Here please find background, anecdotes, explanations, and denials.
I want to apologize for the many fuzzy, dark, and overexposed photos here. I had a really great camera (a Pentax) as well as some nice point-and-shoot cameras, but apparently I was not as good as I thought I was.
These Neolithic monuments are usually a large mound of earth with a stone passage extending into the middle of the mound to a central chamber where there might be side-chambers. The central chamber was often found to have contained the ashes of human remains. Sometimes they’re called a tumulus.
I’ve seen them called barrows, but usually a barrow has no passage, are just a mound with cremated remains and grave goods inside. I think.
Here is a plan of the passage and central chamber in Newgrange, one of the largest passage tombs I’ve seen.
(This picture is not entirely accurate. Newgrange is designed so that you climb slightly uphill as you follow the passage, such that the central chamber is aligned with the roof box, not the entrance. That means the sunlight on the winter solstice comes into the chamber via the roofbox, not the doorway. As far as I remember, Newgrange is the only passage tomb designed this way. For more info about Newgrange, click here.)
When the mound is covered with stones rather than earth, it would be called a cairn.
Sometimes there may be a large open area in front of the entrance enclosed by stone walls. That is called a court cairn.
There are also gallery graves and wedge-shaped gallery graves, where there’s no passage.
A while ago I reread the Mary Stewart books for the first time in many years, thanks to covid. They are The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, and The Last Enchantment. (There is a fourth book she tagged onto the end of the series, but I don’t recommend it.)
I’d first read these books in college in the late 1970s, and they’d bowled me over. I remember coming back from summer vacation and comparing notes with my friend Rick about the books we’d both read over the summer — lo and behold, we’d both read The Crystal Cave and both loved it! Crazy coincidence.
The books tell the story we all know about King Arthur, more or less. But instead of simply retelling the legend, Stewart imagined what may actually have been the situation, without the magic, without the romance. She looked at the history of that time and place, took the few facts available, set them out in a reasonable context, and then extrapolated to suggest what was missing.
For example, in those days, specialized knowledge of botany or chemistry might look like magic. If you’d traveled widely or studied at the feet of masters in faraway lands, maybe you’d learned about medicine or physics or engineering. You could fix or build or plan in ways unimaginable to ordinary people. So they called you magician.
Stewart removed the prism of magic, but left one facet: her protagonist Merlin had a kind of second sight and was able to see things in the fire, either future events or remote viewing. But it was nothing flashy or dramatic, so I could suspend disbelief. When coupled with his specialized knowledge and perceptive insight, he could sometimes sense what direction to take.
This kind of book is common as mud nowadays, but at the time I’d never read anything like it. I’d read T.H. White’s A Once And Future King and loved it, of course, and a A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court — but this wasn’t that King Arthur. This was someone who may actually have lived.
Later on, this became a whole sub-genre of popular literature and I haven’t even tried to keep up with it all. I later read the Stephen Lawhead books, which I loved, and the Bernard Cornwall books, and of course I loved The Mists of Avalon. With the explosion of the New Age movement of the 1980s, the genre took off and now there are so many, they’d fill up a whole row at Barnes and Noble. Most of them cross the line into fantasy or even speculative fiction, which is a whole different thing.
But to me nothing came close to the Mary Stewart books.
So often it can be disappointing to reread an old favorite book — they just don’t hold up over time. But that was not the case with these books. I found them just as compelling and entertaining as ever.
My avid interest stayed with me over the years so when I had the chance to travel in these areas, I most definitely put some of this stuff on my list. It gives me great joy to see my faded photos of places like Old Sarum and Segontium.
The situation
Rome had kept the peace in England for four hundred years, and when they left in 410AD, the situation quickly degenerated. Local chieftains made war against their neighbors. Trade networks collapsed. You weren’t safe on the roads. With no written records, Roman technology was lost or forgotten. When infrastructure fell apart, nobody could fix it. .
People were tired of endless war. So when a leader emerged who could put together a lasting peace, at least for a while, it was a big deal. And it was remembered. People told their kids about it later on, nostalgic for the days when you didn’t have to be afraid to visit the next village. And then the story grew into legend.
The sources
In about the year 828AD, a monk named Gildas wrote up a history of England focusing on the invasions by Germanic tribes in the 5th and 6th century. He includes references to an unnamed war leader (not a king) whose efforts brought peace to the land for a while. Bear in mind, this would have been written 300 years after the events described. So.
In the mid-10th century, a Welsh monk named Nennius picked up those stories for his Annales Cambriae (Welsh Annals). Various Welsh and Breton poems of this time mention this story as well.
The legend got a huge boost from the French poet Chrétien de Troyes, who drew on these sources to create his poetry in the late 1100s.
Then something remarkable happened, largely thanks to a handful of people. The first was a PR campaign meant to exert some kind of social control.
The legend
So here we have the whole process of creating a legend based on history. It starts with a story, the story resonates with people, it catches on. Some bards weave it into song and combine it with other stories. Eventually somebody writes it down, and we go from there. All history is like this. It takes a while to figure out what was real and what was embroidery. Everybody thought the Trojan War was just a made-up story until Heinrich Schliemann found the ruins in the 1870s. Right where Homer said it was.
So who knows? Maybe someday someone will discover an ancient manuscript that fills in the blanks and helps shed light on this place and period. I haven’t even begun to review the current theories about this, but I’m convinced the legend started with a real person and a real situation. And I find it fascinating.
The history
Even if you remove the whole story of Arthur and his pals, this period fascinates me. In the vacuum left after the Romans departed, a Celtic warlord named Vortigern imported some mercenaries from the Germanic tribes from areas in northern Europe. They’re usually referred to as Anglo-Saxons, but also included Jutes and Frisians.
The new guys liked it in England and wanted to stay. They brought over their friends and families, and soon they were fighting the people they’d come to help. The Anglo-Saxon invasions soon swamped large areas of England and drove the Britons into the west and north. Today the English language is descended from their Germanic language, retaining very little of Celtic other than place names.
Another facet of this story is the rise and spread of Christianity, which displaced the Germanic gods of the new immigrants as well as the old gods of the Celts. The period straddles this turning point in history. One day you were worshipping the old Celtic gods of the forest, then your kids were talking about Thor’s hammer, and your grandkids were praising Jesus’ name. There was a critical domino effect that converted these people to the new religion, without which we all might have grown up praying to Odin.
Dolmens are all over the place in western Europe, particularly in Ireland and England. You can see how they’re designed to look like a big table or a sheltered doorway or portal. Neolithic dolmens were usually (they think) tombs, with the ashes of people buried inside. Sometimes they were then covered over by earth and made into a mound. It’s tempting to climb around on them and inside them, and picture how they looked before they collapsed or were damaged.
The best guess is that they piled up dirt and logs and rolled the giant stones up into position, then removed the props to allow them to settle onto each other. Some of the stones are incredibly heavy. Sometimes these monuments are at the top of a big hill. It’s mind-boggling. Why? How? This was all long before there was written history, so we are left to our own imagination.
