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Sacred Landscapes
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BrigantesNation
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Re: Sacred Landscapes
Jul 30, 2003, 10:37
Hi Nigel, Thanks for asking the question, as it's prompted me to do a bit more thinking about Thornborough, you may have noticed I've uploaded an interpretation of the Thornborough Henges for the mig to late Bronze Age period. During the work on that, I had to think about a number of the points you raise.

Firstly, is this a sacred landscape at all? I don't know! To me a sacred landscape would need to have a religious significance, as opposed to a ritual one. What I'm getting at here, is the fact that we do not actually know what these monuments were used for, we note their proximity to burial sites and make a leap of faith that says they were part of a sacred environment. But, as in the case of Thornborough, the burials came much later, and for all we know could well be part of a new culture making it's mark on monuments whose purpose had already been forgotten. In many ways, the term sacred landscape is really sympomatic of our modern tendancy to see all of the ancient monuments "lumped" together - the outcome of thousands of years of careful planning. When the reality is probably much more random and non related.

Coming back to Thornborough, we know that a structure that we know of as a cursus was built something like 5000 years ago. These "ritual causeways" are probably the least well understood of ancient monuments. It is possible that originally there were three at Thornborough. The one that has been confirmed ran for at least 1.2 miles in an east west direction and travelled from the River Ure to the location of Thornborough village. If we are to conject a ritual purpose for this structure and we assume that Thornborough village was probably a settlement location at that early time, then perhaps we could see this as the location for rituals intended to expouse mans relationship with the sacred river? However, to my mind, we do not explore the possible alternative purposes for these structures. If we look at our spanding habits today, we spend much more of our wealth on leisure than we do on religion - why not then? Could a cursus have been a racetrack as was originally suggested? One point to note is that this cursus was later destroyed by the building of the central henge to at the time it could haldy have been considered sacred, although that does not mean that any activities carried out on it were not.

So, when we are considering a "sacred" landscape, we must separate our modern interpretation of these monuments as sacred, largely perhaps as part of our own desire to revere out distant ancestors? and also we have to bare in mind that many of the structures that we see as lending a spiritual nature to these monuments actually came along a lot later.

I hae to go now, back later for the trees!
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Re: Sacred Landscapes (Shestu)
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