All roads lead to Stonehenge, part of the greatest of all sacred sites. It began with a circle of fifty-six timbers, erected in approximately 2800 BC and placed in a ritual landscape that had already been in existence for 500 years. A cursus, 1½ miles long (2.4 kilometres), runs just to the north. Also found were pieces of rock crystal that must have been carried from Alpine regions. Salisbury Plain was then the spiritual centre of the island. From here radiate the chalk and limestone ranges of lowland Britain. A network of ridgeways and trading routes converged upon it. It was the largest area of habitable land. It was accessible by rivers. It was a great cauldron of human energy and purpose.
At some point, around 2200 BC, the first stone circle was being formed. The change from wood to stone has been related to a profound cultural movement, resulting in the building of monumental enclosures elsewhere, in the decline of ancestor worship and in bouts of warfare between opposing groups. In Peterborough a male and a female, with two children, were found within the same grave; the male was killed by an arrow in the back. In Dorset several bodies were found lying in a ditch, with a rampart fallen upon them; one of them had been killed by an arrow.
The building of Stonehenge was the largest and most protracted programme of public works in the history of England. A series of bluestones was first erected in 2200 BC; these stones were largely igneous in origin and were considered to have magical healing properties. The bluestones were then dismantled after a life of approximately 100 years and replaced by thirty sarsen stones; they formed a circle around five pairs of trilithons arranged in horseshoe pattern. At approximately the same time a wooden henge, or circular monument, of twenty-four obelisks was erected less than half a mile (0.8 kilometres) from its stone companion; it may have been a burial centre or the site of some other ritual activity.
Another henge and stone circle, known as Bluestonehenge, was erected a mile (1.6 kilometres) to the southeast along the bank of the Avon. A large village was also constructed, less than 2 miles away (3.2 kilometres), variously interpreted as a lodging for pilgrims, a ritual centre, a place of healing, or a home for those who erected the sarsen stones. Whatever the explanation, Salisbury Plain was the site of communal and spiritual settlement on a very large scale. It was once conceived to be a largely empty field, but now we find it to have been a field full of folk.
From this period was found the body of a man variously called ‘the Amesbury archer’ and ‘the king of Stonehenge’; his grave contained over 100 artefacts, including gold hair ornaments, copper knives, pots and boars’ tusks. Over his body, crouched in a foetal position, were scattered flint arrowheads. This was the last resting place of a tribal chieftain. Oxygen isotope analysis revealed that he had been brought up in the colder regions of northern Europe. What was a foreign king doing on Salisbury Plain? Was he on pilgrimage? There is evidence of an abscess and a painful bone infection. Had he crossed the sea to be healed? Or did he reign here as one of the tribal chieftains who, in an era without countries or nations, were not necessarily confined to one region?
In the final phase of building, approximately 1600 BC, the pits or holes for two circles of standing stones were hollowed out; but they were never filled. So the shape, and therefore possibly the nature, of Stonehenge has changed over a period of 1,200 years. It would be strange if it were not so. The same distance of time separates us from the Saxon age. It has been argued that the stones were a burial ground, a centre of pilgrimage and of ritual healing, a great observatory and a celestial clock, a place of public ceremonial and ritual. There is no reason why they could not have fulfilled all of these, as well as other, functions in the various eras of their existence. At the time of their erection these great stones seemed magnificent and immoveable in the earth; now, from a distance of 4,000 years, they dance in a pattern before us.
In all these eras, however, the stones are evidence of a controlling power that could organize vast numbers of people in a shared project. This was a hierarchical society with an elite, tribal or priestly, that could coerce or persuade many thousands of people into fulfilling its ritual will. The inhabitants of Salisbury Plain, to put it no broader, were under the guidance and protection of leaders who were rich in land and in cattle; the more we understand the material remains of this Neolithic culture, the more impressed we become by its range and authority. The construction of Silbury Hill, in the same region as Stonehenge, would have taken the labour of 1,000 men working every day for five years. The construction of Stonehenge itself would have entailed millions of hours of labour. Its bluestones were transported from the Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, some 200 miles distant. So great parts of England were already under organized administration long before the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons came; land, labour and material resources were governed by some form of central control.
It is suggestive that, in the course of the formation of Stonehenge, communal burials were being replaced by individual burials. The ‘king of Stonehenge’ is just one example. In some graves the body of the chieftain is accompanied by weapons, and in others the corpse is surrounded by goods. These are the graves of leaders and high priests, often with their immediate families. England had become an aristocratic, rather than a tribal, society.
The contours of the Bronze Age, succeeding the Neolithic in the standard time-lines of prehistory, are still to be found everywhere. They have endured for almost 4,000 years, and can be seen in a certain light. In the hour before sunset, when the rays of the sun lie across the English fields, the old patterns of the earth rise up and the land seems to return to its origins. The banks and ditches of hundreds and hundreds of small rectangular fields can be discerned. The sweep and extent of these fields are truly extraordinary; they can only really be comprehended from the air and, seeing aerial photographs for the first time in 1929, the historian G. M. Trevelyan was moved to declare that ‘the discovery of these old Celtic fields, from under the palimpsest of later agricultural systems, is the most romantic thing that has come to stir our historical imaginations since the first Cretan finds’.
A lost world was revealed. The uplands and downlands of southern Britain were laid out in fields, with hedges and stone walls stretching for mile after mile; drove-ways and waterholes can be seen among these rectangular ditched fields. It is a feat of organization to rival that of the building of Stonehenge, and bears all the marks of powerful central planning. It seems likely that many thousands of square miles of land were laid out in one significant single act or set of acts, an example of land planning that has never since been rivalled in English history. In the process the English landscape was created.
This intensive cultivation is the best possible evidence for a steady rise in population. By 1900 BC there were as many as a million people, rising to more than 2 million by the time of Julius Caesar’s invasion in 55 BC. It was of course an agricultural society, with its own regional variations. More and more territory was brought into cultivation, and has continued as productive arable land ever since. The woodland was cleared. Grass for pasture was created. There were more sheep than there would be in the sixteenth century ad. There was little appetite, or perhaps leisure, for monumental construction; working the land had become a more important activity.