Cheddar Gorge from the air. Borrowed from Wikipedia
Something less heart rending than the last blog, a walk quite a few years back on the Mendips with my good companion Moss.
The Mendips is the place you can find early Paleolithic people, in the caves with the bones of animals long extinct from now. Like Sutton Bank, rock cliffs rise out of nowhere, it is spectacular driving through the Mendips you can also end up at the Cheddar Caves, haunt of a witch of course and the place to take young children to see stalagmites and stalactites. Also of course, if it is still there, the cheese company.
The interesting thing about going back on old blogs is that the writing and speculation has moved on further and I was interested to read the PDF on incense cups found in these barrows. I think of them as the Catholic thurible which is waved round during the service, but there again their use might have been completely different. Below is what I wrote in a catch-up, and there are two articles on the funerary or incense cup as well.
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Yellow barrows at the back, the Nine barrows following the ridge behind me and two odd barrows between them I think, though there is an aerial view on this Wiki.  The eight Ashen Hill barrows  The Nine Barrows, two must have disappeared over the ridge. |
Barrows are reflections of a culture, long gone now, we can only speculate about the effort that went into digging and then covering these mounds, obviously reverence for the departed but also these people emotional needs, sometimes the remains of flowers are found, alongside a treasured dagger or necklace of beads.
Now here is for me one of the most obvious of barrow cemeteries to be found in the Mendips, there are in actual fact two sets of barrows, the Ashen Barrows (8) and the Nine Barrows following the ridge of a hill, ceremony is obvious, were they following the lines of a track way? Were they showing respect and reverence of the ancestors as they passed? I find these photographs please me still, the excitement of first glimpsing as I and Moss trudged over the fields, the bullocks to be negotiated, and then the golden grass crowning the barrows in the distance.
(51) Aldbourne and the Enigmatic Funerary Cups of the British Bronze Age
nine seems to be a well repeated number in standing stones and barrows and stuff from what i have seen (which is very little) and of course nine is a perfect square number.... lovely pics of the barrows - thanks
ReplyDelete3, 7, 9, All magical numbers. Bronze Age Barrows was always a favourite of mine, all that effort to build the barrows.
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