Who Created These Mysterious Earthworks? | Ancient Tracks EP2 | Absolute History

[Music] britain is crisscrossed by an amazing network of ancient trackways these remarkable routes are our oldest roads and have been traveled for more than 5 000 years that is an extraordinary place walked by pilgrims and traders hunters and invaders celts romans saxons and vikings each track is bound up in myth mystery and legend this is it it's quite a strange looking monument but what's the truth behind all these megaliths and burial sites and lay lines and hidden caves along these pathways and why were their mystic origins such an attraction for later generations i'm going to explore these tracks to connect the clues they've left hidden in the british landscape isn't this just about the best cave you've ever seen wow her name is majesty what other name could she have [Applause] this week i'm in wiltshire to walk the age-old ridgeway i want to know what this historic path across the north wessex downs can tell me about the myths and legends of ancient britain and the rights and rituals of its many travelers these are the paths our ancestors would have followed the ancient trackways that we can still walk today i'm starting my walk in wiltshire just off the busy a4 this is the beginning of the ridgeway thought to be britain's oldest road and along its path lie some of our most spectacular ancient sites [Music] i'm going to explore this elusive highway from the wiltshire downs across the high chalk ridge in oxfordshire and into berkshire where i'll rejoin the 21st century on the banks of the river thames the ridgeway will take me to a world famous stone circle at the heart of a prehistoric landscape i'll follow in the tracks of celtic chariots explore a burial chamber older than the pyramids and uncover the secrets of a great white horse all of which will reveal to me how this ancient track was once used [Music] i'm only a mile into my journey on the ridgeway and it brings me to my first stop one of our great prehistoric puzzles avebury [Music] britain's most impressive neolithic site and the largest stone circle in the world [Music] this magnificent monument was erected by our stone age ancestors somewhere between 2000 and 3000 bc and is so vast it's believed to have taken centuries to complete two and a half thousand years later the anglo-saxons get attracted to this place and build a village here and then if you fast forward to the medieval you get this arrangement whereby they build a town around and in between the stones creating this almost fairytale look it's absolutely unique isn't it but what was this place used for the experts have been puzzling over its purpose for generations thought to be a place of ceremony and burial rites fertility circles and rituals to appease the earth goddess but these are just guesses really because we know so little about the neolithic people who built it [Music] in the middle ages and through to the 1500s local people tried to pull these stones down which must have been pretty scary why would they go to all that time and trouble well the local church thought they were pagan and mystical and dark and weird not the kind of thing that you would want to surround your town with and then later on farmers just smashed them up because they were in the way of their crops seems horrible to us now doesn't it like something the taliban might do by the 18th century the destruction of the stones was getting out of control crusading archaeologist william stukley's book on avery even names and shames the culprit farmers including disappointingly mr t robinson no relation even today the good villagers of avebury still live with the legacy that some of their homes were built from the crushed megaliths which way we're going to just go to the left here the walls along here well that looks quite rough hewn all that lots of yes and these here oh certainly yeah these look much more uniform but those these earlier ones certainly look like they could have been just guys smashing away absolutely well they learned that if they heated up the stone yeah and and then put cold water on they could split the stones yeah but later on they learned how to cut them up more regularly well i'm not sure about those but i'm from english heritage and i'm afraid i'll have to take these roads away with me right we'll try and find something to replace it the ruined stones were also used in this building ironically it's now part of the national trust museum dedicated to preserving them eventually in 1934 an unlikely savior came to avebry's rescue scottish tycoon alexander keeler bought the village stone circle included wealth into fast cars women and megaliths someone who knows keela's work very well is the current archaeologist for avery dr nick snatill so you've been mucking around in the presence of this this scottish jam king do you find him irritating i have this image of of this real control freak blasting his way through the archaeology and sticking up the stones willy-nilly kayla was an extraordinary man i mean he was he was a multi-millionaire he inherited the marmalade and boiled sweet fortune but uh but he didn't really care much for those he wasn't interested in the the family factories what he wanted to do was follow his passions his excavation records were so good that we knew that if we could excavate as well and get a little bit more information using modern techniques we could draw in what he'd done before to make something that was more than the sum of its parts oh it's nice to know that he was a good guy even if he does confound all my prejudices yeah he really was how the circle appears today is thanks to keela's vision he re-erected a total of 21 stones adding concrete pillars to mark the missing megaliths so is that it have we found just about all we can here far from it i think it's only it's only really at the beginning of the story of understanding what people were doing in these landscapes where they were living people often think we know everything there is to know about places like avery and the big wessex monument complexes but the truth is we've only touched the surface so what we need to do is get out there and explore more of the story i can't help wondering how the huge stones at avebury got there in the first place the ridgeway must have played a crucial part it's no coincidence that a few miles further along i discover firefield down the biggest group of sars and stones in all of england [Music] they're magnificent these massive sars and stones aren't they they're originally laid down under ancient seas and then flung up onto the land and eventually distributed all over here by rivers and melt water actually we had to get special permission to come to this part of the downs because it's privately owned but it's well worth it originally this was thought to be a full and standing stone but if you look at it closely it's more interesting than that see these grooves here this is a stone age work bench this is where craftsmen used to sharpen the hand axes in these grooves the the autograph of a neolithic craftsman really fantastic [Applause] [Music] i can see why our ancestors would have kept to the safety of the natural high road of the ridgeway the lowlands of ancient britain were choked with dangerous forests swamps and flooding rivers so early hunters and travellers would have kept to the ridgeway for their protection two thousand years after the building of avebury got underway giant hill forts like this one began to appear every five or six miles along the ridgeway from then on it protected the celts from the romans the romans from the saxons then the saxons themselves from the marauding vikings [Music] the first hill fort i reach is barbary built and defended by the celts and where engineer rob herford has evidence that the celts weren't just walking the ridgeway they were riding it in style [Music] these are really interesting they're iron age fittings from a chariot and stuff just like that was found around here and it's remade you can see that they they look like that but how do we know that these chariots are celtic and not roman so well some tribes actually had a habit of burying whole chariots with the owner all sorts of different places had different chariots of different kinds but the ones that the celts had of this pattern are quite comfortable to drive in you can sit down and drive quite considerable distances on that from one hill fort to the next you can communicate with your opposite number in another tribe and in doing that you want the showiest chariot you can make so you cover it in bits of big bling to show off how well-to-do you are absolutely i think this is really significant because for most people the the celts prior to the romans getting here are just a load of old dunderheads and you take two steps forward they'd fall over but if they were producing really sophisticated things like this and you've got this incredibly long route and we know how people were getting from a to b in in celtic times it's a completely different kind of civilization isn't it i must have a look at the the horses jason what what what are the horses called this is kaiju and this is fawn they're both brothers and they're dartmoor hill ponies so they are a native breeding do we reckon these are the kinds of horses that would have been used i think so i think so some people think of them as quite small but this seems to fit very well and when you're sitting in the chariot you can actually see over the ponies and if they were significantly bigger you just spend hundreds of miles looking at horses bums um and this i think works really really well are we going to uh let them pull this one along now brave please dude right if you sit on the front door stride you'll get a slightly different view i see what you mean you you can see over them yeah that makes a lot of sense doesn't it on we go boys come on yep here i am mr kels oh hang on hang on a minute there's a young celt here do you want to ride in my car here we go i should have done the whole ridgeway in this i'm beginning to form a picture now of a thriving highway crossing ancient britain but there was a time when the ridgeway was all but lost until it was rediscovered by one man who knew both the lay of the land and the secret history beneath each step along the ridgeway is transporting me to a different time and my next steps are taking me to victorian england in search of a writer who saved the ridgeway from oblivion richard jeffries now regarded as one of britain's greatest nature writers began in the 1870s to connect the discoveries he was making on his country walks jeffries realized that this overgrown track across the downs wasn't a farm lane or a modern road but something much more significant this is his book wildlife in a southern county and in it he says [Music] the origin of the track goes back into the dimmest antiquity there's evidence that it was a military road when the fierce dane carried fire and slaughter inland the eagles of old rome perhaps were born along it and yet earlier chariots of the britons may have used it traces of all have been found so that for 15 centuries this track of the primitive peoples has maintained its existence through the strange changes of the times it is of course what we now call the ridgeway jefferies was born in cote in wiltshire where the ridgeway continues northeast along the north wessex downs the country upbringing he would have recognized is all but gone the house he was born in is now swamped by this busy junction on the outskirts of swindon hi rebecca hello it's crazy isn't it the difference between the mayhem outside and this little idiot yes but i suppose in a way that's what jefferies was writing about the contradiction between the industrial society that he was living in and the the rural agricultural society that had gone before he discovered the ridgeway for ordinary people didn't he did he spent so many years here exploring the local landscape that he actually mapped out the local area with the downs and it became to mean to him something more than than just simply a path it was a more for him a channel into the past if you like when he walked it he would imagine the the different cultures and the different ages of the past and the people who would have walked it before him in a way he's a a very modern writer isn't he because if you or i or anybody were walking the ridgeway today it would generate in us certain emotions which we'd be quite happy to articulate but he was virtually the first person to talk about that kind of stuff yes people find a form of spiritual guidance in his works and comfort and for those of us who enjoy wandering natural ancient landscapes his words really ring true for us when we're up there on the ridgeway experiencing all the nature his words come to mind and i think he manages to keep experiences alive in people's minds for richard jeffries the ridgeway and the ancient sites along it were more than just history they were a place of self-revelation i restrained my soul till i reached and put my foot on the grass at the beginning of the green hill itself [Music] moving up the sweet short turf at every step my heart seemed to obtain a wider horizon of feeling with every inhalation of rich pure air and deeper desire the very light of the sun was whiter and more brilliant here by the time i'd reached the summit i'd entirely forgotten the petty circumstances and the annoyances of existence i felt myself myself it's so passionate isn't it so exhilarating so excited it's a beautiful writer isn't it as the ridgeway climbs high to the east i leave swindon far behind looking at it through jeffrey's eyes i've got a new appreciation for this atmospheric landscape i love how the track seems to inspire storytelling and folklore a way to make sense of the strange and ancient things we encounter along the way waylon smithy encircled in a rustling ring of beech trees is a place steeped in its own myths and legends this is one of the oldest man-made structures in the world a neolithic burial chamber built before the pyramids of egypt and when you see it it makes sense that one frequent visitor to this site was the oxford professor of anglo-saxon literature j.r.r tolkien [Music] this is it it's quite a strange looking monument isn't it you've got these uh one two standing stones then you've got this gully here two more standing stones wayland was the blacksmith for the saxon gods and the story around here is okay if i don't break my legs but if you put a groat i've got two and a half p here maybe that's something like a groat into one of these holes and you've got a horse without any horseshoes on then you go away and the next morning when you come back it's shot this is andy foley who's the national trust flop for here who let me in andy i i don't know very much about this kind of place but look to me looking at this it doesn't actually look saxon it looks older than that it's fair is that fair yes that's very very true tony it's actually a neolithic burial chamber so like about how old would you say uh neolithic refers to about 2500 bc so 5 000 years in all so what do you reckon the story of this place was in in the new stone age well it's obviously an impressive sight a lot of effort gone into the the construction this stone here alone weighs seven tons so that would have to be brought up from the veil from from distance so this is a big powerful potent place and then thousands literally thousands of years later the saxons come along and they what adopt it as their own place do you think that's right yes because obviously i'd no written records they won't be able to understand or be aware of the the neolithic period so this place requires a reason or a purpose i think the wayland smithy story is when this originated yeah we kind of forget don't we that someone like the saxons would have had no idea who these people were it's just weird stuff exactly yes it's still being used i see what we've got in there today well it's just i don't know it just looks like someone's had a bit of a camp fire but it looks as though they've been quite a few of them over the years yeah that's the usual usual sort of offerings we get or wildflowers wrapped into posies and what have you did you say offerings yes so it's not just a bunch of hippies cooking vegetarian sausages no it's quite eerie actually you can see lots of mysterious little shapes in here [Music] andy there's a a painted jaw is that a horse yes horse's jawbone yes it's lovely isn't it a nice piece of work man and hello it's like a big corn dolly isn't it or or a wicker man yeah oh yeah well that might be slightly more sinister if it's a wicker man we can with tasty shades on you said there was some stuff in the trees yeah we get some ribbons and what have you left in these trees oh yeah i can see see ribbons here and here some there as well there's that i know there's loads there's something quite haunting about this place these colored ribbons are wishes blowing in the wind left by today's travelers nice to meet you hey tony goodbye a sacred site it's like the present is reaching into the long lost past with modern pagans reclaiming wayland smithy and the spirit of the ridgeway for [Music] themselves [Music] i'm walking along the high reaches of the ancient ridgeway in oxfordshire bringing me close to one of england's most mythical landscapes guarding the way ahead is dragon's hill according to legend this is where saint george slew the dragon and as the beast's blood spilled over the hilltop it left forever a white patch where no grass can grow [Music] but i'm heading further down the valley to the delightful thatched village of huffington [Music] thomas hughes author of tom brown school days was born in the village here in 1822 where his grandfather was the local vicar hughes spent a carefree childhood rambling this path so he came down the ridgeway in this direction just like i'm doing now and he came across a green veil and i thought i'd lost my book for a moment and ahead of him there was this massive chalk carved horse and he said about it the king carved out on the northern side of the chalk hill the great saxon white horse which gives its name to the vale over which it has looked these thousand years or more let's have a look at it there's the veil [Music] but thomas hughes like many before him got it wrong they thought the colossal white horse and huffington castle perched on the hill above were built to celebrate king alfred the great and his victory over the vikings in the 9th century a.d it's true that alfred the great wasn't born far away and he did defeat the vikings on these very downs but was any of that connected to the white horse [Music] i need to find someone who can help me untangle fact from fiction [Music] what is it that we've got here well we're standing on huffington castle hill fort and it's one of our best known hill forts in this part of the world any idea what kind of date this hill fall would be this sort of hill fort's usually around about 7th century bc so it's early iron age so given the dates you've just been telling me the idea that it was built by alfred the great to defend the area from the vikings doesn't really work does it no but british folklore is a wonderful thing yeah um and often you know you end up with these names like castle um and it's harking back to this sort of mythical age trying to explain origins it's kind of what we do best gonna be a bit contentious why did you call it a fort is it really a fort were there lots of soldiers marching around yeah i keep doing that um there was a while where i stopped calling them thoughts and started calling them hilltop enclosures which is really what they are it's not nearly as sexy sounding it's not is it i like hill faults yeah what relationship do you think there is between this hill fort and the white horse i think it's absolutely fundamental um the and not only that but the sighting of the horse it's almost a story playing out in the landscape and the hillthought sort of sits next to that story going right back to the late neolithic period and it's the iron age which sort of sees that it flower if you like and the horse is absolutely crucial to that so these landmarks weren't created for the glory of alfred the great they were built two millennium before he was born and the oldest of all is the great white horse that has been marked in this hillside for almost 3 000 years and without the local people and their tradition of scouring it might have been lost forever this pounding of the chalk keeps the horse as pristine and clean as the day it was created by the victorian era thomas hughes was writing about the extravagant scouring festivals held here [Music] there was the double line of booths and stalls which i'd seen putting up the day before making a long and broad street and all decked out with nuts and apples and gingerbread and all sorts of socks and food and children's toys and cheap ribbons knives braces straps and all manner of gordy looking articles a female smoking marathon was held where the prize was a gallon of gin awarded to the woman who smoked the most tobacco in an hour get your out girls [Music] the great beauty of this landscape is best appreciated from the sky it's almost as if the ancient britons carved the white horse for some higher power to look down on from above a few miles on from the vale of the wide horse the ridgeway takes me near the town of wantage [Music] where the open chalk escarpments form natural highways and habitats for migrating birds of prey one of the things that really makes my heart sing about walking the ridgeway is the number of birds of prey that you see some bloke said to me earlier that he'd once seen 17 kites all at the same time along here and of course you get sparrow hawks and buzzards and kestrels i think it's something about the the thermals they generate the means by which these birds can be supported whichever way they fly um with this close cropped grass they can see all the little rodents and small mammals they are so staggeringly beautiful but i think throughout most of history they've been much more than just some aesthetic little jewel in the sky they've been a means for you to get food birds of prey have long drifted and hovered over this landscape and have been used here for hunting since the middle ages one man who knows all about this sport of kings is local falconer david hughes [Music] so what i'm going to do when i get here yeah so we've let him settle take the hood off there's going to be a bit of fun there that's what he was invented then i'm gonna stick him on the perch then we'll just gradually walk back and he's gonna have a look around to see what's happening yeah his eyes are on me which is a bonus right so there's the law so he's spotted me with the law now that's it he's seen the meat look he's bobbing he's working wind he's getting everything sorted come on good boy [Music] come on [Music] what [Music] yay [Music] how important was falconry as far as people getting food on their plates until shotguns came along i think it was one of you know other than the bow and arrow or a spear it was one of those for the nobility it was a sport to catch food for the for the pot and obviously i said the gossip would have been the cook's bird they were more likely to catch something than they were the peregrine so depending on your status you would have a different bird with yeah i'm the flipping knight of the realm what do i get well right you wouldn't have had a burden to the crusades when the knights went out to jerusalem they brought sega falcons home sacrifice i haven't even heard of one of those they're actually bigger than a peregrine yeah and the second largest falcon the bigger than the peregrine they're a ground hunting bird your squire would have had a lana falcon again slightly smaller and that's where we got the new birds coming into falconry i've actually got a couple of sacred falcons at home you have to [Music] in the middle ages i imagine you'd have seen every rank of society from peasants to princes using their birds of prey to hunt up and down the ridgeway today evidence of its rich history can still be found in our everyday language [Music] give us a couple of other words associated with foreign um hoodwinking and the hood the falcon here is wearing a hood so you fooled him you've had wings i've conned him into thinking it's night so i've switched him off excuse me we're talking hector come on the thing that strikes me about the bird is that even though i've never held a hunting bird before it's really calm how do you train them it's all down to pieces of meat basically you'd have the bird sitting on the bow perch for a fo for a hawk for a gossau sat in a bow perch and you'd offer him a piece of meat and he jumped to the glove for a piece of meat yeah so again you're getting further and further away which brings in another term so at a certain point when you're jumping that bird from the perch to the glove you're at the end of your tether and it's again it's not because i'm stressing out over anything it's the fact that you're at the end of the tether because that's as far as you've got in your training [Music] all the time we've been talking five has been so well behaved look at that isn't that the most beautiful thing that you've ever seen [Music] sometimes i wish i could soar above the magnificent ridgeway like a bird of prey but then just once in a while this track offers up treasures beneath your feet that only the dedicated walker can find the ridgeway has now guided me three quarters of the way along my journey to the thames even today this ancient track is offering up remarkable treasures for the travelers who walk its chalky path in 2009 metal detectorist malcolm langford rediscovered a unique piece of britain's lost history [Music] this is annie annie baiard who works for the pas which stands for portable antiquity scheme of course a fantastic organization if you find anything which looks old and you think might be interesting then you can take it to annie or one of her colleagues and they'll tell you what it is rather than it being up on your fireplace in ignorance for years and years and that is exactly what happened with malcolm over here malcolm it was about seven years ago wasn't it yeah what happened well i was uh metal detecting the field just alongside the ridgeway i got an extremely good signal on my metal detector so i knew it was something nice yeah and i've dug that out it is quite beautiful isn't it it's a silver delarious it's a denarius but i didn't realize the great age of it because they didn't change some of the issues on the coins the patterns and the pictures they didn't change them for a long time and i knew it was a republican denarius but i didn't know how old so republican means that it was before julius caesar yes andy he brought it to you what was your reaction when you saw that i was amazed when i saw it i knew immediately that it was old yeah very old as well republican um and i thought wow you don't see them in this sort of condition it looks almost brand new you know it's absolutely amazing have we any idea more precisely how old it is now we think it's about 207 bc that's mad the romans didn't get here till 40 odd a.d exactly so this is good 250 years before the claudian invasion but it probably didn't come here that early it probably came here in the first century bc malcolm had discovered the uk's oldest single roman coin it's really incredible to hold something like this in your hand and wonder how it got here [Music] who do you think it was who brought this coin here malcolm where do you think it came from ah well i i'd like to think that a celtic warrior who fought as a mercenary in the um mediterranean area for the romans and it's in the history books that many celts did that and i'd like to think that he saw them using these disparately these things these coins and he brought one back to show his chief of his tribe that they were using these things instead of swapping goats for sheep and the like you know i just heard a slightly hysterical laughter there yeah um it could well be it could also be coming here through trade as well we don't know it's as malcolm corrected saying the second punic wars was happening at the time that these were being issued maybe it was a mercenary we just don't follow it but it does imply doesn't it that there was a much stronger relationship between definitely the i was going to say the mainland you know i mean france and us than might have been expected at that yeah exactly i mean especially in the first century bc when roman coinage started coming in more earnestly we see that there is trade you know britain wasn't this isolated little island um before the claudia invasion and this coin just goes to show that its value for me is that it sort of implies that the brits weren't dozy-headed painted idiots until the romans came they were sophisticated trades absolutely yeah yeah absolutely they knew what money was all about they did pieces of evidence like this long-lost roman coin are driving home for me that the ridgeway really was an international trade route with links to the continent thousands of years before our tricky relationship with europe today [Music] as the ridgeway starts to descend into the goring gap the open remote countryside gives way to woodlands and small villages the track leads me towards streetly and goring two villages that straddle england's most famous river [Music] this is where the ridgeway meets the thames two of britain's most ancient strategic trade routes romans saxons and vikings all used the ridgeway to connect with this great waterway here the ridgeway was at its most vulnerable far from the safety of the highchalk ridge the lowlands of the river valley needed defending from plundering invaders what i find so extraordinary is that they were building these great chunky defense systems on the ridgeway thousands of years ago and they were still doing it in the 20th century and we're not actually going to go on this boat but steve we're going to borrow your boat aren't we thank you mate to see how the people of goring prevented us from being overwhelmed by a german invasion after again mate but these germans weren't saxon invaders coming to conquer the ancient isles of britain they were nazis that's it isn't it that's what we've come to see pull in somewhere pulling in this way [Music] wait look at this it is like a prehistoric megalith isn't it except it's made of concrete i'm gonna need the torch for this this is a world war ii pill box okay it's not ancient exactly but it is recently uncovered one of the best surviving examples left in britain [Music] steve how come this place isn't such a good nick well i think it's because it's on private land what precisely was its function well as you can see if you look out of the embrasure you can see the bridges across the river between streetly and goring and we know that were some other pillboxes on the other side it's about defending the river at this key point it is ironic isn't it that they're still defending the ridge thousands of years after the original people put up their defenses absolutely and as you know coming off the ridgeway here you've got um king alfred defending against the danes and this end we've got uh the descendants of king alfred getting ready to defend against the germans what do people do with them now they're so solid um well what can you do with something that's got three feet walls designed to stop pretty heavy fire not a lot it's a coffee shop you can imagine archaeologists coming along in about 500 years time having no idea what it is always it's going to be rituals religious religious significance without a doubt or offer uh protecting the corn in winter yeah exactly or it has no function at all other than a whole society got together in order well that's exactly what they did yeah that's the whole society did get together in 1940 and it was that's a pretty important thing to do i like to think that in hundreds of years time our monuments and behaviors will be wildly guessed at by armchair archaeologists and fireside historians just like me and that they too will get some joy out of the pursuit of the mystery [Music] i've walked bits of the ridgeway several times previously and i've always found it beautiful and really quite inspiring but i've never had such consistently good weather mind you looking at what's over there i think i'll be off home now for more than 5 000 years drovers traders and invaders have used this track and reused the sights along the way creating their own myths and legends to make sense of the landscape i've been following the ridgeway picking up the track near the megaliths of avebury i've been guided along its route by celtic chariots white horses and alfred the great but the enduring legacy of the ridgeway goes beyond its position as a natural line of defense each generation has added to the mythology and legend of this ancient track leaving clues in the landscape that we can still find today

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 50,009

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, tony robinson, uffington white horse, oxford, oxfordshire, ridgeway, ancient tracks, channel 4, blackadder

Id: zONreMIsrTI

Length: 46min 22sec (2782 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 08 2020