Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar

by T. Rice Holmes

The orientation of the long barrows and of the chambered cairns which are classed with them seems to show that the builders intended that the spirits of the dead might look upon the rising sun. The axis of the barrow or cairn generally lies either due east and west or in a direction approximating more or less closely thereto; and the broader and higher end of the barrow, where, as a rule, the sepulchral deposits are found,[388] generally faces eastward. In a few instances the axis lies between the north and the south, the broad end pointing sometimes northward, sometimes southward. When the direction is not due east, it varies between north-north-east and south-east; and one may reasonably conclude that this variation depended upon the place of sunrise at the time of the year when the barrow was erected. Similar varieties, combined with the same general tendency to point the barrow towards the east, have been observed in the neolithic tombs of other countries.[389]

Fig. 16.

Long barrows vary greatly, not only in their materials and orientation, but also in their size and shape. Many of them exceed a hundred feet in length; and the chambered barrow of West Kennet is three hundred and thirty-five feet long and seventy-five broad at its eastern end.[390] More striking, however, than the mere dimensions of a long barrow is the disproportion between its whole extent and that part of it in which alone the dead were laid. The immense toil which must have been expended in constructing such a monument by labourers who had only deer-horn picks and stone tools proves not only density of population, effective organization, and the despotism which the chiefs must have exercised, but also a religious awe the compelling force of which we, who live in a world that has grown old, can hardly conceive. Some of the mounds might in outline be compared to a very elongated egg, others to one-half of a pear cut lengthwise and laid upon its flat side.[391] The trenches from which the material was excavated extend along their sides, but never encircle the ends.[392] The chambered barrows are of many kinds, no two being exactly alike. Some have a central gallery, entered by a doorway at the broad end, so low that it is necessary to stoop or even to crawl. Generally the chambers, placed opposite one another in one, two, three, or even six pairs, open out of the gallery like the chapels in a Gothic cathedral; while occasionally, as at West Kennet, the gallery leads to a terminal chamber; and in other instances both lateral and terminal chambers are found. At Rodmarton and Nether Swell in Gloucestershire there is no gallery; and the chambers open externally. Galleries and chambers are alike built of stones set on edge, which (the interstices being filled in with dry walling) support flags laid horizontally across; though occasionally, as at Stoney Littleton in Somersetshire, the roof is constructed of converging layers of stones which form a rude arch.[393] Some so-called chambered barrows, for instance Littleton Drew in Wiltshire, have no chambers, but only cists, or shallow graves excavated in the soil and built up with stone slabs. The mounds were generally faced with dry walling; and on the chalk downs of North Wiltshire, where blocks of sandstone abounded, the wall was often, as at West Kennet, surrounded by a peristalith formed of stones erected at regular intervals. These stones have disappeared; but drawings, made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, show what they were like.[394] The architects were inspired by a vivid sense of beauty. The enclosing wall, as it approached the broad and high end of the barrow, was turned inwards by gradual and graceful curves, which generally terminated in great stones that served as the jambs of the entrance. Even when there was no gallery, this symmetrical curve was still adopted, and its termination marked by monumental pillars.[395] The Wor Barrow on Cranborne Chase, an oval mound of such uncommon form that Pitt-Rivers, before he opened it, felt doubtful whether it did not belong to the Bronze Age, appears to have been a chambered sepulchre of an abnormal kind. When the tumulus had been removed, a trench, enclosing an oblong space, appeared in the chalk which had formed the old surface. Stake-holes were detected in the trench; and the famous antiquary concluded that the stakes had been simply ‘a wooden version of the long chambers of stone’.[396]

Fig. 17.

Intimately related to certain chambered long barrows are the famous horned cairns, which exist only in Caithness. Although their forms also are various, the larger cairn of Yarhouse being extremely elongated while that of Ormiegill might be almost exactly contained within a perfect square, the ruling idea remained the same. The exterior wall, which is always double, develops eastward and westward into horn-shaped projections, which curve outwards. Thus the four sides form four symmetrical concave curves; whereas in English chambered barrows, like that of Uley and some of the barrows at Upper Swell in Gloucestershire,[397] the curvilinear projections which correspond with the horns exist only at the eastern end. An opening between the eastern horns in the Scottish cairns gives access to the chamber, which is commonly divided into three partitions by two pairs of stones, crossing the side walls and leaving a passage between.[398]

Just as the long are earlier than the short horned cairns, so the latter are earlier than the round chambered cairns of Scotland; for no horned cairns were erected after the Scottish Bronze Age had begun, whereas, although the round chambered cairns were developed towards the close of the Neolithic Age, and although metal has never been found in them,[399] their external form was reproduced in the Bronze Age, when chambers were no longer built.[400] The chambers of the round cairns also are divided into sections; and one of them, near Loch Etive in Argyllshire, shows traces of an encircling trench and rampart.[401] In Southern Britain the chronological sequence was probably the same: the round chambered cairns seem to be later than the chambered long barrows. The Park Cwm tumulus in the peninsula of Gower, which has a central avenue and two pairs of opposite chambers opening out of it,[402] has been likened to the Uley barrow; but its form is round. The chambered tumulus of Plas Newydd Park in Anglesey, which is roughly oval,[403] may possibly represent an earlier and transitional form.[404]

Round chambered barrows exist in Derbyshire, the design of which is purely local. Thus the Five-Wells barrow, near Taddington, has two chambers, each of which was approached by a gallery entered through a kind of port-hole on either side of the mound. The skulls that have been found in these tombs are of the neolithic type: but a barrow on Derwent Moor, which is commonly assigned to the same period,[405] contained an urn, ornamented with designs characteristic of the Bronze Age, in which a piece of copper was found;[406] and an experienced antiquary has remarked that in cataloguing the remains found in the Derbyshire barrows he ‘found it almost impossible to separate the Neolithic from the Bronze Age interments’.[407] In West Cornwall also there are gigantic chambered cairns, round or oval, the date of which is uncertain. No bronze has been found in them, but abundance of pottery, and cists which are undoubtedly later than the chambers. One, standing on the cliff which rises above Cape Cornwall, contained a double-walled dome, and reminded its explorer of the huge tope at Bhojpur.[408]

Chambered cairns of a peculiar kind remain in Argyllshire and the islands of Islay and Arran, the like of which have been discovered nowhere else except on the opposite coast of Ireland.[409] Nearly all the pottery that has been found in them closely resembles that of the dolmens of North-Western France and the Pyrenees, while none exactly like it has been exhumed in England; and, combining these facts with the geographical position of the sepulchres themselves, the antiquary who has explored them concludes that their builders came late in the Neolithic Age from Brittany, and, sailing up St. George’s Channel, settled on the opposite shores of Scotland and Ireland.[410] Physically, however, they belonged, as their skeletons show, to the same stock as the great majority of the neolithic people of Britain.[411]