Megalithic Landscapes

‘Modern humanity needs to find ways, ritual ways of living and expressing its affinity with nature.’

John Moriarty

What is Stonehenge? It is the roofless past,
Man’s ruinous myth, his uninterred adorning of the unknown.
Sunrise cold and red,
His quest of stars that arch his doomed exploring.
And what is time, but shadows that were cast by these
Storm sculptured stones while centuries fled?
The stones remain.
Their stillness can outlast the skies of history
Hurrying overhead.

William Blake.

In the British Isles we have some remarkable ancient stone circles dating back thousands of years which are our original temples and power houses built in our distant past.

The scale of these monuments is immense, the ancient people using an entire landscape to celebrate and connect with their spirituality which is intrinsically linked to a way of life and the thresholds we encounter such as birth, marriage and death.
They seem to be connected to the elements, seasons, landscape and even the planets.

Earth spirituality is about acknowledging our sense of place, knowing exactly where we are in the geography of the land and even the universe. This knowledge starts with the four elements which make up all life and then the directions of north, south, east, west and the centre which is the fifth element of spirit.

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As with all ancestral spirituality the sacred landscape is often rooted in practical as well as spiritual reasoning. The area around the immense stone circles of Avebury and Stone Henge is perfect farming land with soil that was easily worked with a stone plough and rich fertile plains which would have helped nomadic hunter gatherers to settle as farmers. Surrounding the land they cleared was at one time a mosaic of rich ancient woodlands, a valuable resource.

Once the early communities settled, trade routes were to be established and we find that if we trace a line from the far east of England to the furthest point in Cornwall, the area of Avebury is the central point of Southern England.
From here the prehistoric Ridgeway stretching from East Anglia to the Dorset coast meets the Old Bath Road from London to the West.
These trade routes in early times, before 6000BCE, would probably have stretched into Europe via a land bridge.

This meant the area where Stone Henge and Avebury were built was already a site of trade and commerce bringing together tribes from all over England and possibly even Europe.

The natural progression of this coming together of tribes may have therefore been to develop it into a place of worship where one could celebrate and honour the spirituality of the land. These temples therefore may have been built on such a large scale to make them worthy strongholds for tribes to celebrate and mark festivals from all over England and beyond.

We are exploring a time when people understood they depended on the entire universe, the cosmos in order to live. They knew that without the sun, moon, earth and all of Nature they would not be here. They may have seen and felt the energies of the land, living and breathing every moment and completely in tune with every animal, bird, rock, tree and plant in a way the modern human may struggle to understand.

As the community came together an immense satisfaction may have developed, linking the people together in a common purpose with an awe and satisfaction of what they had achieved. In its entirety an awesome place of worship.

These sites were developed over many lifetimes which demonstrates how early people did not just focus on the small amount of time that they existed in a physical body but far beyond that.
They placed themselves in the eternal world of the soul, harnessing the power of their ancestors and also the future of the new generations.
Evidence suggests they may have begun marking out sites with wooden pillars before placing the mammoth stones. The earliest structures around the area of Avebury were connected to the burying of the dead such as the Sanctuary and the West Kennet long barrow, which is the largest and best-preserved long barrow in Britain.

Once these areas were built they then constructed areas to celebrate the sun, moon and the seasons.

Silbury Hill for instance (also near Avebury) was first built at the harvest festival of Lammas. This huge structure is 130ft high, the size of the smaller pyramids in Egypt and indeed when finished was a 7 stepped pyramid glistening white before being buried and grassed over. This structure has kept its original shape and size for over 4500 years!

There have been many theories about why it was built including it being an ancient tomb of King Sel full of gold though nothing was ever found. The most popular theory is the Silbury Goddess, the mound being her pregnant womb. This fits with the celebration of the harvest festival which is a celebration of the Goddess, the fecundity of the land and its harvest.

The sheer scale of the sites of Stone Henge and Avebury and the surrounding countryside demonstrates how our ancestors were manipulating an entire landscape almost like they were Gods themselves, showing the importance of worship and the marking of thresholds, a sacred landscape stretching for miles with barrows on the horizon and beyond.

Moving these huge stones over miles of countryside would have been quite a feat but also the huge earthworks, banks and ditches were all dug out using antler picks and rakes, ox tongue blades, wooden shovels and baskets and still survive the test of time.
The earthwork at Avebury encloses over 28 acres of land and originally the height from the bottom of the ditch to the top of the bank would have been 50ft.

These builders were highly skilled in science and engineering living in an ordered society.

The earth and rock is older than us and any living thing, the power and size of them speaks of longevity and strength. The energies of the very earth itself were and still are channelled into the temples of old.

Imagine the processions of people as they walked the stone avenues leading to the henges with sacred features all around them on the skyline. Walking from the ancient site of Durrington Walls to Stone Henge at the Festival of the Dead or walking the stone avenues to the centre of Avebury and onto Silbury Hill for the harvest festival.
Arriving at the setting or rising of the sun and moon with lavish feasts and great celebration, in tune with earth and sky, sun and moon, with the energies of the time and experiencing a deep profound relationship with all of nature and the earth.

‘Glastonbury is a gateway to the Unseen. It has been a holy place and pilgrim-way from time immemorial, and to this day it sends its ancient call into the heart of the race it guards, and still we answer to the inner voice. She is all beauty, our English Jerusalem. The paths that lead to her are ways of loveliness and pilgrimages of the soul.’

Avalon of the Heart, Dion Fortune

As we travel further West from Wiltshire into Somerset another seven stepped pyramid rises from what once was marshland traversed by a wooden trackways created by the Neolithic people in 3500BCE.

The Tor is a natural hill stretching up 518 feet above sea level with seven terraces cut into it and red and white springs flowing beneath it. An earth works called Ponter’s ball once separated Glastonbury from the mainland and legends have built up around it giving it the title of the Isle of Glass and Avalon, a fortunate blessed isle of the dead where Gods rise and fall and a powerful sisterhood led by Morgan le Fay reside marking it as sacred Isle to the Great Mother.

The legends continue as Christianity spreads to these isles, it is no coincidence that it is known as the earliest Christian settlement and was a centre of learning in Anglo-Saxon times. It is only a short distance from the Hill fort of Cadbury Castle which has been excavated with mounting evidence that it was a stronghold for a key War Lord holding back the Saxons possibly known in the stories as King Arthur.

‘The stories of Arthur are the acts of Albion, applied to a Prince of the fifth century.’

William Blake

Legends of great giants embodied in old oak trees and Gwynn ap Nudd guarding the Tor as an entrance to the Underworld exist alongside Christian Saints with a Lady chapel as a shining beacon at a time when the praise of the Great Mother was being forgotten.

In the South downs where I live there are rich chalk meadows of purple orchids, scabious and round-headed rampion where flitting butterflies as colourful as the flowers feed above them. There are seven key rivers the Cuckmere, Ouse, Adur, Arun, Rother, Meon, and Itchen.

The undulating hills are sites for Neolithic causeways, Bronze age burial mounds and Iron age forts, down in the rivers are watercress beds and coltsfoot plants where the white clawed crayfish feeds and beavers build dams.

Getting to know our sacred landscape and our ancient sites can help us to build a deep connection within and replenish us for the ongoing daily spiritual work that we can then take into our everyday life.

‘Therefore I am still a lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold from this green earth.
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide,
The guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being.’

William Wordsworth

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