Twenty-One Tumuli

The start point was determined by family history. My wife’s grandma had spent many years living near Brighstone, and so indirectly prompted we had come for a week to the Isle of Wight.

I’d wanted to walk on the island’s downs since I first saw them from the New Battery above the Needles at the beginning of the week, but the Thursday afternoon was the first time we’d had the chance to go. The sunlight still shimmered enticingly on the grass, and the hills’ rounded backs promised fine walking, great views.

Still, at first we struggled through long grass, then we sweated as the now sheep-cropped slope pushed us higher and higher. On our left, in the middle distance the sea was a sequence of blues that faded into a haze of white in the lower sky; in the scrub just above the path, monstrous toadstools bloomed, the size of actual stools. There was little birdsong but pipits and gulls were spread around the fringes of vision.

When we reached the top, through scattered, mossy wall stones and between the twirled and twisted trunks of stunted trees, the ground underfoot became the quintessential “springy turf”, and the sky full of “little fluffy clouds” as The Orb put it in the 1990s.

There was another reason why I’d wanted to walk on these downs, as well as the weather and the views – a reason that made my wife roll her eyes in mock (at least, I hope so) boredom. The map showed that the path ran by many tumuli, Bronze Age round barrows.

These are very common across Britain, positioned on high ground, usually forming parts of “ritual landscapes”, whose use can stretch from the early Neolithic (about 4000-ish BCE) into what in England are the Roman and Saxon periods.

Many of them are crumbly, sagging in the middle – this could be due to the collapse of a burial chamber, or the shafts dug by tomb robbers or by antiquarians. The most notorious case of this is not in a tumulus, but in the mysterious Neolithic Silbury Hill, whose core almost disintegrated in 2000 due to eighteenth-century digs. In any case, the tumuli are almost always grassed over. Sometimes their flanks are thick with gorse.

The first tumulus we passed on this walk was one of these. On the top of the hill there’s a wood, which gleamed that day with autumn moisture. A slight detour took us to a gorsy clearing where the bushes crowded in closer than the trees. Their stems below the outermost fringe of leaf spikes were dry and yellow, skeleton stalks under a thin green caul.

The tumulus skulked there, a mere bump among the bone plants. The visible slopes were cracked, showing pale earth. It seemed about to fragment into nothing. It was not a particularly thrilling sight, but it was the first gateway into the ritual landscape of West Wight.

This landscape is focused on the Mottisham Long Stone and Long Barrow, which lie in the valley south of the downs, these monuments predate the tumuli on the hills, so they must have been built in response to whatever drew the first builder to that one place.

We didn’t have time to see the Long Stone, which was galling – a bit like going to Winchester Cathedral and not looking in the chancel – but we could examine the rest of the construction. A ritual landscape really does involve the land. Many Neolithic and Bronze Age centres are related to water, and I see from the map there’s a stream in the valley. But if the focus is important in itself, the approach makes it more so.

To the Bronze Age mind (as if I could really know anything about such an amorphous, supposed entity), it was not enough that the visitor/worshipper/supplicant come to a place, he or  she must also be awed by it. Avebury and Stonehenge have their avenues; West Wight has its parade of barrows.

After that first tumulus we were walking against the flow, away from the Stone, along the ancient path beside them. I’m speculating, but it could be that a pilgrim, however defined, approached the Long  Stone (hidden in a valley until the last, most charged moment) along the hilltops, coming every so often to the grace, or graces of a revered ancestor. These tumuli are built on chalk, which, if cleared of grass and moss, as the White Horse of Uffington still is, would gleam ahead of the traveller. On a day like the one of our walk, the reflected light would have been near blinding, especially when combined with the glitter of the sea.

Many of the tumuli stand in groups of two or three. If right by the path, the closest one seems broken down, like a sofa with the stuffing coming out, while the one further away is relatively whole and green. At Five Barrows a couple are bearing up well, but one is sunk into the ground surface like a saucer. Local legend apparently talks of a stone that once sat there and rolled away not quite reaching the sea, which is very close. Many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century guides mention the tumuli as part of a commentary on how rooted the local people are in their land.

There, I couldn’t help myself, and stood on the top of all five, knowing that  even my ephemeral presence was contributing to the wearing away of the graves. There were only three colours visible: blue, green, white. The wind rushed around me as my wife kept stoically to the path lower down.

As we walked, evening began, and the number of colours multiplied. Soon we had sea on both sides, never close but always present. That on the left was bright, that on the right, the Homeric “wine dark”.

Our daughter likes to count the number of thatched buildings she sees, compiling history. In the same way, I look for tumuli. Out walk’s tumuli total took me past her tally for the whole holiday. It’s strange that the end of our walk (the beginning of the pilgrim’s progress?) along the downs passes through a golf course. I’ve never associated that game with ancient spirituality,  and it was hard to tell the difference between features built to flummox the golfers, and the real tumuli.

But if my speculations are right, Freshwater, where we turned to make our way to the River Yar and so back to the north coast, is the place where the old journey began. How would it be, at dusk, to climb out of the bay and see the spread of twilight colours on those ancestors’ graves in the darkness of the grass, and know that they would accompany you all the way?