Weyland's Smithy
| Weyland's Smithy | 51 34 00.28N 1 35 46.18W | The horseshoe of trees surrounds the wedge-shaped burial mound described in the text below. The Ridgeway is the white dirt track runing SW/NE below the mound. |
| Uffington White Horse | 51 34 39.59N 1 33 59.95W | The White Horse can be plainly seen, together with the hill fort a little to the south. Dragon's Hill is the mound on the other side of the road to the north of the horse. |
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| The view of Weyland's Smithy from the Ridgeway. |
When I first came to Britain nearly 40 years ago friends, knowing my interest in ancient things, took me to see Weyland's Smithy. To get to it we had to drive to the Vale of the White Horse in Berkshire and then turn off the road to drive - carefully - along what looked like a rough farm track but which was in fact the ancient Ridgeway, a path that runs along the edge of the Downs, low enough to avoid the arduous climb to the top of the hills but high enough to avoid the bogs and swamps of the valley floor.
After bumping our way along the Ridgeway for half a mile we came to four huge standing stones on the right, behind which we could make out a long, low earth mound. We clambered out and climbed between the two central stones and into a dark passageway with small chambers on either side.
When we emerged into the frosty open air again we sat on the lower stones that formed a wall around the mound while April, the English girl, told the story of Weyland's Smithy. According to her, Weyland, smith to the gods, lived in the barrow and if you brought your horse to the entrance and tied it there, then went away leaving a silver groat on the entrance stones, your horse would be shod when you returned and the groat gone.
I wasn't exactly sure what a groat was and even less sure who Weyland was, but I came away eager to learn more.
Of course, that was long before the internet arrived replete with misinformation, so I had recourse to books where I discovered that the barrow was in the shape of a trapezoid 185' long and 43' wide at the wide end where there was a cruciform burial chamber. The earth for the barrow came from long ditches on either side of the mound. This was excavated in 1919 and the bodies of seven adults and a child were found.
In 1962/3 further excavations were undertaken which revealed that the large mound concealed within it a much smaller oval mound that was some 500 years older than the younger mound. This also had a burial chamber, paved with slabs of sarsen stone, which contained the remains of fourteen or fifteen adults, all badly damaged as if the roof had falled on them. The archaeologists suggested that the bodies had been interred on four separate occasions.
The archaeologists replaced all the earth they had removed, did some restoration work on the stones in front of the tomb, sent the bones off to the local museum and that was that - until two years ago when English Heritage, who has oversight of the monuments in the Vale of the White Horse, invited Cardiff University and the University of Central Lancashire to help them re-examine the bones.
In the course of the examination the experts spotted a tiny fragment of flint embedded inside the pelvis of one of the bodies from the original burial mound. When it was prised out it proved to be the tip of a flint arrowhead! The person had been shot through the lower abdomen, an injury that may well have caused his death.
This startling discovery caused the boffins to look more carefully at all the bones and they found evidence that another two had died from arrow wounds. They also found that two of the bodies showed evidence of having been attacked by dogs or wolves before they were buried.
The scientists now believe that they can reconstruct the events that led to the construction of the first burial mound. Enemies - perhaps cattle raiders - attacked the settlement, killing fourteen of the people - eleven men, two women and a child - and sending the rest fleeing into the surrounding forests.
When the survivors returned, they found that dogs had scavenged two of the bodies, tearing them apart. The others had, perhaps, been killed indoors or in some other location where the dogs couldn't get at them. All the bodies were gathered up and buried with honour; a wooden structure was erected inside which was placed the body of one man lying in a crouched position. The other bodies were left until the flesh had rotted away and then the bones were placed neatly but in no particular order on the floor.
The final stage was to pile chalk and earth around and over the wooden structure, raising the oval mound which was the first stage of the barrow. According to the 1962 excavators, nearly two and a half centuries went by before the second stage was built, but the latest research, using carbon-14 dating, indicates that it was no more than 40-50 years before the second stage was constructed. By then the wooden structure had collapsed and the mound was probably badly overgrown, so the second stage may well have been the same community repairing and enlarging the monument to their honoured dead.
However this recent study did not limit itself to Weyland's Smithy. The experts examined three other burial mounds and discovered, to their surprise, that contrary to previous opinion, all had been used for a short period of time and all had stopped being used at about the same time - indicating that the culture had changed, probably through the arrival of invaders who took over the area.
They also found indications that the culture was not homogeneous - which may be why the invaders were successful. Even in sites only twenty miles apart there was evidence of different burial customs and practices. For example, at one of the burial mounds there was evidence that people had brought food offerings and left them outside the entrance, whereas there was no such evidence at the other three.
"It was previously thought to be a time when there was plenty of land to go around, and that it was a very egalitarian society with little competition," said Alex Bayliss, an archaeologist with English Heritage. "Maybe there was more competition between groups than previously appreciated."
We may feel sorry for our Neolithic ancestors suffering raids, violent death and eventual displacement, but on the other hand, eight centuries later the newcomers busied themselves dragging huge stones from south Wales to a site on Salisbury Plain - and Stonehenge might never have been built by the original inhabitants of Britain.
© Kendall K. Down 2009
