Ancient Wonderings: Journeys Into Prehistoric Britain

Ancient Wonderings: Journeys Into Prehistoric Britain
James Canton

Take a journey into our ancient past. Explore a long-lost landscape and gradually discover the minds, beliefs and cultural practices of those souls who lived on these lands thousands of years before you.Travelling the length and breadth of Britain, James Canton pursues his obsession with the physical traces of the ancient world: stone circles, flint arrowheads, sacred stones, gold, and a lost Roman road. He ponders the features of the natural world that occupied ancient minds: the night sky, shooting stars, the rising and setting sun. Wandering to the furthest reaches of the islands, he finds an undeciphered standing stone north of Aberdeen and follows the first footsteps on the edge of a long-lost Ice Age land in the North Sea.As Canton walks the modern terrain, slowly understanding the ancient signs that lie within and beneath it, he weaves a gentle tale of discovery, showing how, beyond the superficial differences of life-style and culture, the ancient inhabitants of the British Isles were much closer to the present-day one than we might imagine.

Copyright (#uc80f65eb-017b-5f14-889f-67ddff0d5310)

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

Text © James Canton 2017

Cover photograph © Joe Gough / Shutterstock

All chapter opener photographs by the author.

Maps from ‘Ordnance Survey Maps – Six-inch

England and Wales, 1842-1952’

Excerpt from ‘At a Potato Digging’, Death of a Naturalist © Seamus Heaney, 1966, Faber & Faber Ltd.

Lyrics from ‘England’ by PJ Harvey reproduced by kind permission of Hot Head Music Ltd.

All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Prehistoric Stone Circles (3rd edn) © Aubrey Burl, 1994, Shire Publications, used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Excerpt from The Gathering Night © Margaret Elphinstone, 2009. Reprinted by permission of Canongate Books Ltd.

The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008175207

Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008175214

Version: 2017-05-23

TO MY MOTHER

Wondering noun

rare an object of wonder, a marvel: OE

Oxford English Dictionary

CONTENTS

Cover (#u13415e30-be7b-5db3-92a3-092e78580e67)

Title Page (#u6efca7f0-f0fb-5c02-946c-5494899ceb5b)

Copyright (#u86eeffeb-57cb-5927-af2d-7d384ee8506f)

Dedication (#u409d5ff4-8977-58e0-a403-13c9c9823f33)

Epigraph (#u388bda44-ca3b-510e-afa7-889ae2e476fe)

Preface

Stone (#ulink_154cd1c5-9267-5eb8-9632-ac35b762fba9)

Doggerland (#ulink_0ebb4f69-f239-5604-b8b1-cf198c37528a)

Roman Road (#litres_trial_promo)

Mummies I (#litres_trial_promo)

Mummies II (#litres_trial_promo)

Peddars Way (#litres_trial_promo)

Gold (#litres_trial_promo)

Forging On (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher

PREFACE (#uc80f65eb-017b-5f14-889f-67ddff0d5310)

This book was born from a certain obsessive desire to understand the ancient world. I set out to venture across Britain seeking those prehistoric sites and phenomena that most intrigued me. Many of those travels were sentimental journeys, imaginative voyages. Inevitably, my interest in ancient Britain widened to encompass a need to know and to understand something of the ancient mindsets that created ways of living on these isles, ritual practices in these landscapes. And as I did so, my wonder took me ever deeper into time past.

I became a student of the ancient world. I learnt to step more carefully through the simplistic divisions between Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages. I learnt to recognise the magic of technological revolutions, such as that of metalworking with gold and copper brought by the Beaker people from continental Europe, and the alchemy of forging bronze from raw stone ore. Yet I also learnt to remember how even though those eras were defined by metals, stone was still very much in daily use. Flint especially remained an essential material. Agricultural revolutions burnt more slowly. The steady shift to farming – forging the first fields, sowing crops and keeping animals – that was practised by our distant ancestors took many generations to truly embed. The early agriculturalists still hunted and gathered to survive.

And then there were the Romans. Their arrival on these shores brought many changes. The arrival of the written word in Britain officially ended the era of prehistory in these isles. I knew that. But I learnt, too, that the fall of Roman feet on British soils brought no sudden shift in the ways and sensibilities of most British people.