Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [48]
On Gwilloc’s instructions, the medicine man then sacrificed a lamb to the sun god, and a deer to the moon goddess of the hunters as well, so that nothing should be left undone as they laid the old chief to rest.
Often in the years that followed, when he had difficult decisions to make, Gwilloc would come alone to the clearing on the high ground and sit silently beside the long white tomb that he had made.
“Tell me, Krona, what I must do,” he would ask. At such times, it seemed to him that the old man’s spirit spoke to him quietly, giving him good advice; and he would return to the valley, strengthened.
This was not the only manifestation of Krona’s abiding presence: for often, when the summer thunder rolled over the ridges the people of Sarum would look at each other and say:
“That’s Krona, rumbling in his house.”
Years afterwards, when he in turn had chosen one of Krona’s sons to succeed him, Gwilloc marked out for himself and his family a similar though more modest tomb half a mile away, so that his spirit also should remain properly housed near the place where the rivers met.
And so began at Sarum the first building of the great earth tombs known as long barrows that are the distinguishing mark of Neolithic Britain and which have lasted for over five thousand years. From this time on, through generation after generation, other tombs would arise out of the ground in the Sarum area as farming communities cleared and settled the land. Sometimes the barrows became the tombs of families or groups, but others continued to be built as memorials to some individual great man. Their use spread further afield over Britain. As millennia passed they took on many forms – some round, some saucer-shaped. But it is on the high rolling downland of Salisbury Plain that to this day one of the greatest concentrations of all can be seen, where several hundred barrows overgrown with grass – brooding presences from the island’s ancient days – dot mile after mile of the landscape.
As Magri had predicted, not only did the settlers leave the northern valley in time and spread over many of the old hunting grounds, but other settlers, too, came from across the sea.
For the arrival of Krona was only one of many similar migrations, both to the island of Britain and to the more distant land of Ireland in the west, to which the settlers came in a steady trickle, braving the dangerous northern waters in their tiny craft. They built small wooden farmsteads, sowed corn or raised livestock, or, like those at Sarum, they did both. Their earthwork enclosures were used as meeting places, where cattle could be bartered, or sometimes for defence; they built barrows; they cleared the ridges for their flocks of squat brown sheep. Wherever they settled, they dominated the land. And out of this sporadic settlement grew the great civilisation known as the Neolithic culture of Britain.
It took about two thousand years.
This next two thousand years of Britain’s history are reasonably well documented by archaeologists. The barrows, settlements and implements of the farmers have been found in quantities which allow scholars to identify many varieties of culture. One area somewhat to the north of Sarum, has given its name – Windmill Hill – to the culture which produced surface flint quarries and causewayed earthworks. In Yorkshire to the north, the settlers found the lustrous stone called jet, which they used for making necklaces and ornaments. And in Cornwall, Wales and the Lake District, communities of miners developed, who cut into the volcanic rock of those regions and made axes superior to any seen before. Cut off from the rest of Europe, the island continued to develop its own rich and distinctive life.
It may be supposed, though it cannot be proved, that the island’s original and sparse population of hunters was absorbed by the gradual infiltration of these Neolithic farming folk. But although the land under agriculture could support much larger