Issue no 44, May 1999

Kenneth Brophy tries to make sense of some of Britain's largest and earliest prehistoric monuments

Cursus monuments are among the most impressive yet mysterious prehistoric sites in the British Isles. Their sheer size - gigantic even by today's standards - exceptionally early date, and apparently inscrutable function make them a particularly fascinating subject for study and speculation.

These long, narrow earthwork structures date from the Neolithic - many from the early part of the period about 6,000 years ago - and are thus some of the oldest monumental buildings in the world. They have been found across the country from southern England to north-eastern Scotland, and stand beside some of the most famous archaeological sites in Britain and Ireland, such as Stonehenge, Newgrange, and in Argyll's celebrated Kilmartin valley.

Cursus monuments are essentially very long and relatively narrow rectangular enclosures, with a near continuous boundary of an interior bank and an exterior ditch. The only breaks in this boundary are the `causeways', or possible entrances. The ends of a cursus are either squared-off or rounded. In Scotland, about half the known sites (which now number over 50) have a boundary of pits or post-holes which held large upright timbers, rather than earthwork perimeters. A few sites have a single mound running along their centre, rather like a bank barrow.

Size is perhaps their most amazing characteristic. Many cursuses are several kilometres long, while the largest known, the Dorset Cursus on Cranborne Chase, Dorset, is over 10km in length, and over 100m wide. Most are visible only as crop-marks, but there are exceptions, like the Cleaven Dyke near Blairgowrie in Perthshire, with 1.8km of its central mound still standing relatively intact. This `dyke' is one of the most awe-inspiring surviving relics of Neolithic monumentality left to us today.

Several cursus sites have been excavated, but these excavations have usually produced a frustrating lack of artefacts or internal features. Dating evidence, which points to the early Neolithic, has been derived largely from the relationship of cursuses to other monuments. Many are located close to other Neolithic monuments, while some have later Neolithic henges built on top, for example at Dorchester-on-Thames in Oxfordshire and at Thornborough in North Yorkshire. Springfield Cursus, Essex, had a timber circle built within one of its terminal areas, and a timber circle was built over the terminal of a pit-defined cursus at Upper Largie in the Kilmartin Valley. Long barrows seem to have been built close to some cursus sites, such as the Dorset Cursus, the Stonehenge Cursus and the Cleaven Dyke.

But what were cursus monuments for? Initially, they were regarded by antiquaries such as Stukeley as Roman circuses or race-courses. However, by the middle of this century Neolithic ritual explanations had taken root. Theories have varied around the theme of ritual processions (first suggested by Richard Atkinson in 1955), although there have been other ideas. These range from pathways linking a series of events in the night sky, and representations of snakes, to enclosures marking the pathways of prehistoric tornadoes!

In general, however, most ideas have developed the processional theory. Recently, some archaeologists have suggested that only certain people may have been allowed in the cursus to take part in such rituals, and that these sites may have represented planned-out pathways joining natural and ancestral places together to form a ritual experience.

One researcher who has tried to take these ideas further is Chris Tilley. In his 1994 book The Phenomenology of Landscape, he described a walk along the Dorset cursus, in which he took note of the changes in the landscape along the cursus, the other archaeological sites he came across, and what he could and coudn't see on the horizon at certain points of his journey. Tilley suggested that the cursus was used as a mysterious, exciting and frightening place for rites of passage ceremonies for young men.

In my own research in Scotland, I also decided to walk along some cursus sites, and to try to imagine what the cursus might have looked like when first built, and what it could have felt like to walk within the newly-built enclosure. The Cleaven Dyke, Perthshire, would have stood in a landscape which was fairly flat and had been mostly cleared of trees. New sections were added every now and again to the long central mound and ditches to increase their length.

Walking along beside the 6ft high mound, I could see the low hill on which the cursus ended. The wide ditch on my right-hand side and the mound on my left encouraged me to look, and walk, straight ahead. I could not see what was on the other side of the mound - but I could hear everything going on over there.

As I got closer to the end, the land beside the ditch began to rise up in a long natural spur, until I could see nothing on either side because of the mound and spur. It even became hard to tell which feature was natural and which artificial. Then I reached the hill-top and the end of the bank, and the view ahead stretched down to the River Isla ahead, and the mountains beyond.

To walk along a cursus in this way may well have been a rare experience for Neolithic people, and perhaps some were never allowed in this strange enclosure, which had been extended again and again by the ancestors. It could perhaps have been a mysterious experience, where the outside world was blocked out to one side, or even both. These enclosures leave you with the impression of being in a special place, removed from the world.