THE EARLY HISTORY OF BARLICK (2)
Posted: 17 Mar 2026, 02:34
THE EARLY HISTORY OF BARLICK (2)
15 October 2001
Last week I took you up to about 8,000BC and tried to convince you that I’m right and there were Stone Age men and women living in what was to become Barlick. In view of what is to come later we need to look more closely at these people and draw some conclusions about them. One important thing to remember is that at this time there was no concept of settlement or agriculture and there were no domesticated animals, these people were nomadic hunter/gatherers. They lived off what they could find and when an area was getting eaten out they would move on carrying what little possessions they had.
Further afield in the warm rich river valleys of the Middle East people had realised the value of growing crops and domesticating wild animals by 10,000BC which changed their culture completely and gave them a much better life. The advantages of this spread slowly across Europe but it was to be another 6,000 years before it reached the Isles.
I think it is important to remember that these people were humans, they had the same genes as us and would have had the same emotions, fear, anger, joy and even affection for those close to them. We start to see burials in mainland Europe around 80,000BC and we know that burials were taking place in The Isles by 25,000BC at the latest and when you think about it this says something about their society. They no longer simply left bodies to be eaten by wild animals, they were showing evidence of affection or respect. Bodies were often covered with a scattering of red ochre but we have no idea why. We start to see what the archaeologists call grave goods., these are artefacts or supplies they would have used in daily life and it is almost as though they were equipping the body for some sort of journey.
How could the dead go on a journey? What need had they of tools, weapons and food? I can’t think of any other explanation than that they believed there was some sort of after-life, I don’t think this is far-fetched. On a daily basis they saw birth, death and the change of the seasons. All this was evidence to them of something they knew nothing about. In their daily lives there would be an hierarchy, mothers and fathers who taught skills and cared for young ones. It wouldn’t be a great leap to imagine that there was another hierarchy beyond death. I don’t want to go too far with this because it is pure speculation but belief systems have to start somewhere and the evidence we have is that such a system was established by 8000BC.
We have to consider another possibility, that they may have had some form of magic. The word magic has been debased over the years, we have been saturated with myths and folk lore and the word magic conjures up a picture of a man or woman in a pointed hat waving a wand, you’ll even find it in the Bible. How did Moses part the Red Sea? He struck it with his staff or wand. Put this out of your mind and consider what magic really is. The best definition I know is that magic is the tool humans use to try to influence things over which otherwise they have no control. If someone is ill you see it as an attack and try to influence whatever it is that is the aggressor. One thing they would have learned pretty early is that a gift of some sort often influenced someone. It seems reasonable to suppose they applied the same principle to magic, they gave a gift, or as we would describe it, made a sacrifice. The size of the gift would be governed by the size of the problem and we know that in many primitive societies the ultimate gift was a human life.
We need to put another layer on top of this. Eventually there would be more than one family living in Barlick and they had a choice of either fighting each other for the resources or cooperating. It wouldn’t take long for them to realise that cooperation was the smart thing to do and we start to get groupings which we call tribes. At first these would be very local and small in size, they wouldn’t grow beyond the number that the area could support. If they did, like modern sheep on a moor, they would die back to the number as farmers say. Starvation would dictate how many members the tribe could carry.
Once you have a tribe you get an hierarchy. The fittest and the strongest, I assume they would be the men, would go out and do the hunting and the women would care for the young and gather the rest of the food locally. The dominant male would be the chief and would probably take advice from the older members of the tribe, what we are looking at is the beginning of a society. I have to confess that I don’t know how they survived in winter, I can well imagine them making rude shelters out of branches and skins during the summer but can’t conceive how they would fare in the winter, as far as I know there were no caves round here. It may be of course that they moved south in winter to avoid the worst of the weather, we simply don’t know.
Meanwhile, further south, the combination of rising sea levels caused by melting ice in the north and the whole of the mainland Isles tilting slightly as the weight of ice came off it caused the land bridge to the continent to sink slowly. The rising waters first made it boggy and impassable and then submerged it completely. This happened between 6,000 and 5,500BC. The same fate befell the crossing between the north of Ireland and the mainland. The Isle of Man and Anglesey became islands. You might assume that this meant that The Isles were cut off from the continent but this was not necessarily true. We know that in later years, the Celts were quite used to long sea voyages, not surprising really when you consider that if you lived on the coast it was much easier to travel and transport goods by sea. These boats would probably be frameworks of branches covered by skins like a larger version of a Severn coracle. We have evidence from 3,000BC onwards of well travelled routes on the mainland Isle. We know this because there are sites at regular intervals along some routes that were used for refuges, trading points or perhaps festival sites. There might even have been limited settlement at some of them towards the end of the Neolithic period. It seems inconceivable that these routes didn’t include water crossings.
Elaborate stone tombs have been found in The Isles dating from 4,300BC in England, 4,200 in Ireland and 4,100 in Scotland. Centuries before temples were built in Mesopotamia and 1,500 years before the Pharaohs were building in Egypt Late Stone Age man was building large stone chamber and passage tombs and erecting megaliths (standing stones). These are clear evidence of veneration of the dead, possibly sun worship and almost certainly organised ritual connected with the calendar and notable deaths.
Round about 4,000BC there was a revolution in the culture and society of The Isles, the first seed corn and domesticated animals arrived in the south. Agriculture had completed its long trek westwards from the Middle East and after 6,000 years had reached us. The word agriculture is fairly modern, it derives from the Roman word ager or field (acre comes from the same root) and cultura or culture. So it’s a very literal meaning, the culture of fields, and therein lie the seeds of a great change. By 2,000BC this new way of life had spread right through the Isle and so we can reasonably assume that Barlick started farming somewhere around 3,000BC.
This was more than a transition from the concept of a family group or tribe living in an area and ranging across it as semi-nomadic hunter/gatherers living off the land and moving to wherever the current resource was located. Cultivation meant fields and this introduced the concept of boundaries and occupation of land. People stayed in one place to till the land and care for their beasts so settlement grew and more permanent buildings, well travelled routes between settlements meant paths and tracks. The society changed as people began to specialise, one group would be hunters and warriors, another would care for the fields and animals. Miners and craftsmen became important, we know that at this time there were centres in Langdale in Cumbria, Craig Llwydd in North Wales, Mounts Bay and the Cheviot Hills producing stone axes and exporting them all over the country and possibly to mainland Europe. Flint mines in Sussex, Wiltshire and Norfolk were producing unfinished flints for much of the mainland Isle.
Living became easier because the climate then was roughly equivalent to that of the south of France today. The combination of rich bottom lands, plentiful rainfall and warm weather were ideal for wheat based agriculture and stock-keeping. Wheat is a high protein cereal and scientists have made interesting comparisons between the rice-based cultures of the east and the wheat-based of the west in terms of their ability to sustain growth in a society, wheat is far superior. The easier living and better resources meant that there was room for concepts such as care for the elderly and infirm, they were no longer a drag on the tribe, indeed, in terms of child-minding and small tasks about the settlement one can well see them being an asset as they freed other workers to go to the fields.
Story-tellers, priests and keepers of wisdom grew more important. If there ever was a cult of birth, life, death and sustenance from nature this shifted to sun, moon, season, rain and the fertility of the land. We suspect that there were rituals but there is no written record so we know nothing of it. It may be that this was the birth of what was later to become known as the Druids.
Another consequence of settlement, possessions and a higher standard of living was that there was more to lose. This meant that unlike the nomadic days flight wasn’t an option, you had to stand and defend what you owned, your houses, grain pits, crops and animals. Between 3,800 and 3,500BCE the tribe at Carn Brea in Cornwall built a defended site, a fort, it had stone faced walls and looks as though it was meant for more than one family. At the same time we start to see evidence in the archaeology of large (7 metre square) houses built of timber with wattle and daub infilling in the walls and stone foundations. By 3,200BCE houses were being built in the far north of the Isles of stone with stone furniture and drains.
Round about the time agriculture was being established we see a big change in burial practices. Barrows, passage graves and mounds ceased to be built and their place was taken by rings defined by a ditch or bank with flat burials nearby. If they had ditches and banks they are called henges, the crucial feature of 90% of them is that the ditch was inside the bank and therefore they were built for ceremony and not defence. There are over 300 of these henges identified all over the Isle except in the Yorkshire Wolds, East Anglia and much of the Midlands. All are dated from 3,000 to 2,200BC. Most are in valleys and are associated with water. In the later ones there is evidence of alignment with certain aspects of the sun.
At the same time we see evidence which suggests that tombs were blocked up and fields allowed to go to waste, we might be looking at tribal warfare. We’ll apply what we have learned this week to Barlick in the next article.
(15 October 2001)
15 October 2001
Last week I took you up to about 8,000BC and tried to convince you that I’m right and there were Stone Age men and women living in what was to become Barlick. In view of what is to come later we need to look more closely at these people and draw some conclusions about them. One important thing to remember is that at this time there was no concept of settlement or agriculture and there were no domesticated animals, these people were nomadic hunter/gatherers. They lived off what they could find and when an area was getting eaten out they would move on carrying what little possessions they had.
Further afield in the warm rich river valleys of the Middle East people had realised the value of growing crops and domesticating wild animals by 10,000BC which changed their culture completely and gave them a much better life. The advantages of this spread slowly across Europe but it was to be another 6,000 years before it reached the Isles.
I think it is important to remember that these people were humans, they had the same genes as us and would have had the same emotions, fear, anger, joy and even affection for those close to them. We start to see burials in mainland Europe around 80,000BC and we know that burials were taking place in The Isles by 25,000BC at the latest and when you think about it this says something about their society. They no longer simply left bodies to be eaten by wild animals, they were showing evidence of affection or respect. Bodies were often covered with a scattering of red ochre but we have no idea why. We start to see what the archaeologists call grave goods., these are artefacts or supplies they would have used in daily life and it is almost as though they were equipping the body for some sort of journey.
How could the dead go on a journey? What need had they of tools, weapons and food? I can’t think of any other explanation than that they believed there was some sort of after-life, I don’t think this is far-fetched. On a daily basis they saw birth, death and the change of the seasons. All this was evidence to them of something they knew nothing about. In their daily lives there would be an hierarchy, mothers and fathers who taught skills and cared for young ones. It wouldn’t be a great leap to imagine that there was another hierarchy beyond death. I don’t want to go too far with this because it is pure speculation but belief systems have to start somewhere and the evidence we have is that such a system was established by 8000BC.
We have to consider another possibility, that they may have had some form of magic. The word magic has been debased over the years, we have been saturated with myths and folk lore and the word magic conjures up a picture of a man or woman in a pointed hat waving a wand, you’ll even find it in the Bible. How did Moses part the Red Sea? He struck it with his staff or wand. Put this out of your mind and consider what magic really is. The best definition I know is that magic is the tool humans use to try to influence things over which otherwise they have no control. If someone is ill you see it as an attack and try to influence whatever it is that is the aggressor. One thing they would have learned pretty early is that a gift of some sort often influenced someone. It seems reasonable to suppose they applied the same principle to magic, they gave a gift, or as we would describe it, made a sacrifice. The size of the gift would be governed by the size of the problem and we know that in many primitive societies the ultimate gift was a human life.
We need to put another layer on top of this. Eventually there would be more than one family living in Barlick and they had a choice of either fighting each other for the resources or cooperating. It wouldn’t take long for them to realise that cooperation was the smart thing to do and we start to get groupings which we call tribes. At first these would be very local and small in size, they wouldn’t grow beyond the number that the area could support. If they did, like modern sheep on a moor, they would die back to the number as farmers say. Starvation would dictate how many members the tribe could carry.
Once you have a tribe you get an hierarchy. The fittest and the strongest, I assume they would be the men, would go out and do the hunting and the women would care for the young and gather the rest of the food locally. The dominant male would be the chief and would probably take advice from the older members of the tribe, what we are looking at is the beginning of a society. I have to confess that I don’t know how they survived in winter, I can well imagine them making rude shelters out of branches and skins during the summer but can’t conceive how they would fare in the winter, as far as I know there were no caves round here. It may be of course that they moved south in winter to avoid the worst of the weather, we simply don’t know.
Meanwhile, further south, the combination of rising sea levels caused by melting ice in the north and the whole of the mainland Isles tilting slightly as the weight of ice came off it caused the land bridge to the continent to sink slowly. The rising waters first made it boggy and impassable and then submerged it completely. This happened between 6,000 and 5,500BC. The same fate befell the crossing between the north of Ireland and the mainland. The Isle of Man and Anglesey became islands. You might assume that this meant that The Isles were cut off from the continent but this was not necessarily true. We know that in later years, the Celts were quite used to long sea voyages, not surprising really when you consider that if you lived on the coast it was much easier to travel and transport goods by sea. These boats would probably be frameworks of branches covered by skins like a larger version of a Severn coracle. We have evidence from 3,000BC onwards of well travelled routes on the mainland Isle. We know this because there are sites at regular intervals along some routes that were used for refuges, trading points or perhaps festival sites. There might even have been limited settlement at some of them towards the end of the Neolithic period. It seems inconceivable that these routes didn’t include water crossings.
Elaborate stone tombs have been found in The Isles dating from 4,300BC in England, 4,200 in Ireland and 4,100 in Scotland. Centuries before temples were built in Mesopotamia and 1,500 years before the Pharaohs were building in Egypt Late Stone Age man was building large stone chamber and passage tombs and erecting megaliths (standing stones). These are clear evidence of veneration of the dead, possibly sun worship and almost certainly organised ritual connected with the calendar and notable deaths.
Round about 4,000BC there was a revolution in the culture and society of The Isles, the first seed corn and domesticated animals arrived in the south. Agriculture had completed its long trek westwards from the Middle East and after 6,000 years had reached us. The word agriculture is fairly modern, it derives from the Roman word ager or field (acre comes from the same root) and cultura or culture. So it’s a very literal meaning, the culture of fields, and therein lie the seeds of a great change. By 2,000BC this new way of life had spread right through the Isle and so we can reasonably assume that Barlick started farming somewhere around 3,000BC.
This was more than a transition from the concept of a family group or tribe living in an area and ranging across it as semi-nomadic hunter/gatherers living off the land and moving to wherever the current resource was located. Cultivation meant fields and this introduced the concept of boundaries and occupation of land. People stayed in one place to till the land and care for their beasts so settlement grew and more permanent buildings, well travelled routes between settlements meant paths and tracks. The society changed as people began to specialise, one group would be hunters and warriors, another would care for the fields and animals. Miners and craftsmen became important, we know that at this time there were centres in Langdale in Cumbria, Craig Llwydd in North Wales, Mounts Bay and the Cheviot Hills producing stone axes and exporting them all over the country and possibly to mainland Europe. Flint mines in Sussex, Wiltshire and Norfolk were producing unfinished flints for much of the mainland Isle.
Living became easier because the climate then was roughly equivalent to that of the south of France today. The combination of rich bottom lands, plentiful rainfall and warm weather were ideal for wheat based agriculture and stock-keeping. Wheat is a high protein cereal and scientists have made interesting comparisons between the rice-based cultures of the east and the wheat-based of the west in terms of their ability to sustain growth in a society, wheat is far superior. The easier living and better resources meant that there was room for concepts such as care for the elderly and infirm, they were no longer a drag on the tribe, indeed, in terms of child-minding and small tasks about the settlement one can well see them being an asset as they freed other workers to go to the fields.
Story-tellers, priests and keepers of wisdom grew more important. If there ever was a cult of birth, life, death and sustenance from nature this shifted to sun, moon, season, rain and the fertility of the land. We suspect that there were rituals but there is no written record so we know nothing of it. It may be that this was the birth of what was later to become known as the Druids.
Another consequence of settlement, possessions and a higher standard of living was that there was more to lose. This meant that unlike the nomadic days flight wasn’t an option, you had to stand and defend what you owned, your houses, grain pits, crops and animals. Between 3,800 and 3,500BCE the tribe at Carn Brea in Cornwall built a defended site, a fort, it had stone faced walls and looks as though it was meant for more than one family. At the same time we start to see evidence in the archaeology of large (7 metre square) houses built of timber with wattle and daub infilling in the walls and stone foundations. By 3,200BCE houses were being built in the far north of the Isles of stone with stone furniture and drains.
Round about the time agriculture was being established we see a big change in burial practices. Barrows, passage graves and mounds ceased to be built and their place was taken by rings defined by a ditch or bank with flat burials nearby. If they had ditches and banks they are called henges, the crucial feature of 90% of them is that the ditch was inside the bank and therefore they were built for ceremony and not defence. There are over 300 of these henges identified all over the Isle except in the Yorkshire Wolds, East Anglia and much of the Midlands. All are dated from 3,000 to 2,200BC. Most are in valleys and are associated with water. In the later ones there is evidence of alignment with certain aspects of the sun.
At the same time we see evidence which suggests that tombs were blocked up and fields allowed to go to waste, we might be looking at tribal warfare. We’ll apply what we have learned this week to Barlick in the next article.
(15 October 2001)