Underblog.co.uk

Last week the family and I spent a few days in the Lake District. I didn’t have as miserable a time as I was expecting. Anyway, in Keswick, I was flicking through a guide book in a tourist-ey shop and noticed a note about Castlerigg stone circle, apparently only a short drive away. So off we went.

The site was fairly simple. There was a little road-side parking space and a gate in the hedge on the other side of the country lane. Just through the gate there was a small National Trust sign with a little information and donation box. About fifty metres into the field, surrounded by sheep, there were 38 stones, forming a circle about 10 metres in diameter. They blew my mind.

The circle isn’t actually very circular, and some of the stones mark out an inner rectangle jutting into the squashed circle from one side. (There was a ram mounting a sheep a short distance away.) The flat top of the low hill where the circle stands is surrounded on most sides by magnificent fells, and the horizon all around appears to mirror the stone circle. I felt I knew why that place might have been considered significant by the people who made it. (On closer inspection the ram was actually two lambs, and they were suckling rather than shagging — I’d make a pretty bad farmer.)

Stone circles are unique to the British Isles and northern France. I’d only really heard of Stonehenge before, but there are actually hundreds of the bloody things (although the horizontal lintels placed atop the vertical pillars are unique to Stonehenge and, amazingly, the Stonehenge stones were mined 150 miles from the monument) . They were all built in neolithic times, between 3000BC and 1200BC, by the predecessors of the Celts. They predate european written history (although chinese writing dates back to around 2200BC). So for almost two thousand years, while the chinese were scribbling away on papyrus, our ancestors felt the need to drag massive rocks around the country and arrange them into circles. Frankly, I don’t know whether to be proud or embarrassed. We Brits have spent over a third of our history since 3000BC building these things. The circle-builders weren’t heavy-browed club-wielding cavemen, they were modern human farmers, only 160 generations ago, who had the strength, determination and sheer bloody-mindedness to make them. Some of them are almost certainly related to me, but personally, I probably couldn’t have been arsed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2004 at 03:52 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.