Exploring meaning in early prehistoric remains on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall

ABSTRACT

This volume of Time and Mind contains four interconnected articles distilled from an unfinished longer piece written by the late Cornish polymath Roger Farnworth.¹ Together, the articles approach a more general understanding of prehistoric people’s relationship with aspects of Bodmin Moor’s landscape, skyscape and rockscape, and consider how the creation of cairns, propped stones, cromlechs and quoits (Cornish terms for chambered tombs) and stone circles may have helped people place themselves in the history of the wider world and the cosmos.

KEYWORDS:

• Bodmin Moor
• landscape archaeology
• early prehistory
• natural monument
• Pole Star

Introduction to this volume

Roger Farnworth brought to bear on his archaeological thinking a broader knowledge – including philosophy (in which he graduated), art, ethnography, comparative religion and astronomy. A poet, writer, painter and political activist, Roger was a sharp and generous questioner of the given and the assumed, and a close examiner of a place or a thing. He pursued landscape archaeology, especially on his local patch, in all weathers and seasons, on and around the granite upland now called Bodmin Moor (formerly Fawymore) in eastern Cornwall, in south-western Britain.

Roger was concerned with the cycles of life, including the ways people considered death: their own, that of family and community members, and that of those unknown ancestors who contributed to the creation of the world in which people lived. He was interested in how people are affected by the natural world, and the ways they affect it, and he expected past people to have been at least as sensitive to place as he was.

I thought along similar lines (e.g. Herring 2008b), and together Roger and I discussed the implications of Chris Tilley’s ground-breaking ‘Rocks as Resources’ paper (Tilley 1995) and the work of Chris, Barbara Bender and Sue Hamilton and their UCL team at Leskernick on the northern side of Bodmin Moor (Bender, Hamilton, and Tilley 2007) for understanding the development and meaning of the Moor’s prehistoric landscape.

In the early 2000s, we were at the ‘Cannon Stone’, a propped stone on Carburrow Tor, just a mile from Roger's home in Warleggan. A chamber beneath the stone frames the view to Rough Tor (Farnworth et al. 2023a, Figures 6 and 11) and Roger wondered aloud to me how many others of the Neolithic propped stones then being discovered on the Moor (Blackman 2011; Herring 1997) might have been designed to frame views of important features of the Moor, and in particular Rough Tor. He used his observations to develop a rationale for the so-called Rough Tor Effect (a term derived from Tilley’s [1995] work), which is set out in the first of the four articles.

I also remember how taken Roger was by a visit we paid a little later to the high plateau on the summit of Brown Gelly, again in the southern part of the Moor, with its arc of large and complex Bronze Age cairns. Chris Tilley had noticed that when walking onto the plateau from a small tor on the southern hillside, the first sight of the Moor’s most significant tor-topped hill, Rough Tor (Figure 1), had been marked by the placement of the most southerly cairn (Tilley 1995, 44). Brian Tugwell later observed that the arrangement of the other cairns – when seen from that first cairn – both framed the view northwards to Rough Tor and its higher neighbour Brown Willy (formerly Bron Wennelyn) and also mimicked it. The more complex cairns to the north-west replicate the multi-tor profile of Rough Tor, and the more massive nearer eastern cairn represents Brown Willy (Herring 2008a, 76 and Figure 7; Farnworth et al. 2023c, Figure 8). I can still hear Roger shouting over the wild wind that this was more than prehistoric landscape design, as I had seen it; it was landscape art, and he would pursue its meaning.

Figure 1. The naturally weathered tors west of the summit of Rough Tor, set high above the rolling lower downlands of Bodmin Moor. These tors appear to have been intensely valued by early prehistoric communities who set up monuments (including view frames, stone circles and cairns) in relation to them. Among the tors can be seen several cheesewrings, stacks of overlapping slabs, that may have been used for excarnation. Photograph: Peter Herring.

From then onwards, Roger proceeded to gather evidence that might provide him with insights into that meaning. He relentlessly criss-crossed apparently empty downlands searching for viewframe propped stones and platform cairns, Neolithic and Early Bronze Age monument types from which Rough Tor very often can be viewed. This led Roger to discover several previously unrecorded monuments in precisely defined zones, the viewshed from which Rough Tor could be seen. His work on cairns and their locations’ relationship with Rough Tor and the possible meaning of that relationship forms the subject of the second article in this volume.

The third article examines why later Neolithic or early Bronze Age people placed stone circles south of locally dominant tor-topped hills, frequently Rough Tor. The article considers the role of the Pole Star, at that time Thuban rather than Polaris, as the hub around which the stars rotated and passed behind the chosen hill. Potential associations of stars with the spirits of the deceased are explored and the effects of precession on observing the Pole Star form the basis of an explanation of the arrangement of three large circles forming the famous site The Hurlers.

The last article starts from Roger’s consideration of the lack of early Neolithic cromlechs (or quoits) on Bodmin Moor despite there being several elsewhere in lowland agricultural parts of Cornwall. Roger suggested that the key quality of a cromlech, a large flat capstone overhanging the sides of a stone chamber, was available on the Moor in the form of natural monuments, particularly cheesewring tors and the cavities often found in rockpiles nearby or below (see Figure 1). He further suggested that the function of the capstone may have been to enable excarnation, principally by birds, with cavities or chambers being used as ossuaries. Finally, Roger proposed that laying out the dead on cheesewring tors would have created or reinforced the attachment of early Neolithic people to mythic predecessors or ancestors who they may have believed capable of making structures beyond the capability of mere humans, placing massive slab upon massive slab to create the natural structures we now know as tors.

All four articles are exercises in landscape archaeology in which the principal forms of physical evidence are partial. Only the earth and stone survive of complexes that may have once included wood, hides and other perishable materials. Even these have been affected by several millennia of weathering, and in some cases by changes wrought by later people.

We should presume that the communities we discuss responded to, and incorporated into their belief systems or cosmologies, other even more transitory social and natural phenomena that leave no physical trace, such as arranged or unexpected encounters with other communities, the coming and going of migratory birds and animals, and the transience and the apparent permanence of seasonal and long-lived plants. We regret their omission, but have, however, felt able to draw into our considerations the wider landscape of east Cornwall (especially its physical topography) and the skyscape above it where the positioning and arrangements of stone structures and earthworks have suggested these are significant. In so doing we accept the cautions proposed by Richard Bradley (2000, 33–44) in his seminal work on such matters.

The distillation of Roger’s long paper into four separate articles has been conducted by myself, by Roger’s daughter Cathy Rozel Farnworth, who has ensured that his thinking and his voice have been retained, and by Bryn Tapper who helped Roger with GIS mapping, modelling and discussion, and has since supported Cathy and myself with thinking about how individuals and communities negotiate and find meaning in landscape and through symbolism. We are grateful to the two anonymous referees and the editors who have helped guide us towards relevant recent publications.

Earlier, briefer outlines of some of Roger’s thoughts on stone circles, viewframes and cromlechs (or quoits) were published in the magazine Meyn Mamvro, Ancient Stones and Sacred Sites of Cornwall (Farnworth 2007a, 2007b, 2012).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Herring

Peter Herring was formerly a Head of Historic Places Investigation within the Research Group, Historic England and previously a Principal Archaeologist with the Cornwall Archaeological Unit. Peter is a specialist in landscape survey and interpretation with a close knowledge of the archaeology of Cornwall’s uplands, including their prehistoric remains and landscape.

Notes

1. https://warleggan.wordpress.com/roger/obituary/, https://cornwallartists.org/cornwall-artists/roger-farnworth