2016 PREHISTORIC TOUR OF WILTSHIRE/DORSET
23-26 July 2016
Jamie and Paul had been planning a trip to Wiltshire to visit Stonehenge, Maiden Castle and a number of other prehistoric monuments in the south of England. The Iron Age and Bronze Age means a lot to us, and if Hadrian’s Wall is Britain’s focus for Roman military history, Dorset and Wiltshire is the focus for prehistory.
We could spare four days: two days of travel to and from the region and two of site visits and we decided to be as close as possible, booking a pitch at the well-run Stonehenge Campsite at a nearby village. After some discussion, we decided to check out Neolithic and Bronze Age sites on day 1 and Iron Age sites on day 2. But another site, Butser Iron Age Farm is too close to ignore, this reconstructed prehistoric farm in Hampshire has been used for valuable experiments on Iron Age agricultural techniques. Their website also seemed to show that the museum had recently built several Neolithic houses, a Saxon long house and a small Roman villa, in addition to the Iron Age round houses already there. We set out from Yorkshire at 5:00 in the morning to visit Butser Iron Age farm en toute to the Stonehenge Campsite.
We could spare four days: two days of travel to and from the region and two of site visits and we decided to be as close as possible, booking a pitch at the well-run Stonehenge Campsite at a nearby village. After some discussion, we decided to check out Neolithic and Bronze Age sites on day 1 and Iron Age sites on day 2. But another site, Butser Iron Age Farm is too close to ignore, this reconstructed prehistoric farm in Hampshire has been used for valuable experiments on Iron Age agricultural techniques. Their website also seemed to show that the museum had recently built several Neolithic houses, a Saxon long house and a small Roman villa, in addition to the Iron Age round houses already there. We set out from Yorkshire at 5:00 in the morning to visit Butser Iron Age farm en toute to the Stonehenge Campsite.
The trip went brilliantly. The staff at Butser were very friendly, letting us tour the site in authentic Iron Age kit. The campsite was fantastic, it allows raised fire bases and I had taken mine on the off chance, so we were able to have wood fires each night. Very cosy!
Stonehenge has had a makeover, the visitor centre is huge and expensive, with a new museum and bus rides to the stones. But you pay a lot more for this. Price of entry is £15.50. We were glad to visit again, but we were more impressed by the barrow fields we visited as the sun came up that day, barrows on Normanton Down and at Winterbourne Stoke. Watching hares race Round the fields from the vantage point on top of a bell barrow while we waited for Stonehenge to open proved a great memory.
Stonehenge has had a makeover, the visitor centre is huge and expensive, with a new museum and bus rides to the stones. But you pay a lot more for this. Price of entry is £15.50. We were glad to visit again, but we were more impressed by the barrow fields we visited as the sun came up that day, barrows on Normanton Down and at Winterbourne Stoke. Watching hares race Round the fields from the vantage point on top of a bell barrow while we waited for Stonehenge to open proved a great memory.
'We visited lots of other sites that day, including Woodhenge, the Sanctuary, Durrington Walls, Avebury, Silbury Hill and West Kennet Long Barrow. These were amazing monuments, particularly the awesome Avebury henge (free!) which actually surrounds a modern village! I’ve been several times in the past, but it still impresses me… we ended the day with a trip to Devizes Museum which holds a fantastic collection of prehistoric material from around the Stonehenge-Avebury area. Note that at West Kennet barrow, an amazing chambered tomb, we found huge amounts of rubbish: old flowers left as New Age offerings, burnt out tea lite candles, printed poetry rotting away, candles in glass cups left scattered at the back of the tomb by thoughtless New Age tourists and even burnt out birthday cake candles. I swept it all up, bagged it and dropped it in the nearest bin to the site. We also rubbed off all the New Age chalk graffiti on the blocking stones and some of the inner chambers. Once it was cleaned out, we could enjoy the site as the archaeologists wanted us to see it. Imagination did the rest. Jamie and I regularly make our own ‘offerings’ at ancient sites, personal nods to the ancients, but they are always cleared up. We leave nothing behind. Our incense, wine, flowers etc. either melt away or are taken away by ourselves - because our view of the site's use might not be yours, and you might be coming right behind us. We were pretty disgusted by the rubbish we found in the tomb, moreso by the graffiti. It is a real problem, I remember seeing the same 'tat' back in 1995 and 2004.
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Day 2 was focussed on Maiden Castle, Britain’s largest and most impressive Iron Age hillfort. It had been attacked and seized by the Roman II Legion shortly after the Roman invasion. Again, we wore our Iron Age kit, a real treat, walking the ramparts in authentic clothing, slinging stones from the defences, just as the inhabitants had done when faced by the Romans. We met some very interesting people at the fort, including a lovely couple who wanted a point by point explanation of our kit!
At the Late Roman temple to Minerva that still survived on the summit of the hill, Jamie offered the goddess a splash of wine. It had been a wonderfully evocative visit, as our photographs show. We checked out the chalk figure of the Cerne Abbas Giant on the way back to the campsite, having to cut short the day, traffic was terrible and did not have time to visit Hengistbury Head, site if the harbour connecting Iron Age Britain to the Roman world. It was a fantastic, exhausting and enjoyable visit with good weather. Traffic was awful around Stonehenge every day, forcing us to set out each day at 5:30-6:00 to avoid the inevitable build up as commuters sped off to London. |