Stonehenge: Neolithic Man and the Cosmos. John North
Smithy, the chambered long barrow on a ridge of the chalk downs to the south of the hamlet of West Kennet in Wiltshire is even grander in scale. Just over a hundred metres in length, and tapering from about 24 m at its eastern façade to 12 m at the western end, it is (with that at nearby East Kennet) the largest in the region, and among the largest in the country. Its sheer size has enabled it to survive a number of crude onslaughts. One of these was by a certain Dr R. Toope of Marlborough, who in 1685 raided it for bones, for their supposed pharmaceutical properties. John Aubrey gave a vague account of the tomb at about the same time. It is in a letter to him from Toope that we learn of the doctor’s attitude to prehistory, and of how already in 1678, alerted to the large quantities of bones in the area around the Sanctuary nearby, he had acquired ‘many bushels’ with which he had made ‘a noble medicine’ that relieved many of his distressed neighbours. (One might doubt whether those particular bones, lying near the surface and closely packed in the open field, skull to skull, were prehistoric at all, although Toope did insist that their feet were all directed to the Sanctuary.)
William Stukeley made valuable drawings of the West Kennet long barrow, and described it, in 1723–4. ‘It stands east and west’, he wrote, ‘pointing to the dragon’s head on Overton-hill.’ (This is the hill on which stood the Sanctuary, now known to have comprised a succession of concentric rings of timber posts, before they were replaced by rings of stones.) The long barrow was partially excavated in 1859 by John Thurnam, who reported that farmers had cut a wagon-road through it, and had raided it for flints and chalk rubble. The definitive excavations were done in 1955–6 by Stuart Piggott and Richard Atkinson, like those later at Wayland’s Smithy.
The West Kennet barrow has much to tell us about the evolution of a single long barrow, but it shows, too, that it is a mistake to consider that changes in ditch direction necessarily imply additions to an old barrow at a later time, as is often supposed. It will be discovered that it was probably built in two distinct phases, a century or so apart, but that there is a change in direction within the first barrow. Quite apart from its intrinsic interest, this long barrow has an importance deriving from the fact that it is in the neighbourhood of an extraordinary complex of prehistoric remains. Silbury Hill, the largest man-made mound of prehistoric Europe, is less than a kilometre away (NNW), and less than 5 km in the same direction is Windmill Hill. Roughly 1.3 km east of the barrow lies the site known as the Sanctuary, and from there the Kennet Avenue of stones stretched, initially roughly westwards, then turning closer to north and heading for the southern entrance to the stone circle at Avebury. (The Avenue will be discussed again in Chapter 5.) Avebury, by far the largest of all British stone circles, is only a little over 2 km to the north of the West Kennet barrow. The almost equally large long barrow at East Kennet is just under 1.5 km to the southeast. On most days, all of these places are to be seen from the West Kennet barrow.
The barrow is flanked by ditches, running alongside it for all of its length. Its orientation was said by Stuart Piggott, in his report of the excavations, to be 265° 20'—that is to say, a person looking at the façade would be facing 4° 40' south of west. To define an axis, however, one must be able to identify the intentions of the builders, and this figure presumably rests on the assumption that the stones of the central passage were set symmetrically about an axis that agrees with the spine of the mound. Another interpretation, to be offered shortly, substitutes a figure of 267.0°.
FIG. 25. Sections of the West Kennet long barrow, as drawn by Stuart Piggott.
The mound had a central core in the form of a long cairn of sarsen boulders, rising to about 2 m in the excavated section. This core was in turn overlaid with chalk rubble from the ditches, and at the higher end this virtually doubled the height. A kerb round the barrow, resembling that at Wayland’s Smithy, was robbed of its stones long ago, and consequently a much less accurate picture is available of the outline of the tomb. As for the difficulty of assessing the orientations of the sides, their sheer length makes this a little easier, compensating to some extent for the loss of the kerbstones. The northern ditch apparently changes direction so that it is in at least four sections, while the southern ditch is in at least two. The bounding edge of the mound seems to follow those changes closely (Fig. 26). Viewing across the barrow, it will be shown that section A was paired with B, but not with C, which is a linking section only, while D was matched with both E and F, but at times a century apart.
FIG. 26. Outline plan of the West Kennet long barrow and ditches, showing the deliberate changes of direction, resulting in four sections to the north but only two to the south. (The inset scale at upper left is 10 m long.)
The most obvious stone structures, now largely restored, are at the eastern end, built out of massive local sarsen stones and dry-stone walling of oolite slabs. The sarsens were brought up the hill perhaps 2 km or more from the southeast, and the smaller stones from a distance of 10 km or more. The chambers form a ‘cross of Lorraine’. They are arranged around a roofed passage running for more than 8 m down the spine of the barrow: a burial chamber opens off it at its end, lengthening it to 12 m, while two others open off at each side. The passage is as high in places as 2.3 m. It is entered from a crescent-shaped forecourt formed out of large but rather irregular uprights, and a false front closes off the forecourt, making the façade seem more or less flat. There are two stones flanking the entrance, immediately behind the large blocking stone in the middle of the façade. They should not be dismissed as merely helping to seal the entrance, for they have another important function. As will be seen from Fig. 28 (from which blocking stones are removed), they help to limit lines of sight from particular points within the five chambers. These lines of sight—of which more shortly—seem to have been directed to five significant stars.
FIG. 27. The five chambers at the eastern end of the West Kennet barrow, with surviving blocking stones in position.
FIG. 28. The West Kennet chambers with blocking stones removed, showing potential lines of sight, limited by the edges and faces of stones. The other lines added to the figure (see also Fig. 29), show the great care that went into the planning, and justify the position given to the axis.
As for the number of burials, the solicitous Dr Toope missed the bones of at least forty-six individuals, for he—and even Thurnam—found only the chamber at the western end. The others were closed with blocking stones. As at other Neolithic sites, the skeletons were often incomplete. Some have held that this implies a systematic removal of certain bones—especially skulls and long bones—but on this point opinion is divided. The adult men seem to have been between 1.57 and 1.73 or even 1.80 m in height, the women from 1.49 to 1.64 m. The characteristically round skulls of the Beaker peoples are not represented, although their pottery is found among what are presumed to have been later ritual offerings. They were perhaps well represented in Dr Toope’s medicine, since the western chamber was the most readily accessible.
FIG. 29. The surprisingly systematic construction lines, abstracted from the previous figure, defined by the faces of stones. Close parallels and perpendiculars are indicated by similar marks. On this basis it is easy to make conjectures concerning slight changes of plan, forced on the builders by their materials, terrestrial and celestial. Note that four stones are almost perfectly in line with the axis, whilst five stones (including the three marked with a circle) are parallel to ditch sections.
In time, the chambers were filled to the roof with chalk rubble, stone and earth. Numerous bone objects