NEOLITHIC CURSUS HUNT near my home has some surprises in store!

hi everybody hope you're doing well Michael here um something we don't do very often and that's look back over content we've produced in the past and bring it out and repost it but here for a bit of throwback fun is an item that originally was part of an episode of something we called the prehistory show that we made in July 2020 that's four years back it was in episode one I think and it's still somewhere down in the timeline on the channel if you want to find it however I think it works well as a standalone piece and I hope that you agree it's all about finding a Neolithic curses in the landscape near my home here near Stratford upon aen in warshire if you're not sure what a curses is and why you might be interested in what a curses is pause the video now for an explanation from Wikipedia over there I think some of you may know that ruper and I have a very different take on curses from the accepted explanation but that's a debate from another time in this video I'm on a cursor hunt during which I make a couple of very interesting discoveries so keep watching to find out what they are the Journey Begins in a hedge a hedge just one mile from my house up the road there where we were sitting just now and I've chosen to start this report sitting in a hedge because if I'm right this slight bank here maybe the last vestigal remains of of an early neic cursus a cursus is a highly enigmatic type of prehistoric structure named by antiquarian William stukeley using the Latin name for a course imagining that they were Roman Athletics tracks as you would the most visible and accessible example I know of is the Stonehenge curses and thanks to Google Earth I can take you from the Sasson Monument here and fly you down the length of it the charcut cursors or to be more precise the chut B cursors there being another a few hundred yards to the north as with most cursor structures can usually only be discerned in certain climatic conditions from aerial photography you can see the faint marks on Google Maps here the physical remains most often have been raised by plowing and erosion here is my approximation of the layout on this aerial photograph and I'm in the head about here I'm actually going to come out of the Hedge now if I can and uh walk down the road towards the village so as it comes into the village this road is actually following the southern line of the bank of the cursor I'm just coming to the junction with the main road that runs through Chara and if I'm careful Crossing and I cross over here Beyond this fence there's another fence extending into charcut park which extends and curves around to the right it's the fence around The Village Church and if I come inside the churchard and find follow the fence round I come to the point where the northern edge of the curses would have ended is this semi circular fence somehow preserving the original 5,000-year old form of the half circled Terminus of the Chalker cursus it's a form that many curses display not so long ago before modern farming the remains of Earthworks such as these would have been much more apparent in the landscape stukeley's own sketches tell us this now while people down the ages May well have forgotten the original purpose of the curses it is true that people venerate monuments they don't understand and honor them in ways that the original Builders May well have found a bit weird the Church of St lens here as we see it now is Victorian but it is on an earlier site that dates back to at least the 12th century could it be that like the church in the center of Nolton henge in Dorset that this building owes its position to an act of imposition by the church on something that may have been deemed a pagan Monument there even seems to be a vestigal ditch running just outside the fence as further evidence and how many semicircular perimeters to church yards do you know of especially ones that seem to align with where you'd expect the Terminus of a Neolithic curses to be it's tantalizing isn't it and it'll probably never be proven to be part of the remains of the curses however before we leave the mystery of the chut curses there's one more thing that I want to show you literally just back up the road a bit and I'm walking into um what would be the Overflow car park for Char park for the National Trust and uh extending behind me I think you can see the Avenue of trees leading down to the house it extends right down the approach to the house and through that to a double line of trees extending to the perimeter of the [Music] park the park was designed by none other than the famous 18 century landscape Gardener capability Brown again I can never prove this but I strongly suspect that this wide Avenue of trees follows the pre-existing bank and ditch of yet another cursus utilized by capability Brown as a template for this most striking of 18th century landscape features really how many curses did Neolithic folk need well quite a lot it turns out if the evidence isn't totally fooling us it is known that there were at least four in the complex near the rudston monolith in East Yorkshire and some of those even cross over each other I mean even just here we've got Chalker A and B curses just to the north here a mile further Beyond there's another curses two miles beyond that there's another three curses over there four miles is one cursus and if I walked half an hour in that direction I'd find another two cursores it seems duplication wasn't a problem so back to my capability Brown curses it's the right dimensions for one it crosses water as they often do and look here aren't those vestigal marks of curses ditches extending over into the next field and that's about as much as I'm going to say but two points if it's possible for me to walk out of my back door and be stumbling over prehistoric sites before I've gone a mile down the road what might there be just lurking in the landscape around you and two it's possible that in just the next Village along I've discovered a major a neic site hidden in plain view and on that bombshell let's go back to the studio thank you Jeremy that didn't date me at all did it anyway hope you enjoyed that I'm sure there quite a few other gems hidden away in the archives that we can revive from time to time but in the meantime please do hit the like And subscribe buttons and if you got a moment check out our patreon page and our GC tab Stonehenge project page links in the description below thanks for watching bye for now

Channel: The Prehistory Guys

Views: 4,702

Keywords: the prehistory guys, the prehistory guys youtube, michael bott, rupert soskin, ancient history, prehistoric archaeology, prehistory videos, archaeologist interviews, ancient mysteries, prehistoric man, prehistoric cursus, neolithic cursus, cursus monuments, prehistoric monuments, neolithic monuments, stone age monuments, stone age cursus, neolithic landscape, neolithic britain, stone age britain, processionary pathways, sacred landscape, cursuses in britain

Id: ilY8uGmNTyQ

Length: 8min 18sec (498 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2024