The first handicap we have to deal with is that the only hard evidence we have for British pre-history is from archaeology but we have the benefit of recent advances in techniques which mean that we can get more information from artefacts, things like improved carbon dating and isotope analysis mean that we can go back to the earliest finds and revise our assessment of them. I was going to say that we have no written evidence but then I remembered cave paintings and unexplained marks which are still a mystery to us but should be taken into account.
All the evidence we have from the late Stone Age onwards (from about 4000BC) suggests that these people were remarkably similar to modern man in that they seem to have had belief systems, lived in extended family groupings and in the main respected the old and the dead. Surprisingly we have evidence of long distance trading links, there is good evidence that almost a third of the stone axes found in England came from the area round the Langdale valley in the Lake District and they have even been found on the continent. Add the sea links we know existed from about 2000BC onwards when Phonetician traders from the far eastern end of the Mediterranean were exporting tin from the south west and we can be sure that extended travel was perhaps more possible than we originally thought. What it amounts to is that we should not assume that these people were savages or unintelligent.
With travel and migration came cultural exchange. One of the most striking examples of this is that some time after 4000BC agriculture arrived in Britain and by 2000BC was universal all over the Isles. Other cultural arrivals over the centuries modified beliefs, burial practices, monument building and social structures, a process which is still going on today.
There is one more factor we should take into account but luckily this is something we can be certain of, geological time is so vast that we can be certain that, apart from cyclical climate change, the topography of Barlick is very close to what it was 6000 years ago. Weets Hill protected the valley from the prevailing SW winds, the watercourses ran in the same valleys and the Craven Fault, that division between limestone to the North and grit-stone to the south was the same.
Right, we have some guidelines, now we have to use our heads and apply them to the problem I have set myself, to find out the history of the early Christian church in Barlick. But first we have to tease out what we know about the old belief systems, to use the modern terminology, we have to see what we know about the Pagans because it is possible there are connections between the two.
This was the same geography 2000 years ago.
