Stonehenge: Neolithic Man and the Cosmos. John North
this phase continuing in use. Another specimen from the same post was well over a century earlier—supporting the idea of post renewal. The mound and burials produced more, hovering around 3500 BC, all with similar ranges of uncertainty; and there were others still later. These dates, however, are less interesting by far than the simple fact that the Sun’s turning points were being accurately observed at a Lincolnshire long barrow in all probability just before the beginning of the fourth millennium.
As a postscript to this section, it is worth putting on record a curious fact about the nearest stretch of the A1028 road, marked on the Ordnance Survey as a ‘Roman Road’. A consistently straight tract of this is still in use, and covers nearly 4 km. The now disused part of the road continued in exactly the same direction for 7km more, taking it south to the village of Burgh le Marsh. The section still in use passes within 400 m of both Skendleby barrows, and its azimuth is 133.7°—differing therefore by only a fifth of a degree from the line of stake holes in front of the façade of Skendleby 2. This does not imply any immediate connection with the barrows, of course, but it does seem highly probable that the road embodies an alignment on the Sun, and that this was pre-Roman. The gradient is very slight (averaging 0.23° upwards in the direction 313.7°). The direction of the road never matched that of the extreme of midwinter sunrise, but it did once perfectly match that of sunset (last glint) at the summer solstice in the Neolithic period. Using the figures quoted here implies a date in the neighbourhood of the twenty-second century BC, but there are slight uncertainties in the direction and altitude, and these are far more critical than in the case of dating by the stars. (The direction of midsummer sunrise changed by only two-fifths of a degree over the previous two millennia, for the stated altitude.) This is our first example of a trackway aligned on the Sun, but as will be shown in the following chapter, it was by no means an isolated instance.
A barrow nearer to those of Wessex that seems to have shared some of the contrivances of Skendleby 2 has a most unusual shape, for its mound was in the form of a parallelogram, and not especially elongated. It was excavated at Barrow Hills, Radley, Oxfordshire, in a rescue operation led by Richard Bradley in 1984—as one of many prehistoric monuments on a site destined to be submerged under a housing estate on the northeastern edge of the town of Abingdon. Lying on a gravel terrace a little more than a kilometre north of the River Thames there, this site had seen Neolithic, Bronze Age, Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon settlement. (The tradition of refusing to treat the land as a museum is clearly an ancient one in Abingdon.) The nearby Abingdon ditched enclosure was separated from the barrow by a very shallow valley, and it is assumed that the two were set up at much the same time.
The long barrow is difficult to analyse not only because most of its surface detail has been lost but because it had ditches that were superimposed on it, in some places cutting through an older trench, assumed to have been a post trench. Fig. 43 shows the ditches in rough outline. It was suggested by Bradley that there were four phases:
(1) A fenced enclosure, the posts of which were later removed. Our outline figure hints at the existence of the narrow trench in which these were taken to have been placed. He thought that the grave might have belonged to this phase, or more probably to the next. It was very shallow and held two crouched burials of adult males laid along the axis of the site with heads at opposite ends of the grave and legs laid across one another.
(2) A three-sided ditch (surrounding the first trench to the north of points x and y on our figure) and large post holes E and F, the former seeming to have held a split trunk. (For the notation, see Fig. 46.)
FIG. 43. Outlines of the ditches surrounding the long barrow at Barrows Hills, Radley.
(3) The open end (below x and y, where a causeway was left) was closed with another length of ditch avoiding one of the large posts.
(4) The outer ditch was cut in a series of segments between 2m and 5 m long, with a causeway at the southernmost corner. There were deposits of pottery and flint scrapers near both causeways.
Stretches of the sides of the outermost ditch were clearly deliberately curved, in contrast to the inner ditches, which contain some quite passable straight lengths, for example on the ditch floor. Averaging over three of these in the short direction and four in the long, the plan can be provisionally taken to have been meant as a parallelogram with sides at azimuths 136.0° and 216.0°.
It is very unfortunate that all detail of the structure of the mound has been lost, but one thing is clear: the trench and inner ditches were intimately related in shape. The material thrown up from the trench would not have been enough to build a mound worthy of the name. Even the material from the inner ditches would not have created an artificial horizon to a person standing anywhere but in the ditch. This presents a difficult problem. Why did they cut into the trench at all?
There are many possible answers, but it is not easy to find one that carries conviction. The first phase might have begun with the outer ditch, perhaps starting from the south side, and looking north to Deneb’s rising. By the usual procedures—possibly using E and F as scaling posts—the required angle of view would have been known. The mound area might then have been marked out and surrounded with short revetting posts to retain the soil. But the outer ditch alone (about 90 cu m) would not have provided enough material to create a revetted mound setting an angle of 12.3°. Perhaps labour was in short supply, or for some other reason it was decided to build a less ambitious mound. For the same viewing angle they would have needed to move closer. Since the mound was so much lower, the revetting posts were no longer needed, so that they and the trench would have been dispensed with.
A first impression of the ditches at Radley is that they are a rather chaotic patchwork, but this is not so. There are surprisingly many points of agreement between the excavation outline plan and a geometrical scheme shown in Fig. 44, tending to support—rather than prove—the idea that the outer ditch was planned in relation to the mound limits, the positions of the southern posts, and the grave area (ill-defined to the excavators). It should be noted that all circles in the scheme are centred on the parallelogram, and that the centre in all probability was originally at the head of the grave. The scheme otherwise speaks for itself. Only those with the experience of making geometrical constructions on the open landscape, with antler pick and ox-bone spade, have a perfect right to say that agreement could have been closer.
Another explanation of the discarded trench might be that an attempt was made to build a mound with high edge—say half a metre—from a shallow inner quarry ditch, but that quantities were misjudged, and the revetting, growing increasingly unstable, was abandoned in favour of a low mound. The inner ditch (about 75 cu m) would have provided just enough material for a 12° mound tapered to the ground, without posts (Fig. 45).
No matter what the explanation, it can make little difference to the astronomical geometry of the situation that has come down to us, which has interesting echoes of Skendlebury 2. There, matters were so arranged that Deneb could be seen rising across the barrow and setting down its axis. Here, at Radley, conversely, Deneb was to be seen rising along the length of the barrow (by the observer at C), and setting across the mound (by observers at points marked D, or between them). More details will be given shortly. At Radley, however, there was exactly the same doubling of function with respect to Bellatrix too: it would have been seen rising across the mound by observers between points marked A, and setting along the barrow’s length by an observer at C.
There is some latitude in the placing of observers in the inner ditches, since all that we require of them is that the lines of sight pass over points of maximum altitude of the mound. In fact each of the viewing positions marked on the figure has