A false door for spirits to pass through: Belas Knap
One of Britain's oldest buildings in a landscape shaped by humans: dotted with phone masts, hill forts and modern memorials. Nr Winchcombe, Gloucestershire
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Belas Knap has a claim to be amongst the oldest buildings in Britain. Depending which list you look at, only the Neolithic settlements on Orkney, a tomb in Wales, and the West Kennet Long Barrow in Wiltshire are older. A funerary monument built by the earliest farming communities in Britain, it is about six thousand years old.
Looking out from one of the reconstructed burial chambers, Belas Knap.
It’s a hot day when we climb the steep path from the road through a woodland of tall, spindly trees. Lockdown has been loosened and lots of people are out; we keep stepping aside to make room on the Cotswold Way. As you trace the spine of the wooded ridge the hummock rises suddenly from the earth like a wave. Today, it’s hardly a place of quiet contemplation: a scraggly-haired young man with his camping mat and rucksack asks us to take a photo, squatting in the false entrance where he’s balanced a strange purple sun-shaped disc.
The forecourt enclosing the false door, Belas Knap.
You can see why it attracts alternative types: the impressive frontage engulfs you with two large ‘horns’, constructed from dry-stone-walling, of which the lower parts are original. Peering closely at these stones through the lichens and crumbling moss you can see how meticulously they were laid together, unmoved since those hands placed them six thousand years before. In the doorway are two portal stones, and the lintel is from a later restoration: but despite how it draws you in, this isn’t a door. There’s an original ‘blocking’ stone in the way, and even behind, it leads nowhere. Possibly, this entrance wasn’t for corporeal bodies: instead, it may have allowed spirits to pass through. The forecourt between the flanks could have hosted ceremonies: bones, including that of an infant, were found beneath the false door.
One of the burial chambers, Belas Knap.
Neolithic peoples’ treatment of corporeal bodies, even dead ones, seems rather unlike our own. The real entrances to the burial chambers are around the sides, where bones of 38 people were found, mostly all jumbled up. This, and the presence of more complete skeletons near the entrances or the false door suggest that Neolithic people allowed bodies to decompose, or be eaten by animals, before stashing away the denuded bones. Scratches and rubbing on these -- especially thigh bones and skulls -- suggest they were taken out and used repeatedly for ritual purposes. Perhaps this suggests that people ceased to be individuals in death: or maybe it’s anachronistic to ascribe the idea of the individual at all. In the Bronze Age, this appears to change: people begin making smaller, round barrows for families or individuals. There’s meant to be one in the neighbouring field, but it’s only 0.25m high, and I can’t see it even as I squint from the top of the barrow into the sunlight.
I bash my head on the lintels of the low-lying burial chambers as I peer inside. These are mostly reconstructed from the 1920s and 30s, but they accurately mirror the craftsmanship of the original: meticulously lined and walled in stone.
A glimpse of original stonework along the side of the monument, beneath moss and grass.
We retire to a vantage point across the field for lunch: the streamlined teardrop shape rises up like a surfacing whale from the ground. This was a monument made to be seen from afar. Some Romano-British pottery was found inside; for those who stashed it, the monument was already unimaginably ancient, built by a civilisation that remains incommunicable.
A view of the monument from across the field.
It’s also part of a landscape that has for centuries exerted a pull on the imagination. Unusually oriented north-south, the barrow follows the line of a ridge, between the summits of two hills. Possibly these monuments served as centres not just for burials, but other ceremonies such as births and marriages.
Iron Age hill fort, Cleeve Common: Cheltenham in the background.
We walk over to the other side of the chalky escarpment: Cleeve Common, highest point in the Cotswolds. Skylark song glitters in the air around us as we brush through paltry grasses and gorse: a few small trees, stunted and Biblical. On a panoramic high point, stone blocks surround one on which are affixed memorial plaques to those who loved this hill: a modern funerary monument. The landscape in view has been almost completely shaped by humans. On the summit there are three enormous phone masts. On the edge of the limestone scarp perches an iron-age fort, forming only a third of a circle, its banks rising like ripples in the grass. Atop almost every hill in sight, there is one similar. We don’t know if this was was originally a whole circle, its cliff side quarried away. Here, you could see invaders coming from Wales.
Memorial tree, Cleeve Common summit.
Along the common, a Bronze Age dyke rumples the ground gently; possibly to enclose a grazing area. Further down the slope, there’s another ring-shaped earthwork marked ‘Settlement’. The hill is knobbly all over, having been, for many centuries, quarried for limestone; one side is an old rabbit warren. Now mostly the hill serves for picnics, rock climbing and golf -- we occasionally duck whizzing balls. On the summit are three giant phone masts; people are out, kite-flying and biking; police roll lazily over the plateau in a 4x4. Cheltenham shimmers in the heat below. They used to race the horses up here before they built the racecourse.
Down in the valley, we come across Postlip Hall, a new-age cohousing community where eight families live in a ‘village under one roof’. The estate is well kept, hidden behind massive walls of Cotswold stone, though we can just glimpse the ancient Tithe barn through the slats of a gate in the wall. The Jacobean frontage of the older mediaeval manor looms behind us as we climb up the hill.
Cottages, Postlip Hall.
Cultural titbits I’ve been enjoying this week —
Theatre: I started watching Jane Clegg, a suffrage-era play by St John Ervine that Finborough Theatre are streaming for free on YouTube. I’d never heard of Irvine or the play. An inscrutable woman who’s come into an inheritance refuses to give the money to her bumbling, cheating husband, made more interesting by the constant presence of his comically vacillating mother. I still need to see how it ends…
Film: I also discovered, in a tribute to the late, great Aubrey Burl — expert on British and Irish stone circles — this film by Derek Jarman, with soundtrack by COIL. In shots reminiscent of Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash, Jarman journeys through the area surrounding the prehistoric site of Avebury, a pastoral landscape made even more strange by the looming soundtrack. Can definitely recommend as a soothing, if slightly strange, watch.
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Sincerely,
Ruth
For the factual background for this article I am indebted to the following: