in the early 1980s both it and the hill fought alongside were both dated to the Late Bronze Age now you only need to look at the Spanish conquistadors decimation of South America to see what a few warriors on horseback can do these really were rich and powerful people as communities grew inevitably rituals became progressively more elaborate and burial grounds like pretty 9 Burroughs illustrate the huge significance they held for the community even today the very word barrow still holds a ghostly place in folklore like any graveyards there's a sense of walking amongst the dead over time the whole relationship between the living and the dead became more structured giving rise to sophisticated temples in a variety of building styles this part of England is characterized by the seven Cotswolds style of tomb and some of them are wonderfully preserved some like stony littleton have burial chambers which are accessed from within a low central passageway excavations seem to suggest that the chambers in this style of tomb was specific to age and gender of the dead children buried in the first chamber on the left sweeping clockwise with adult males in the end chamber with the old being buried in the chamber closest to the entrance on the right waylynn smithy is a much grander construction with huge stones forming the imposing forecourt it was developed over a long period of time the mound we still see today was actually built over an earlier mortuary house made of timber others like Bella snap in the Cotswolds have external burials along the sidewalls but with the same meticulous attention to design and location they certainly picked beautiful places to lay their loved ones to rest did you know Lakes rousing Jerusalem might never have been written if it weren't for these the wrong white stones in Oxfordshire may come as a surprise to know that much of Blake's art and writing was inspired by the ideas of an 18th century clergyman and friend of Isaac Newton Williams - Klee was secretary to the Society of Antiquaries when he visited this place and apparently he had a life-changing experience his visit brought him to believe that the sites were religious and ritual centres built in ancient times by the Druids Stokley meticulously catalogued described and illustrated so many of our ancient monuments bringing them firmly to public attention and it's fair to say that their mystical importance and place in our hearts is entirely due to him his passion led him to adopt a grandiose title of archdruid kinder knacks ultimately inspiring the eccentric artist and poet William Blake to write his famous hymn Jerusalem is actually about rekindling druid culture in Britain this place is a wonderful concoction of historical confusion as names and dates all over the place there's tales of Witchcraft and kingly fighting and no sense to be made of any of it it is a complicated site on the other side of the road from the circle there's a big outlier called the king stone and on the other side of the field over there is a very full-on looking Dolman called the Whispering Knights the name roll rights originates from Viking times when it was called crawler Landreth which meant the land with special rights belonging to Aurora and apart from being a landowner we don't really know anything about him then it was thought to refer to a Norman called Roland who fought a battle here except that the battle near here happened in 916 ad and Roland died in seven seven eight then perhaps the most tenacious myth of all there's the story of Danish king Rallo you see the land on which the stone stand was actually owned by a witch and one day while passing through Rallo and his trusty Knights found themselves confronted by the crone she said to King Rallo seven long strides shalt thou take if long Contin thou constancy King of England that shall be stick stock Stone said Rallo as King of England I shall be known and he took his seven strides but the view was hidden by the slight rise of the ground the witch screeched with laughter as long Compton thou canst not see King of England thou shalt not be rise up stick and stand still stone for King of England thou shalt be none thou and thy men horse stones shall be and I myself an Eldon tree which all sounds very mean and self-destructive to me ironically if Rollins legs had been a bit longer then his strides may well have shown him the village of long Compton in the valley below instead he and his men turned to stone and remain as we see them today although people do say that some nights they out root themselves and go down to drink in the stream in the valley below so what do we know aside from the tales of witchcraft which persist to this day it's generally accepted that the stones were erected about five thousand years ago and excavations here have uncovered Bronze Age burials cremations a couple of flint tools and an urn but perhaps most significant of all is its location sitting on the Cotswolds Ridgeway the role rights were probably for thousands of years a really important place on what could be the oldest trade route in the country trading in Flint trolls pottery livestock textile is probably very well established and this was probably a major link between southern England and the whole of the rest of Britain our standing stones belong to an age long before British territories were established and there's something very evocative about crossing a national border that didn't exist in those ancient times Whalen's appears to have far fewer megalithic remains than some other parts of britain but that may be simply because they're harder to reach and many of them in inaccessible places are forgotten and unnamed but those that have had an enduring place in people's imagination are much to the richness of Welsh folklore the Ponte please rocking stone has been a meeting place for as long as we know and it has strong connections with the Welsh bardic tradition interestingly though the stone circle around it was constructed by bards in 18-49 and that made me wonder very occasionally we still build stone circles in a kind of homage to our distant ancestors but with no real knowledge of their original purpose how do we know that half of the British circles aren't Bronze Age Follies built in homage to their Neolithic ancestors with no knowledge of their intent tink ins wood is another example of a seven Cotswolds tomb and this enormous Neolithic Monument is home to the largest capstone in Britain 30 feet long and weighing around 50 tons folklore says that if you fall asleep here you will wake as a bard or go mad although with some of the birds I've met I'm not sure it isn't the same thing out in the wilder countryside the open Moreland's echo the barren landscapes of Dartmoor and everything seems to disappear into the vast openness of it all above the river tour if it weren't for the massive standing stone called may more you could easily miss the circle of caring gone but however unimpressive the circle may be its position looking down through the valleys is spectacular this is gorse vow in Pembrokeshire and it's typical of Welsh stone circles you know they're all made of small stones which is really strange because you see that Ridge up there behind me well that's the pre-cell is right now I can tell you from the wonders of GPS technology that Stonehenge is a hundred and thirty-five miles from here you know the blue stones at Stonehenge they came from up there I think it may be another good example of the possible remnants of old oral traditions that Merlin appears in Welsh folklore and is the reputed builder of Stonehenge long before his emergence as a wizard in romantic Arthurian legend these faint strands could connect to an age far older than we imagined dolmens punctuate the landscape in this part of Wales although here they're usually called chrome licks and are all that remain of much bigger structures not far from the Priscilla's the tiny letter trip earth stands lonely on a hilltop and its small size makes it difficult to imagine what it may have looked like but a few miles to the south pantry fan is so huge that it takes a tall man to reach its enormous capstone and these stones were covered by a long mound of earth and stones which stretched about a hundred feet down the hill behind it further north in a village called as boutique convent not far from Aberystwyth is an incongruous site illustrating the struggle between ancient belief and Christianity the once powerful stone circle has been absorbed into the walls of the church graveyard very much like the church sitting on top of Knowlton henge in Dorset the early church clearly recognized the greater impact of using the site for something new rather than destroying it in contrast the unspoiled circle of multi HF sits majestically on a hill looking out across the landscape just as it has for millennia and sites like this highlight an aspect of these monuments which is often overlooked they look similar but this is a circle of stones forming an almost unbroken enclosure clearly different from a stone circle where the stones are widely spaced and each has a deliberate placing hi in the hills overlooking Conway Bay sits a site called the druid circle all through Wales links with the Druids seems to grow stronger and here it's not without reason although little is known about them we do know that in Celtic tradition the Truitt's were already long-established by 200 BC to the rest of society these revered teachers clearly held a special status than from the later accounts of Julius Caesar referring to the Druids in Gaul we find that they were exempt from all normal taxes and obligations interestingly when it came to electing a successor for the position of supreme druid if it couldn't be resolved by vote it was decided by armed force so much for peaceful mistletoe pickers the Roman invasion of Britain was ruthless and as they forged their way north the opposing Brits along with the Druids were forced to retreat ahead of them through Wales and it was ad 60 that everything came to a head Rome had to overcome the Troublesome druids if it was going to achieve total control of Britain it was here on the Isle of Anglesey that the Druids made their last stand against the might of the Roman Empire and contemporary accounts tell of a people far removed from the peaceful white robe mystics imagined by stutely the final battle started here at the Menai Strait the Roman army arrived at the riverbank over there and looked across to a terrifying sight Tacitus described the enemy as a dense array of armed warriors he said women in black with disheveled hair were dashing between the ranks like Furies and waving brands druids with their arms in the air yelling curses at the Roman army he says that the soldiers were paralyzed with fear but nonetheless the Romans 1 and the Druids mythical status today is the legacy of that once powerful force and who knows what body of knowledge died with them one needs to remember that despite our perception of the druidic links with stone circles and ancient monuments these sites were built long long before we hear anything about the existence of Druids for example on anglesey is the profoundly mystical but claudia de garis about 5,000 years old a circular structure which leaves no doubt that it was a significant setting for ritual practices there are what appear to be burial chambers to the sides although only one was found to contain human remains stones positioned within the tomb bear strange carvings and strangest of all archeologists have found that in the central area a fire had burned for a long time into the middle of which had been poured us to a stew containing eel grass whiting rabbit mouse shrew snake frog and toad now easy as it is for us to associate such a recipe with a Shakespearean witch's brew actually there is another interesting possibility these people seem to be fascinated by creatures that live in the margins of the natural world creatures that live underground where man would only place the dead or in water where man couldn't exist at all or only coming out at night when the veils between the living and the dead seemed to be lifted in the mind of Neolithic man could these creatures have seemed to pass between the worlds of the living and the dead however we interpret this remarkable find discovering these organic remains has given us a unique glimpse into the ritual lives of our ancestors soup this is bring Keith levy and it really is one of the most significant sites in Britain its history is long and very complex and there's been a lot of debate over its construction about five thousand years ago it was a henge complete with ditch and Bank and to emphasize its importance the central area was crowned by a circle of big stones then about a thousand years later it was turned into a huge chambered can far bigger than is visible today the ditch was filled and Earth from the bank was used to provide material for the earth mound and to make the tomb the circle stones were moved and reused or broken and buried in a total destruction of what had been before another example of a total change of usage a place being taken over completely and changed from an open place for the living into an enclosed place for the dead in a way it's like the stone circle of his boutique in vain' being absorbed into the walls of a later Christian graveyard and it's possibly our best example of the underlying complexity at any site that was used for thousands of years gotta be honest with you I came here yesterday and I thought the one I got to Anglesey I'll tell you about the Druids and show you a couple of sites and go but I found something here that I really can't understand how it's been missed before it's genuinely the most exciting thing I've ever discovered and yesterday it left me stunned for hours can I have a look at this this is the burial chamber and here stands an impressive pillar of stone it doesn't touch the ceiling so it's not structural it's important in its own right now archeological texts and writings about this site have described this as a monolith and as a carefully dressed pillar of stone meaning it was cut to be this shape but you can't cut these textures so what could be cylindrical and this rough texture it's a fossil tree trunk look you can see where the bark has split revealing the wood grain underneath all around you can see traces of that now don't switch off when I say what I'm gonna say next some of these cut marks can only have been made when it was wood not when it was stoned look here the bark has dragged stone would have split or shattered and down here two distinct marks blows where the wood has pulped and you can't make these marks in stone unless it's something like a mud stone but in that case you won't get these textures now you'll have to think I'm crazy or you'll be as stunned as I was yesterday because as far as I was concerned the latest fossil wood comes from the Miocene period which is about 20 million years ago I sat on the floor stunned and confused and then rang a friend of mine who knows about these things and apparently the latest research from Japan has proved that petrification so it's turning into stone can occur much faster than we thought and it is conceivable that a piece of wood this size could petrify in under a century but that's in extreme conditions now even if we give it a few thousand years we still have a wonderful story we could have a tree trunk that has been worked by man it falls into a bog with a high acid content and a high silica content and over that period of time it turns to stone now when it was found again it must have seemed like a thing of absolute magic to Neolithic man would symbolize life and stone symbolize death so here was a being of life and afterlife living and dead whether it was found by the builders of Ben Cassidy or whether it was brought here from elsewhere already a highly prized item we may never know I'm just amazed that nobody has written about this before and I hope that specialists get here to date it and soon because if it is 20 million years old I don't know what I'll do Island this really is the land of fairy tales any turn in the road might reveal a slight so beautiful that your heart skips a beat it's hard to know where to start until you see castle rudder e-even as stone circles go this looks a bit of a mess but underneath its tired appearance lies a site as complex as stent and drew or bringeth levy known as a circle henge the stones are surrounded by a raised bank and excavations showed it to have been built using soil from a ditch lying 24 feet outside the circle and if that wasn't impressive enough the excavations also revealed that the whole thing was surrounded by another Bank which was supported by a wall of wooden posts but even with all of that it isn't what excited me about this site until I came here I didn't know when or where I was going to talk about a particular obsession of mine drill holes drill holes are a fairly common feature around megalithic monuments and it's always intrigued me that no one really discusses them one of the things that makes them so enigmatic is that in the main they all appear to be worked with the same size of tool they've been dismissed by some as being worked in the last few hundred years by stonemasons attempting to split and clear stones from the land now obviously some of them could be exactly that but drilled stones litter the landscape across Devon and Cornwall with many of them still in positions which bear no relation to possible clearing and even though these are a typical examples here at castle rudder II there's evidence that I have good reason to be excited by this apparently minor detail firstly this stone close to the white quartz entrance stones is drilled to create an elegant curved edge the other half of it lies outside the circle but clearly is nothing to do with clearing and secondly but most significantly this stone lying to one side of the circle has five carefully worked slots for who knows what purpose the thing is that I know an identical stone lying in a similar position in another circle back on Dartmoor in southwest England at a place called fern worthy it would be extraordinary if these stones were not cut and positioned for the same purpose so we may have another piece of evidence for a shared ritual or practice that we know nothing about Ireland has such a variety of megalithic monuments some of them extraordinary for their audacity like Browns Hill Dolman near Carlo in the southeast its immense capstone is the biggest in Europe and is estimated to weigh between a hundred and 150 tonnes others like lab Akali near for muy are extraordinary in their design this looks more like a prehistoric dying that to me it's not surprising that Ireland is so steeped in fairy lore when you see sites like the beautifully elegant circle of odd grooms it's tall slender stones it's really hard not to imagine it filled with equally tall and slender robed figures and utterly magical sites that because of their settings chosen so carefully by their builders seem to exist in another world altogether like aura standing timelessly on the banks of a lake facing a waterfall which cascades down from the hills on the far shore have a look at this here's a map of a tiny area in the south and I'm not even going to bother to open it all out okay standing stone standing stone Boulder burial stone circle megalithic tomb stone circle megalithic tomb Boulder burial cross inscribed stone Boulder burial standing stones Standing Stone stone circle stone circle Boulder burial Boulder burial megalithic tomb megalithic tombs standing stone a map of a tiny area in the North cans cans cans megalithic two megalithic two megalithic two megalithic tomb making us into him pick anywhere megalithic tombs standing stone standing stone megalithic two megalithic two megalithic two megalithic tomb standing stones stone circle stone row megalithic tomb they are everywhere over the whole of Ireland there are 1,500 megalithic sites that's the big stone stuff I don't want to keep tossing the list at you but if we do count the cans and the bearers and all that stuff as well there are an incredible 5,000 recorded archaeological sites in County Sligo alone now the point is that here as we saw on Dartmoor for example there's been comparatively little building so the traces of our ancestors are still clear to see now even allowing for the variations in population density if there are 5000 sites in County Sligo alone how many cells a must there have been across the whole of Britain and Ireland having seen from the maps just how many sites cover the Irish landscape picking any road in the southwest seems to lead to something worth visiting here the circle of sh rome bahrain with its tall portal stones sits isolated off the road almost oppressed by the ominous rock face behind it it's amazing how the atmosphere of a place is so influenced by its position in total contrast - Rome Bahrain the portal dolmen of Palmer Brown in County Galway stands proudly under open skies which seemed to link it far more to the heavens than the earth earlier I mentioned that there are 5,000 recorded archaeological sites in County Sligo well out of all those places in Sligo there's been one area which stands out from all the rest this is Karrimor Ireland's largest megalithic cemetery it's amongst the oldest and largest megalithic cemeteries in Europe and the dates here are staggering earliest remains have been dated back to around nine thousand six hundred years ago and the earliest megalithic tombs here - about seven thousand years ago so to put that in perspective that's a very very long time before any of the great pyramid building in Egypt you see that lump up there behind me that's not an array it's the sacred mountain that dominates the surrounding lowlands and you see that bump on the very top that's what we're going next not an array is not alone amongst the surrounding mountains in having a huge can at its summit but this colossal monument is called Maeve's can and there really was an Iron Age Queen Maeve who could be buried here even though the can itself predates Maeve by a couple of thousand years tombs were commonly reused for long periods so it is possible Irish mythology tells of people that came from over the sea a noble figures like the kings of Tara the kings of to uttered their Danann and here Queen Maeve you know whoever does lie here they must have been held in the very highest esteem to be buried at such a site we'd probably mostly agree that man is an animal trying to solve the problems of living comfortably with his environment and you probably hear people say quite often that man no longer lives in harmony with his environment but actually that's a mistake man lives in total harmony with his environment he just happens to have created a completely artificial one over which he has far greater control the accurate thing to say would be that urbanized man no longer lives in harmony with nature now this is essentially how we lost our connection with our ancestors the stories and myths passed down for thousands of years cease to have meaning for a people so far removed from nature now in Britain the combination of Roman invasion and centuries of religious dogma destroyed or absorbed sometimes confused that earlier heritage as is so clear to see at places like Nolton henge for example or as Betty convene adopter into the present and it ceases to have the past that you so wish to hide it only takes a few centuries of being told how and what to think and believe for almost all traces of a word-of-mouth tradition to disappear so cultural heritage had to start all over again the problem now is that our artificial environment maintains that separation from our ancestors and the speed of change through our technological advances means that few figures in history hold their meaning who were the mythical kings of Terra the kings of - Arthur didn't own and Queen Maeve we cling to the heroic tales of King Arthur of Robin Hood because they remind us of the values that we hold dear love honor bravery nobility but historical figures don't fit so easily into an ever-evolving culture there's really only one way to find modern day heroes who will fit into a culture undergoing constant change we create celebrities it's interesting that as you move north through Ireland the site seemed to become grander and more sophisticated still in County Sligo the court can of creevy keel is one of the finest examples of this type of structure the open area has a puzzling circular construction with its own passage entrance perhaps a kind of pulpit where the priest could make a grand entrance when the congregation was settled in the wider area of the court beyond this lies what would have been the covered tomb itself still guarded by imposing portal stones big more near Londonderry seems more like a showpiece of Bronze Age architectural design the circles here are laid out in pairs each pair having its own can and approaching stone rows the overall sense of establishment refinement of old rituals is almost tangible especially at the most famous group of Ireland's prehistoric monuments now south and Newgrange in the Boyne Valley sadly death is little more than a ruin long since ravaged by quarrying but now the Newgrange hold a level of artistry which leaves you speechless these Neolithic masterpieces show a level of sophistication which is impossible to take in on a single visit both Newgrange and now the colossal monuments in themselves each surrounded by numerous chambered tombs each also has its own crowning feature Newgrange is meticulously built in a line so that it's gently rising passageway coincides with the angle of the sun's rays when they shine through the opening above the entrance at the winter solstice the sunlight reaches up the passageway to illuminate the central chamber Nath is notable for an entirely different reason the whole site is adorned with decorated stones in fact Natha loan accounts for over a quarter of all the known megalithic art in Europe I couldn't leave Ireland without saying something else about Newgrange from up here it does look spectacular but actually it's both a marvel and a monstrosity inside its original it's an awesome display of Neolithic sophistication creating that internal space that's only illuminated by the Sun at winter solstice has to have been done with a fantastic understanding of astronomy it really is worth a visit but outside it's a lie Neolithic man would never have built that monster that gleaming white quartz facade conceals a concrete wall the only way that that design would stay standing and all around above the curb stones there are concrete Flint's that support the weight of the mound even the entrance it's designed to take huge numbers of visitors the court would never have looked like that it's a 1970s piece of nonsense come and marvel at the inside but ignore the outside it's just not true halfway between Ireland and England lying peacefully in the middle of the Irish Sea is perhaps the best-kept secret of the British Isles aside from being a beautiful island the isle of man is steeped in history and folklore to this day it remains politically independent and is home to the oldest unbroken Parliament in the world the ten world was a meeting place for the clans and has had many reputed sites around the island throughout history even today it maintains its ancient political rituals at 10 Wald Hill looking every bit a prehistoric mound in the town of sand John's this deeply held respect for heritage means that ancient sites often add to the sense of place accepted and protected in intimate proximity to modern houses it's also home to some unique prehistoric sites which clearly show a shared culture with the British Isles but are individual in their design and layout on open Moreland's overlooking the sea across the hillsides and in secluded woods the signs of ancient sites remain if you saw a hot circle marked on a map you probably wouldn't bother to even come and have a look but without coming to explore where on earth would you find a site like this it's marked as just a hot circle which implies that it's just the footings of a building where somebody lived but if it's true that this is how our ancestors built their houses then why aren't there thousands of them all over the landscapes you have to wonder is it possible that it was where maybe a holy man lived on the outskirts of a village or maybe just somebody really antisocial who didn't want to have anything to do with anybody else over on the southwest tip of the island is an extraordinary site called molehill it's hard to imagine how this would have looked in its day but the circle of cans laid out in pairs with numerous entrances hints and elaborate rituals under an open sky and with clear views to the Setting Sun many of the islands monuments are positioned looking out to sea and sometimes the most unimposing sight can turn out to be quite special of all the sites in the world that visited this is one of my personal favorites it's listed as just a can but it's an excellent example of why we shouldn't take things for granted and you can see on closer inspection why it can't just be a burial site look at this this place is unique it's a white quartz box these walls and ceiling are huge blocks of white quartz and the thing is that they're not at the center of the km which is where a traditional burial would be there at the back this place is intimate it's really intimate it is more than just a burial chamber another feature of this mound can also be seen across Britain and that's the small ditch and raised Bank running around its perimeter to me it seems likely that they shared the same function as the banks at the great hinges the perfect height for seating to watch a priest minister to his flock or whatever ritual was taking place on the mound this is cash telling art one of the most important sites on the whole of the Isle of Man it's about four thousand years old and it's a great example of how our perceptions can become distorted and the impressions that we get can be a bit misleading we can be forgiven for thinking that you find somewhere like this in the landscape in an isolated place and it would have been maybe a small community living somewhere but when you think about it the manpower necessary to create the site of this size must have been immense when we're just left with the bare bones of a building it can sometimes be very hard to imagine what it must have looked like when it was fully intact big in there this is something you don't see every day we're used to sites being isolated because the needs of communities change and they move to new ground but you find a place like this and you can see that people have been living on this very spot for 5,000 years or more lack see isn't a big town even today its population is still only around 2,000 inhabitants but nevertheless its status as a successful settlement is clear and this site is huge it's probably one of the biggest of its kind in the whole of the British Isles the other half of it is way behind the house on the other side of the road over there this whole site is called king orry's grave in Lexie and if it was one site when it was built with this central row of burial chambers running right through to the other side it's even bigger than at cachtice Lonard that we were looking at before so it must have been for a big community and it must have been a very important site perhaps the important point to note from the Isle of Man is that even on a small island we can see evidence of communities which were big enough and stable enough either to have daily sustenance sufficiently under control that they had the time to build such sites all that the community was big enough for some people to be dedicated to the task of building coming down the timeline of history inevitably there are crossovers between archaeology and geology but it is important not to blur the edges archeology tells us about how our ancestors lived what they did what they left behind but geology tells us about the land on which they lived in archaeological terms what we broadly call the Stone Age began way back two and a half million years ago in the Paleolithic and astonishingly with this simple tool use it was well over a million years before men realized that it was a good idea to hit stones with stones the development was really slow we have to come way way down closer to the present day to the Neolithic period which started incredibly only eight thousand years ago when our building work began that lasted until the beginning of the Bronze Age only four and a half thousand years ago now all this sits within a geological period called the Holocene which started 10,000 years ago so all the work that we know of or the ancient sites all the megalithic tomb building that all happened in this small time frame in the Holocene period now here in the Holocene beds at Formby point north of Liverpool something truly wonderful is happening the see here has washed away thousands of years of sand uncovering a 6,000 year old beach baked so hard by the Sun over a long dry period that when the tide next brought sands over to cover it it just rested gently on top protecting every mark that had been made by people this isn't rock this is just baked hard ancients and so the sea is gradually washing it away these won't be here for long they have found children's footprints and animals footprints here too so the man who left these prints could have been out hunting with his children it's wonderful to think that he could have stood on this spot watching his children play or watching the Sun go down are below in the Peak District is another fabulous henge it may be smaller in size than the enormous hinges of Avebury and Stanton drew but is nonetheless impressive for it the inner mount stone circle is long fallen either through centuries of high winds or perhaps religious destruction but in use all those thousands of years ago it must have been a wonderful sight Stenton more in derbyshire is home to an enormous Bronze Age cemetery and its focal point of the nine ladies stone circle stands on what would have been open high ground the early morning mist seemed to give it an even greater mystery but nine stones so often we see nine stones near clithero in Lancashire Bleasdale circle is another mysterious site but very important for us in our journey you may have wondered why I'm not travelling much into the east of the country and Bleasdale is a good illustration of the reason this small arrangement of concrete cylinders marks the post holes that have been found here and this is all that can be seen of a much bigger and complicated site which spread into the surrounding field the geology of Britain has created an almost Rock less sway that crossed much of eastern England this meant that here our ancestors had no choice but to use wood to build all their important sites which have long since rotted away leaving no visible trace above ground imagine what the flat lowlands of England might have looked like covered in wooden versions of stone circles how many wood hinges and stent and Druze might there have been waiting to be rediscovered the early church often use standing stones to put the fear of God into the hearts of the lowly people of the parish all over the country you find sites which still bear the names they were given to frighten the would-be sinner their merry maidens the nine maidens the hurlers the nine ladies of stent and more all turned to stone for doing something ungodly on a Sunday you know really bad things like dancing or playing a happy tune and here even more scary the devil apparently threw this stone in an attempt to destroy the church amidst but aside from early superstitions what do we have here this is the rub stone monolith it's the tallest standing stone in Britain nearly 26 feet tall and if you apply the rule of thumb for big monoliths that there's a quarter again in the ground this stone is between 32 and 35 feet long and they brought it from Katyn over ten miles away now obviously you don't go to that amount of effort without a reason and here around Rustin may well have been as important to our Bronze Age ancestors as the mighty Stonehenge and Avebury only traces remain but almost invisible in the landscape are the remains of the most enigmatic of prehistoric monuments the cursus imagine a henge a circular area surrounded by a ditch with a raised Bank on the outside and then imagine that idea as a straight line that's the basic structure of a cursus and they were clearly of immense importance there are a number to be found across Britain varying from the shortest example in Northampton two hundred yards long through the Stonehenge cursus which is nearly two miles long to the awesome Dorset cursus which stretches for six miles it's 300 feet wide and the builders shifted an incredible six and a half million cubic feet of chalk in its construction and I wonder if the processionary pathway of the tin world on the Isle of Man is a living example of the same structure every July the fifth on tin wool day the world's oldest Parliament walks between the raised banks in a procession to the step mound at the end here new laws are proclaimed and the people gather to seek justice and air their grievances around redstone there were at least four curses monuments and it may not be coincidental that this site lies pretty close to halfway up mainland Britain a national meeting place perhaps theories about the purpose of these huge structures vary greatly but I favor the slightly controversial idea that they're the precursors to the Athletics track the feature of the raised bank would certainly have given clear views to spectators and the fact there are often burials adjacent to them does nothing to negate the theory even today we still play cricket and hold sports days on the field by the church we're often so wrapped up in the spiritual side of our ancestors we forget that our fundamental to all species especially humans is competition after all the Greek Olympics and the Roman arenas didn't spring from nowhere evidence absolutely none I just wish they'd uncover some chalk lines running the full length of well there's a common misconception about our Neolithic and Bronze Age ancestors that they always lived around their settlement and never really went very far from home but you remember way back at the rollright stones in Oxfordshire I mentioned a trade route across Britain and believe it or not some of the best evidence we have for the scale of that trade is up there on the top of Langdale pike in Cumbria this is local stone it is found in a few other places not far from here most of them a lot easier to get to and you have to wonder why our ancestors chose this remote an inaccessible spot as a centre for their axe making industry the thing is that this stone produced axe heads of such quality that they were highly prized and desired items how do we know because axes from this very spot have been found as far afield as Ireland Scotland southern England and more than anywhere else way over in the East in Lincolnshire some have even been found completely unused in burials and religious sites the significance of Lincolnshire is that it's a place with a little local stone the people in the East would have needed to buy these and what price a beautiful axe a pig a cow a pottery urn so did people bring their items here to exchange them or with the axes carried all over Britain by traders the truth is we don't actually know how the trading took place the important thing is that it did in the region all around the Langdale ex-factory there are suggestions of a level of wealth similar to the Flint lands of Wiltshire the small druid circle of Alveston also known as the Druids temple on Berkeley common to the south of Londo looks unassuming but is all that remains of a circle which must have been quite beautiful there used to be an outer circle now all but invisible but the circles once stood on a stone pavement and the inner area was cobbled with a bluish stone that wasn't local it seems that this carefully designed construction with its open views across Morecombe Bay was more elegant than cheap in sharp contrast closer to the axe Factory things were far less subtle enormous show sites were built in an overt display of wealth and power sunken Kirk to the southwest originally contains sixty stones in its impressive circle and excavations found that the ground had been completely leveled in preparation for its construction and to the north one of my favorite circles in the whole of Britain Castle rig near Kazik in the Lake District stands in a breathtaking setting whilst it may just as easily have been an axe market the abiding impression here is of a vast Cathedral where the mountains themselves are a part of the grand design moving away from the lakes to the northeast near Penrith stands another giant among stone circles in fact long Meghan her daughter's is the sixth largest in the whole of Britain with an incredible seventy stone still standing it's possible that long Meg the tall outlier was standing before the circle was built alongside but it's hard to know for sure there's a lot of debate about inscribed stones but I do have to wonder if they're not Maps there are three rings here that's a big one here that you probably can't see in this light but we have this big circle here huge circle there used to be a circle over there and there still is another circle over there so we have these three circles that maybe illustrate that if you look at places like now for example in Ireland where some of the engravings are really intricate but again show shapes that can relate to some of the structures that we see in the landscape I've spent a certain amount of time with the Kogi Indians who live in the jungles of northern Colombia and they are the descendants of and effectively remain to this day and Neolithic culture now the entrance to one of their cities in the jungles they have a huge stone that could be a thousand fifteen hundred years old covered with engravings now they call it the map stone and it shows the layout of the city as it spreads into the jungle and I think when you look at these rings knowing what we know now about Stanton drew about the postholes and these concentric rings of posts and that more and more post holes are being found at different sites I do have to wonder are these rings and showing that there were concentric rings within this site as well our first sight across the border into Scotland is coincidentally the seventh largest circle in Britain the 12 apostles used to be 18 or so but sadly today only five remain however unexcited this circle looks today it must have held huge amounts of people but moving further into Scotland the variety of sites have echoes of others far away across Britain down in the southwest of Scotland Ken Holi is an impressive chambered can which is reminiscent of places like Whelan smithy and cash still in art a little further north the circle of Glen quicken with its huge central monolith seems to share its design with Baz Conan in Cornwall and then up near Kilmartin in Argyll the wealth of engraved stones with cup and ring markings share a number of characteristics with others we saw at long Meg in Cumbria and now in Ireland I don't know see Sun rises over there and each of these channels faces more or less in that direction I've got a Sun compass here if I put that down now see each of these does line up with a sunrise at varying times of year now it might be total nonsense but but on the other hand it might not ironically there is one that is slightly off the scale but do you throw the idea away because of one or did they have a reason for making it different we will never know it's very easy to underestimate the meticulous and painstaking job done by archeologists and people often misinterpret what they're actually saying about their findings for example a place is called a burial site because there are signs of ritual burial that an individual was held in high esteem or affection but on that basis would we call this a burial site the thing is that archaeologists are saying we'll call this a burial site because that's what we know anything else may be possible but it's conjecture and then there's a very real problem with dating many Neolithic and Bronze Age tombs were constantly reused over huge periods of time now you can date the remains that you find but does that necessarily date the site let's say that in five thousand years time our descendants are excavating Westminster Abbey well Edward the Confessor was buried there in 1066 and we still bury royalty and eminent figures there today our descendants need only excavate the newer remains to date the Abbey wrongly by a thousand years and how about interpretation let's say the same archaeologists start excavating our churches and pulling out tiny scraps of information they find that all Christian churches are aligned east-west a clear reference to the sun's movement in the sky then they find that there was a big celebration called Christmas which was always held around the winter solstice and another called Easter that was always held close to the spring equinox then from jumbled texts they find that the ritual day was on a Sunday and that Jesus was always referred to as the Son of God on what basis would they not think that Jesus was a Sun God and then we're confronted by a place like this I'm in the area around Kilmartin in Argyll and rarely is there more scope for confusion this whole area was in use for thousands of years with clear signs of development and reuse over all that time and some of the details are virtually impossible to interpret with any degree of certainty for instance with these cup and ring markings made on a flat lying stone my clothes at kin barn and a kinnor brick and then erected here to stand as this imposing megalith long after the original significance of the markings have been forgotten and then here the great X not a mile up the road has precise alignments with features on the horizon which strongly implied that its function was a lunar observatory and then over there is a linear cemetery a number of cans in a line stretching nearly two miles across the countryside with a standing stone at the end it's a a real gift for the ley line hunter searching for networking lines of energy across the landscape I have to say that whilst I don't in any way dismiss the many energetic experiences people have at ancient monuments the more I see of these sites the more I'm faced by their practicality and function and to me there is nothing mysterious about line of sight if you can see one sight from any other you can orientate yourself and know which way to travel and then still within the same complex we find the bewildering site of temple wood archeologists would never have found this circle if they hadn't been excavating the larger one over there because it was completely hidden by the PT soils that cover the valley floor now we know that there was a timber structure here first the post holes are marked by these concrete cylinders and their positions do imply an astronomical function then they started to build a stone circle here stones are long gone now but before it was completed they built the larger circle over there and they never came back to finish this one he imagined its nose and somebody builds a snowman in the time-honored way of a lovely carrot for his nose and two lumps of coal for his eyes and then the warmer weather comes and the Snowman melts then one day you're walking across the field and you come across the two lumps of coal and the carrot but you have no knowledge of the tradition of making snowmen what would be your interpretation a messy cold man with a careless donkey but then we're still say a sheep came along first and ate the carrot and you were excavating the lumps of coal thousands of years later that's the problem with our distant past fragmented pieces from different jigsaw puzzles and we just don't know what goes with what it's exciting people are often horrified when they see a road going straight through the middle of an ancient site but actually what we're looking at is thousands of years of unbroken human inhabitation it's where the footpath became the donkey track which became the lane which became the road it's where it's always been and it's where it belongs welcome to the land of the RSC and though I don't mean as some regional open-air production of Macbeth by the Royal Shakespeare Company RS c stands for recumbent stone circle it's a remarkably unimaginative name coined by early archaeologists for these extraordinary stone circles which have a massive horizontal stone seemingly Lane as an altar in fact some of them weigh up to 50 tons and were dragged for miles across the countryside and uphill to be placed exactly in position fantastic they're extraordinary for more than one reason firstly here in the Grampians was the highest concentration of stone circles anywhere there were over a hundred and fifty of them and a huge amount of those were these technically brilliant recumbents secondly and far more importantly the recumbent stone circles are almost unique to this part of Britain why was this arrangement of stones not used elsewhere why is the auto stone always placed to lie precisely on the horizontal why was that level of accuracy so important that smaller stones would be used to wedge them exactly into the required position this is coffee Muir wood how long it's been award is anyone's guess but certainly when the circle was erected the horizon would have been clear to see and the answer to all those questions is that they were focused on the moon's passage through the heavens in a way not possible further south they were precisely aligned to mirror the landscape we're up here at this high latitude at certain points in its cycle the moon skims the horizon as it dances its way across the sky we have absolutely no idea what the rituals may have been all their significance to the community but the other examples of recumbents in this part of Scotland all emphasize this intent genius now these are different stone circles usually appear to be stone circles but these occasionally we see kists in the middle but normally the burials associated with stone circles tend to be on the outside these are clava cairns so named because the best preserved examples of them are here in the district of klava and all a very few remain to be seen today up here around the Moray Firth there were loads of them here the cans were massive structures much taller domed buildings than we see today the middle one is what is known as a ring can the outer two are passage tombs aligned like Newgrange in Ireland so that the winter solstice Sun streams through the passage to illuminate the central chamber and these strange radial causeways which may have astronomical alignments but no one knows for sure not far away the fine example of chorim oni still has its passageway intact giving a much clearer idea of how they would have looked what makes them so difficult to interpret is that they were used and adapted over thousands of years the cams themselves are between three and four thousand years old but perhaps strangely the surrounding stone circles were erected much later around the time that stone circles generally were falling into disuse and we can only wonder what our ancestors here were thinking in the same way that many of the deconsecrated churches across Britain have become things like community centers and apartments the builders intentions are confusing if and I have to wonder how future archaeologists might decipher our present-day recycling of old buildings so one of the stone circles just a fancy refurbishment to the temple or did they relate to some worship built around structures where the alignments had already been made we'll probably never know I've been waiting to come here for years and actually being here is more breathtaking than I ever imagined no photograph can capture the sheer majesty of the place it's a work of Neolithic wonder greater even in the astronomical brilliance of the recumbent stone circles Kalen ish is the greatest prehistoric observatory of them all situated on the Hebridean island of Lewis I think it's utterly implausible that it was built by the Islanders themselves simply for local use indeed one of the enduring legends of kallen ish is that it was built by black men who came from over the sea there is a burial can here but it was added long after the stones were erected and lacking the stone altar of the recumbents the implication is that this was a place of science rather than religion the full lunar cycle of 18.61 years is marks and predicted by these monoliths but here the wider horizon is the stage just once in each cycle the moon seems to come down from the sky to touch the earth disappearing behind the hills only to reappear in a final display gleaming between the central stones as it passes we've only scratched the surface of its alignments here the intricacy is so complete the impression is one of a finely tuned clock marking the slow but predictable movement of the heavens throughout the sight notches and angles are cut into the stones refining the accuracy and marking certain celestial events the focus at Kalen ish of marking the full lunar cycle brings another point to mind which is relevant to many sites throughout the British Isles the closest you can get to marking 18.61 in stones is 19 the number of stones in many sites especially in Cornwall and the closest you can get to marking half that number is 9 are the many circles of nine stones a slightly less accurate version of the same phenomenon and do the wider spaces between stones which we so often interpret as entrances actually mark a deliberate offset to adjust the inaccuracy of the circle to me the insistence on describing the builders of these extraordinary sites as animal skin wearing farmers is like saying that Britain's motorway system was built by shoppers up here almost at the end of my journey it brings to mind that I began working on this project about eight years ago I've driven about 8,000 miles across the British Isles and I have no idea how far I've walked wouldn't surprise me if it was about 800 fate must be on my side because without any deliberate planning and through constantly shifting weather dependent schedules I've arrived here five hours before a lunar eclipse I said right at the beginning of the film that it's only by being here standing with these ancient stones that we can truly begin to get a sense of what they were all about I've found of all the miles and the monuments that our forebears were so far removed from the insular communities of our imagination and arriving here accidentally to be on the light of a full lunar eclipse it really does make me appreciate the mystical qualities that seem to have been so important to our ancestors back on the mainland traveling through the very north of Scotland we find a region where there are few signs of our ancestors presence but every now and again a site like the enormous gray cans of campster will remind us that the communities were sizable the last leg of our journey makes that point all the more evident even the harsh environment of Orkney didn't prevent the construction of some of the most impressive monuments of all the great mound of maize how is much smaller than the enormous Maeve's can in ireland but inside the beauty of the skilled workmanship sits in total contrast to the plain exterior each wall of the passageway is made of a single piece of stone 30 feet in length and again the beautifully corbelled central chamber is illuminated by the Sun at winter solstice it's a huge undertaking which like so many of the sites we've seen doesn't fit with a small community of simple farming folk right across organist a Liz maintained the enormous ring of brodgar happens to be the third largest stone circle in Britain after Avebury and Staunton drew such a vast site for a small community of farmers I don't think so a little distance away the improbably tall wedge cut standing stones of Stenness are even more impressive even though most of them have gone unlike brodgar the ditch and Bank have also disappeared throughout the whole of my journey across the British Isles I've been used to seeing monumental science places that were in some way important to communities or how they treated the dead we have very few signs of how people actually lived because the abundance of forest made wood and easily available source material so very little evidence of daily life remains what makes me so special is that unlike most of the rest of the British Isles it was never forested so timber would have been a valuable scarcity that was reserved for making things like tools and boats in 1850 a storm battered the dunes here at skara brae and uncovered a Neolithic village there's a strong sense of community here the houses are close together and linked by communal passageways but they remain discreet and private and rarely do we get such an intimate view of our ancestors their homes remain almost as intact as the day they were built complete with beds which would probably have held mattresses of Bracken a central half even a dresser I have to wonder if the wooden houses across the rest of Britain wouldn't have had the same type of furniture I wish I could express just how magical it is like putting my feet in a Neolithic ancestors footprints at Formby point I wonder how many people stood on this exact spot putting away their personal belongings well how many people sat here around the fire talking and laughing over dinner and how many people rested a hand here stepping into bed since shivers up my spine but even though I could end my journey here I still have one more thing to show you I'm on the island of South Ronald say about 40 miles from skara brae in 1958 at the same time that my mother was waddling around pregnant with me Ronald Simonson was walking his land here when he stumbled upon an exposed section of stone wall beneath his feet he had discovered quite by accident a chambered tomb dating from the Neolithic period which turned out to have been in continuous use for about eight hundred years well into the early Bronze Age when it was excavated it was found to contain not only human bones but those of seagulls as well an extraordinary discovery of an unknown cult who seemed to revere these magnificent birds to the extent that they included them in their burials but exciting as that is it's not why we're here when excavations were complete the tomb had given up a wealth of grave goods a short distance away from the tomb close to Ronald Simonson's home is an intimate and informative museum now run by his daughters Kathleen and Frida amongst the relics and treasures from the tomb housed here are human and animal remains numerous tools polished axe heads some jewelry and this a button of polished albertite more finely made than any in your mother's button box how many times might this have been touched in the simplest of daily routines how is it actually worn or used and how many times did someone struggle to get a thread through so fine a hole my journey has taken me from tantalizing signs of life - intimate signs of lives ways of life so familiar that they can't fail to bring our ancestors alive in our minds across the whole of the British Isles we've seen evidence of shared knowledge community interaction between people across huge distances the next time you find yourself wondering how did we lose track of those people where did they go remind yourself they didn't go anywhere we're still here hello Michael Bart here thank you for watching this prehistory guy's show there's loads more to watch and you can get to some of it on this playlist here if you'd like to 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Channel: The Prehistory Guys

Views: 900,412

Rating: 4.8675594 out of 5

Keywords: standing with stones, michael bott, rupert soskin, archaeology, ancient history, megalithic, neolithic, bronze age, standing stones, stone circles, long barrows, neolithic era, neolithic europe, neolithic art, neolithic man, megalithic builders, megalithic sites, megalithic monuments, stonehenge, avebury, callanish, megalithic britain, neolithic britain, bronze age britain, neolithic scotland, neolithic ireland documentary, prehistoric britain documentary, prehistoric britain

Id: Iq4xM8TLWc0

Length: 135min 13sec (8113 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/HotelIndiaFoxtrot]

This is an utterly fantastic documentary