An Overview of Prehistory

“Perched on hilltops, strewn in ragggedy lines across moorland, built into drystone walls and dykes, cursed, cherished or ignored, the Stone Age monuments of Britain confound the modern mind with their unfeasible antiquity… For the majority of Britain’s stone circles, dolmens and chambered cairns are close to 5,000 years old and they are the very first monuments ever built by Humankind. Before that time we felt no need for monuments, for the earth was our home and Humanity did not consider itself separate from that earthly home. We worshiped at great waterfalls, sacred trees, or natural rocky outcrops of significance. But the coming of agriculture brought with it a certain degree of independence and control over the land. Humanity was freed from its Mother’s apron strings and the direct response to this new freedom and control was the erecting of great stone monuments: the coming of the megalithic culture.” —Julian Cope, The Modern Antiquarian, 1998

Recognizing the importance of being informed, this section is an overview of the eras that led up to and included the times when the Peak District monuments covered in this book were built. Please note that the following is a brief overview of these times and should be used as such. I do not claim any great authority on this subject and therefore ask you to regard this as a useful resource and as a guide to finding these places for yourself. I refer you to the works listed in the Further Reading section (page 186) for greater depth and knowledge of prehistoric Britain than what is presented here.

Late Upper Palaeolithic

Early humans had inhabited Britain on and off for more than 500,000 years, but during that time a series of ice ages came and went, each time the great glaciers repelling any kind of life, forcing occupation by early hominids out to other, more southern areas and scouring the landscape of most of the evidence of their occupation.

The end of the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago, begins what archaeologists term as the Late Upper Palaeolithic, the last period of what is also referred to as the Old Stone Age. The people we are now dealing with are, in every respect, identical to us today. For most of this era there are still little signs left behind in the Peak District to record man’s occupation, except for a few stone tools such as carefully crafted blades and butchered bones found in caves where preservation has happened simply due to the fact that they have been left there undisturbed.

Apart from these artifacts there is very little else to give us a clue as to how these people lived, but we must presume that their lifestyle was nomadic, similar to the way they had lived for thousands of years, following great herds of reindeer across the tundra and grasslands of a post-glacial landscape. These movements and seasonal changes would have dictated their lives. At this point, Britain was still joined to the European mainland by a landbridge, allowing the migration of these vast herds.

Towards the end of this time though, around 8,500 years before the Common Era (B.C.E), as the climate warmed, we begin to see more visible signs of the occupation by modern humans in Britain. This period is known as the Late Upper Paleolithic and the signs are that they were starting to adopt a less nomadic lifestyle.

The Mesolithic

There is also now a greater body of visible evidence for the way we lived. A semi-nomadic lifestyle was certainly being adopted, with summer occupations of higher ground being followed by migrations to lower levels and coastal regions during the winter. The great migrations of the past were now giving way to smaller seasonal movements. This is typified by the excavations of the known Mesolithic camp at Star Carr in Yorkshire, where excavated has given us the evidence of the types of meat they were eating, both red and roe deer, as well as the plants they supplemented this with and the wide variety of flint and bone tools they used in their everyday lives.

The Neolithic

Many changes can be seen to come into view during the Neolithic, or New Stone Age era, which began around 4,000 B.C.E in the British Isles. It is at this time that we first see evidence of an agricultural lifestyle, the use of pottery, as well as marking the start of the building of megalithic structures in the landscape that the people were beginning to settle into.

In truth, the Neolithic era began around 8,500 B.C.E. in the Fertile Crescent, a crescent-shaped region of the Middle East incorporating the Levant, Ancient Mesopotamia, and Ancient Egypt. The era marks a radical change in human development as it introduced a shift away from the hunter/gatherer existence towards permanent, agrarian societies that domesticated various crops and animals and built permanent structures. This marked change didn’t reach North Western Europe until around 4,500 B.C.E. and slightly later in Britain, whose island status meant that it was more isolated that the mainland. Whether this was through invasion, or the spread of new technologies and ideas from contact between groups is unknown. The Early Neolithic is when we first see the building of communal field monuments built in what is now the Peak District. At that time the climate was different from what we experience today. It was warmer and drier. This meant that the Peak District was covered with fine fertile soil. Combine this with an abundant source of fresh water thanks to the multitude of springs, streams and rivers, meant that it was an ideal place for the first farmers to settle. The land supported a wide variety of crops and domesticated animals, once it was clear of its natural growth of oak, hazel, elm, willow and alder trees.

These field monuments consist of burial mounds, or barrows, such as Minninglow and Five Wells, many of which contained chambers tombs into which the bones of the dead were interred (and probably brought out again to be used at special times in the annual cycle). The bones though, tended not to be those of one person, but collections from numerous persons, suggesting that they made reference to cycles of life and death in general and not that of specific individuals, as well as the importance of the greater community. In other regions constructions included cursuses and causewayed enclosures depending on the geographic region.

The Late Neolithic, from about 2,000-2,500 B.C.E. also saw the construction of henges: circular earthworks consisting of a bank and ditch, usually with at least one entrance, such as Arbor Low and The Bull Ring (page 172)e found throughout Britain, suggesting at new levels of organization as well as a sedentary lifestyle with a highly developed farming economy that produced enough surplus to allow sections of society to devote their time to the construction of these places. They are generally built in areas that are known to have been able to support larger populations as landscapes that are known to have been marginal have no such large monuments.

It should be noted that these large scale monuments, built on the limestone plateau in the Peak District, are in sharp contrast to the types found on the surrounding gritstone moors in the Peak District, where the scale is smaller and could easily have been constructed by only a handful of people.

The Bronze Age

Like all the aforementioned eras, the lines between one and the next are blurry, there are no clear demarcation points, but around 2,500 B.C.E. we see the decline of what we call the Neolithic era and the beginnings of what is the Bronze Age.

During this transition, known as the Late Neolithic Early Bronze Age (LNEBA) a new culture started to appear in Britain, making its marks on the landscape and leaving a new set of evidence behind. As well as the introduction of metal work for tools, ornaments and weapons using bronze (as well as a brief period before this that introduced copper, the Chalcolithic, which is a more distinct era on mainland Europe), this period also saw the introduction of a new style of decorated pottery known as beaker wear, hence it often being described as Beaker Culture. Modern thinking is now moving away from the idea of this being an influx of new people into Britain, to one it being an influx of ideas and techniques.

During this period, especially in the Peak District, we see the building of stone monuments. These take the form of freestanding and embanked stone circles, often the upright stones in these circles making reference to a celestial events such as the sun or moon rise on a specific day like the mid-summer, or mid-winter solstice. We also see the building of burial cairns and ringcairns, both of which lay reference to a change in relationship with the dead as they often contain cremated remains of an individual human. Many of these new sites were built in direct reference to (or reverence of) the existing Neolithic monuments hinting at a continuation in beliefs surrounding the influence of the ancestors.

In the Peak District, the scale of these monuments is small compared to those in other parts of Britain, suggesting that the population here may well have been smaller, or more widely dispersed. They seem to be the monuments of smaller, extended family groups. There is of course, the great henge and stone circle of Arbor Low, which surely must have served the greater community like a medieval cathedrals served the parishes and their local churches, but generally the Peak District Bronze Age monuments are smaller than 20m in diameter. It is this more intimate aspect that I find the most appealing.

The true meaning of all these monuments is now long lost as none of the above societies were literate and recorded their lifestyles or beliefs. Their tradition was oral based as it had been for millennia, but do not misunderstand illiterate for ignorant, as the study of these places clearly indicates a high knowledge of science and engineering. The concept of prehistoric man being a cave dwelling thug is about as far from the truth as can be. Over 100,000 years separates those humans referred to as cave men from those that existed in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, yet only around 5,000 years separates them from us today. Sadly though, these ancient peoples are still seen as barbarian, but if that means they were not part of one of the classic societies, Greek, Roman or Christian, then yes, it is true, they are barbarian, but we must remember that their culture survived and flourished for millennia, outlasting any of the classic societies, which were short-lived by comparison.

It is also very important not to attach meaning to such places based only on what has been discovered through modern excavation. In just about all cases the only remaining clues to there original use has been found in the form of burial depositions. We must though, not presume that burial was the sole purpose of these sites. For example, if no record survived then future archaeologists could presume that Westminster Abbey was a site relating primarily to death also. Chances are the only things that would be found would be the remains of the dead. Little trace of any other functions for the building would survive and this is the case with prehistoric sites. We have to be careful not to ignore the fact that the function, and therefore the symbolic meaning of these places, must have been far greater that what we can see them to have today.

Therefore we have to be cautious about the interpretations we put onto megalithic monuments. Without too much fear of judgment though, we can say that these monuments are grand statements made by their builders. They proclaim not only the builder’s existence within the landscape, but also their ownership of it. They show the outside world that we were here first, our ancestors are buried here therefore this land is ours. Yes, it does also include a great reverence for the ancestors themselves, but this could have easily been done on a smaller, more intimate level and still had the same personal impact for the descendants. Instead these are grand gestures that meant to be seen and reacted to. It may well be seen as overly simplistic, but it is my opinion that the inherent meaning is ‘we are here, pay attention’.

Towards the end of this era the climate became colder and wetter. As Britain moved on into the Iron Age (700 B.C.E to the 50 C.E.) with all the technological advances that the development of that metal brought and then on into the Roman period starting with their invasion in 44 C.E., the occupation of the upland regions of the Peak District declined as sustainable existence became harder and unviable. It saw an end of the building of great stone monuments. The region never regenerated itself to the way it had been before and it saw the beginning of the formation of the peat bogs and a landscape similar to what we see today.

This abandonment of the uplands is the cut off point for this book. In some ways I choose to see this change in climate as a good thing because no further settlement has meant that many of the monuments have been preserved, despite the 18th Century Enclosure Act seeing many of them being robbed of their stones in order to build drystone walls.

Sadly though, many of these prehistoric sites today lie abandoned and unvisited. What I refer to as the ‘showcase sites’, such as the Nine Ladies of Stanton Moor and Arbor Low will continue to attract many visitors and hopefully the protection that comes with such awareness, but I fear that many of the sites will soon quickly disappear into the peat, the only hope being that this will preserve them for rediscovery at a later time.