Original subtitles

This is the story of how Britain came to be.

Of how our land and its people were forged over thousands of years of

history.

This Britain is a strange and alien world.

A world that contains the hidden story of our distant prehistoric path.

The occupation of Britain began with hunters battling for survival through

Ice Age.

It's fantastic after 14 ,000 years to get a glimpse of the way at least one

individual was thinking and continued into a new age that came after the Ice.

Instead of hunting mammoth and reindeer in the snow, he hunted

red deer in the wild wood.

Now the journey continued.

With the next chapter in our epic story.

Nothing like this had ever been seen before in Britain.

The invention of farming.

And the massive social revolution that came with it.

A brave new world that shaped our land and the way we lived.

I'm going back 10 ,000 years to a wild and untamed Britain.

The Ice Age was over.

And a new Britain had emerged, blanketed with trees, birch, alder, hazel and

finally oak.

Across the whole of our land, perhaps no more than a few thousand nomadic

hunters lived by drawing everything they needed from that landscape.

They had flint for tools, red deer provided meat, antler for

picks and harpoons and needles.

hides for shelters and clothes.

These people didn't just live close to nature, they were part of nature.

10 ,000 years ago, Britain was still attached to mainland Europe as it had

throughout the Ice Age.

Now though, sea levels were rising and a new Britain was emerging.

Gradually, Britain was becoming an island.

Much of the land that had been home to nomadic hunters for thousands of years

was disappearing beneath the wave.

Here on the south coast, just off the Isle of Wight, there's a relic of that

ancient world.

Evidence of people who lived here just as all this was becoming sea.

10 ,000 years ago, there was no Isle of Wight. It was part of the English

mainland to the north and still joined to Northern Europe and France to the

south. And all of that out there, the Solent, was dry land.

What should mean out there underneath the water are the relics of a lost world

and of the people who lived on it.

It's a world that's being explored by archaeologist Gary Mumber.

And I'm going to join him.

I'm about to go back to a time when writhing sea levels were turning land

tidal marsh.

when Britain was an island in the making.

The site is 8 ,000 years old, a time archaeologists call the Mesolithic, or

Middle Stone Age.

It's really everything in the picture of Mesolithic period that we're not

getting from sites on land.

So when the sea level was lower, further back in time, and we're finding the

well -preserved remains.

So it's actually the sea that's going to make it awkward for us.

It's what has preserved what we're going to see. If it wasn't for the sea, it

wouldn't be there.

Doing a final diver check.

Everything okay?

Diver's ready for the water.

One, this was home to a coastal community of hunter -gatherers.

living a way of life that had barely changed for thousands of years.

What's been discovered here is more than an ancient hunting camp.

It's the oldest boat -building yard in the world.

And it contains fragile evidence of the sophistication of the people who once

lived here.

So this piece of timber is how old?

Well, it's over 8 ,000 years old.

It has come up in association with other bits and pieces, and one piece of

timber in particular, which we believe may be part of a log boat.

See those grooves? Uh -huh.

How clearly defined they are. So that's woodworking, that's not natural erosion.

No, that's woodworking. That's obviously part of something, with the grooves

either side.

So someone 8 ,000 years ago was working with a stone tool to create these

grooves. You don't, as a general rule, you just don't see organic material

coming out of metallitic sites. You get the stone tools, but see what those

stone tools were being used for. It's the other half of the equation. It's

pretty unique and very special.

The log boat is an extraordinary insight into the lives of the hunters who once

lived here.

Mesolithic life might have been nomadic, but it was largely carried out around

the shorelines of Britain's coast and rivers.

The forested land of the interior was a dangerous, forbidden world.

But all that was about to change.

And all because of these, tiny grains of barley.

Like the stolen boat builders, these are around 8 ,000 years old.

But these aren't from the Isle of Wight.

These are from more than 2 ,000 miles away to the southeast, what's now Syria.

This is evidence of a new way of living, a world not of hunting, but of farming.

When this technology arrived in Britain, it would nudge us towards a whole new

era in our history, what we call the Neolithic, the New Stone Age.

By producing food, Farming communities could provide for bigger families, more

children, and that meant better chances of survival for the whole group.

Instead of hunting the wild herds, now farmers had new domesticated breeds of

cattle and sheep.

Instead of gathering wild nuts and berries, farmers could grow most of what

needed from seed.

The Neolithic Revolution.

was to utterly change the way we thought about food and survival, but it was

much, much more than that.

It was also to profoundly alter our sense of ourselves as human beings, as

of the natural world.

In a sense, as well as domesticating livestock, we were also domesticating

ourselves.

This revolution, when it finally reached our shores, would change everything.

It would change the land, the things we ate.

It would change our relationship with time.

It would change our beliefs and the way we understand our place in the universe.

This change, the jump to farming, was the single greatest social revolution

there's ever been.

To try and understand what happened when the radical new world of agriculture

collided with the ancient world of the hunter, I'm leaving England behind and

crossing the channel to France.

By 5000 BC, Neolithic culture was spreading into Western Europe.

For the hunting communities of northern France, the new ways must have been

completely baffling.

In Brittany, there's a unique set of monuments, lying upon line of ancient

standing stones.

These weren't erected by Neolithic farmers, but by Mesolithic hunters, just

the first farmers started appearing on their doorstep.

This place is just extraordinary.

I've known about it for years. I've seen photographs of it countless times, but

this is my first visit.

And the impact of the stones is just breathtaking.

Everywhere you look, there's more of them.

They're in every direction, line after line of them.

When you look at any one of them, they weigh at least tens of tons. Some of

look as if they weigh even more.

dominate the landscape everywhere you look.

We use extraordinary to describe a lot of things but a place like this really

deserves the word.

What we're looking at is the result of a collision not just of cultures but of

two completely different belief systems.

All of this might be The result of a monumental tipping point in human

The hunters hauled the stones into place to demonstrate their strength in the

face of people they didn't understand.

But there was the old world.

In just a few hundred years, Neolithic culture took over.

And many of these great standing stones became building material for something

new.

Neolithic stone tombs.

Archaeologist Serge Caffin has studied them for over 20 years.

Is there a connection between the change from lines of stones to tombs like this

and the change to farming?

Yes, it is probably linked with this new process, this new economy, this full

Neolithic, where life of animals, life of plants are very important inside

this life cycle.

Inside one tomb, excavated by Serge, this decisive fork in history is marked

some remarkable rock art.

So these, these are the old -style Mesolithic hunting weapons, almost like

primitive boomerang to kill birds. Exactly.

Okay. So this is the old world, very male, very phallic. Yes, exactly.

One carving in particular brings it all home.

We can observe now carvings. So it's another throwing stick.

Yes, the same shape, the same weapon, the same representation, and a...

We have the Polish axe from the Neolithic period with his handle.

The triangular shape.

Yes, exactly.

So you've got the new technology of the axe on top of and even cutting

into the old world of Froste. So this is almost the

moment or depicting the moment when the old world and the new world collide.

And after that collision, the new world is dominant over the old. Exactly.

We may never fully understand a site like Karnak.

We might never hear what those hunters were trying to say with the stones.

But to me, apart from anything else, they are a statement of defiance.

They're saying to the farmers, come in, bring your crops, bring your animals.

But be aware that we are here.

That we've always been here.

We're part of this landscape and we belong to it.

They're saying, we may not last forever.

Our way of life may not last forever.

But we will be remembered.

Not just for now, but for all time.

The age of the Mesolithic was coming to an end.

By 4500 BC, the Neolithic Revolution had conquered almost all of Europe.

But around here, it came to a halt.

Because of that, farming might have swept across the landmass of Europe, but

last few watery miles presented a different challenge.

It would take hundreds of years, but that final leap across the Channel and

Britain was inevitable.

Exactly how the new Stone Age came to Britain and what the local hunters made

it remains one of the greatest mysteries in all of our prehistory.

The first farmers must have come to Britain by boat, bringing their

domestic cattle and grain.

These were pioneers undertaking a perilous journey to a new and unknown

And direct evidence of some of those first farmers can be found here, in

Wait to see what's up here.

Nothing like this.

had ever been seen before in Britain.

This is one of the very earliest stone tombs. This is Neolithic behaviour.

The people who built this were amongst the first to come and farm our land.

And we're talking about 6 ,000 years ago.

Today, the rich soil of Kent is still prime farming land.

And together with its proximity to mainland Europe, you can see the

for the earliest farmers coming over.

Of course, you have to remember that 6 ,000 years ago, when the first people

arrived with the intention of farming here, all of that would have been

woodland. So first of all, they had to clear the trees, cut them down, burn

down, and then they had to build their homesteads.

You can only imagine what the local hunters thought.

Unlike the Mesolithic hunters who hugged the coastline and river valleys, the

first farmers began to break into the interior of Britain.

And what they found was a wild and wooded place.

For thousands of years, forests of oak and birch had grown, blanketing the

landscape in green.

This was home to red deer and elk.

In the undergrowth, Bears and wild pig.

But this wild and ancient Britain was about to be transformed.

Forever.

The new farmers were technologists.

This wasn't living off the land, like the metallithic hunters, but shaping it,

adapting it, making it work for them.

These people weren't simply fitting into the world alongside nature.

They were going to rule over it.

Incredibly, some of those pioneers, the very mothers and fathers of this brave

new world, have survived.

Around 17 individuals were interred in that Neolithic tomb.

in kent and these are the bones of just a few of them there's a whole

age range represented amongst the dead these pelvis bones

here this is a baby and an older child through to older people and old people

neolithic terms is somebody my age somebody in their 40s would be

and we often talk about the neolithic revolution

and the farming revolution and the effect it had on Britain and on the

landscape.

But what you also see here, and you have to remember all the time, are real

people.

This is part of a man's skull.

These individuals are part of the most profoundly affecting

living experiment that's ever been attempted.

They... trust their future to planting a few seeds in the spring in the hope of

a harvest in the autumn. They keep some animals in the hope that that meat will

be enough to sustain them and their families.

It's a gamble.

So whatever else you might want to imagine about the man, he was certainly

brave.

It's traditionally been thought that farming gradually spread north and west

from its first foothold in the South East.

But new evidence suggests this could be wrong.

This is a piece of a bone from a domesticated cow.

It's a classic Neolithic indicator.

What makes this one unique, however, is that it wasn't found in the South East

of England.

but in the deep south west of Ireland.

And it may date from as early as 4 ,300 years B .C.

That's hundreds of years before the first trace of the Neolithic lifestyle

Kent. And so far, no one has been able to explain what it's doing there.

And the unexplained cow bone isn't the only evidence that's challenging the

accepted story of how Neolithic culture spread through Britain.

As far north as Orkney, there's also evidence of early farmers in the shape

prehistoric voles.

So here's a group of skulls. You can see characteristic skull shape. This guy

here is the field vole. This is the vole that's found most commonly in the UK

mainland. This guy here is actually much more interesting. This is the vole

that's found in Orkney, but is not found, importantly, in the UK and

Microtus arvalis, the Orkney vole.

only lives on a few islands off the north -east tip of Scotland.

The evidence of ancient vole bones shows that they first appeared at least 5

,500 years ago.

The question is, how did they arrive?

The closest relatives that we have genetically to the Orkney vole

from the Rhine Valley in Germany.

and maybe in Brittany.

But clear, the voles aren't swimming from Europe to Orkney on their own,

means that humans are involved.

It's thought the vole came amongst grain, carried by early farmers.

Not from the British mainland, but direct from France.

It seems that the early settlers in Kent might represent only one route

Neolithic culture took from Europe.

There are also those earlier Neolithic expeditions to south -west Ireland and

the mysterious vole -carrying voyages direct to Orkney.

What's emerging?

is something much more complex and subtle than the traditional view of the

Neolithic revolution.

Many people would have continued with a nomadic or semi -nomadic lifestyle,

supported by a few domesticated animals.

And that way of life would have continued for hundreds of years at

And then there were the settled farmers themselves. They would have continued to

hunt to supplement their diet.

However people took up the new wave, it's now thought that Neolithic culture

some form swept across the whole of Britain in just a few generations.

But with just a few fragments of evidence from 6 ,000 years ago, exactly

all began might forever remain a mystery.

What more?

Across the whole of Britain, there's precious little evidence of how those

farmers actually lived.

which is why I'm leaving our shores yet again, headed this time for Ireland.

Welcome to the west of Ireland, one of the wildest, most spectacular landscapes

I've ever seen.

In Britain, Archaeologists have only discovered fragments of early farming,

here something's been preserved on a truly massive scale.

What's special about this place is the ground.

This landscape is blanketed in peat bog, slowly decaying vegetation that builds

up layer upon layer. It takes thousands of years, but what's drawn me here isn't

the bog itself, but what's hidden beneath it, as much as four metres

feet.

You just drive it in. Oh, it's like a knife through butter.

Archaeologist Hamith Caulfield has been probing this bog with simple metal rods

for over 40 years.

So, just about here. And put it in straight. It's vertical.

He's using them to map ancient stone walls made by the Neolithic farmers who

once lived here.

So that's the old ground surface coming on and then...

And you can hear that you're hitting stone now.

Yes, it's beginning to look like it.

Amazing. Listen to that again. Give it a... Yeah.

Knock, knock. Yeah.

Five and a half thousand years ago, someone lifted a stone in place, and now

we're hearing it for the first time.

So how much have you found? How extensive is the wall?

Something over 100 linear kilometres at this stage.

100 kilometres?

Yeah. You're joking. That is jaw -dropping.

The scale of that is five and a half thousand years ago. Yes.

It's just sitting there under the bog as it was.

By probing every inch of this land, Seamus and his teams of helpers have

revealed far more than some buried walls.

What they've found is the biggest Neolithic field system in the entire

cattle enclosures that stretch almost as far as the eye can see.

What are the fields for?

It's a dairying economy. They have to wean the calves from the milked cows.

have to separate the dry stock from the milking animals.

There's herd management is what's involved in these fields. So they need

separate areas to keep.

bull calves and milking cows and all the rest. Yes.

Typically in Ireland, the weather turns foul.

But I'm determined to uncover some of this wall for myself.

And here on the bog, there's only one way to do it.

Clean the blade.

Is this all just used locally?

That's 90 % water at the moment, but it dries out and that's the fuel we use all

the time. All I

can say is

don't give up the day job.

You're right.

And look, there it is.

Look at that.

That is the wall.

That's amazing.

Look, come here. Look at this. Look.

That's the top of a wall that's about a metre high.

Extends down about a metre beneath my feet.

Now, the sun has risen and set two million times since these stones last

light of day. The last hands to touch these before mine were those of a

Neolithic farmer five and a half thousand years ago.

Now, even on a foul day like today, and this is truly foul, the sight of these,

the touch of these, makes it worthwhile.

Doesn't it?

Just about.

It does.

It does. Yes, it still does.

Amazing.

The cage of field structures are a hidden wonder of the world.

But the walls aren't the only secret.

Because the peat itself can reveal just what this world was like five and a half

thousand years ago.

And even what was being farmed.

The peat is

preserving the record of human activity, vegetation, etc.

through time.

So it is like a history book of thousands of years.

By studying pollen grains preserved in the peat, Michael O 'Connell can

what was growing in the ancient landscape.

This particular pollen grain comes from pine. Pine was the dominant tree in

cagey fields before farmers came.

At the early part of the Neolithic, the pollen totally changed from being tree

pollen dominated to being herb and grass dominated.

The change to grassland pollen shows that the trees were cut down and

with pasture for grazing cattle.

But in amongst the grassland pollen, Michael has made an even more startling

discovery.

We were really excited about these results.

This particular sample has quite a number of cereal pollen and of course

really important because it shows wheat and maybe also barley were grown.

So this was a really interesting and significant find.

Cereals and domestic animals transform society.

But there was also a third Neolithic invention.

Pottery.

Together, all three created a completely new diet.

A feature of Neolithic life studied by Jackie Wood.

This is actually just wheat that's just boiled. I know the new thing from the

Neolithic.

And bread.

Flatbread.

That's very, that's so flavoursome. Now this is a bit of prehistoric stew.

With slow cooking. Slow cooking, yeah, absolutely.

Butter, big thing in the Neolithic.

Bread and butter, what could be more quintessentially British?

I tell you what, absolutely everything is so substantial.

You wouldn't need much of anything, would you really?

Six year ribs and everything else.

The new food might have seemed good, but human remains show evidence of farmers.

being less healthy than hunters with their diet of fresh fish and red deer.

No more, I beg of you.

And there was another price to pay.

This is actually a real quern, a neolithic quern. This is the genuine

not our... This is the genuine article, so if we put some sort of grain on

first... So this is some thousand years old.

That's right.

So what's the action?

Just... Spread, up and down, like that.

But that sound is the sound of the sandwich, basically.

I'm doing this for a minute, but if you were put to work like this...

you know, on a daily basis. What kind of toll, physical toll, do you think this

kind of work had on people? We can actually see that it did have a toll

in the archaeology you actually find sort of skeletons where the actual parts

the vertebrae are actually quite warm because of repeatedly doing this

But you need to grind for a good hour every day to make enough bread for a

family. Every day.

So, the daily grind, basically.

Despite all the individual hardships it brought, it was the sheer productivity

of farming that made it irresistible as a survival strategy.

This is where our working lives began, invented by the first farmers of the

Neolithic.

This was a point of no return.

Farming was productive.

So people could have more children and open up more land. The population

increased.

There quickly came a day when they couldn't go back to hunting, even if

wanted to, because there were simply too many people around.

And it wasn't just the daily grind.

This new age would usher in the idea of land ownership and conflict.

The Neolithic would completely change how we thought about ourselves.

In this life and the next.

The Neolithic revolution changed our mindset.

Not only towards work, but the idea of the land and our relationship to it.

It changed our beliefs.

And evidence of these new beliefs can be found in massive stone tombs, some of

which mark our countryside even today.

One of the most impressive is in Wiltshire.

This great long mound was created by digging thousands of tonnes of chalk

from ditches on either side.

Some of the stones weigh 40 tonnes and they were hauled here from as much as a

mile away.

This is the work of a whole community, not just one family.

And it's people for whom the creation of this mattered as much or more than

anything else they were doing. And these were busy farmers.

This isn't just a whom.

This isn't simply about remembering a loved one.

This is about creating an entire world, one built by the community of the living

for the community of the dead.

And wait till you see what's inside.

About 40 people were buried in here around 3600 B .C.

over a period of maybe just 25 years or so.

What we think happened was when someone died, if it was deemed appropriate that

they... become part of this play, then their body would be laid out, maybe

nearby, maybe even in here in the passageway, and then the natural process

decomposition would begin and animals and birds would remove the flesh over a

period of time.

And then, once there was little remaining but the skeleton, the bones,

they would be gathered up and placed in the chambers. Now, there was a

particular logic to this place.

Old people and young people in separate chambers on either side of the

passageway. And then further in, maybe adult males and females, again separated

and on either side of the passageway. And then, all the way at the back, just

the remains of adult males.

They weren't laid out as individuals, as intact skeletons.

You would have a pile of skulls.

then a separate neat pile of vertebrae and another pile of long bones.

And that was important because what's going on is a process by which the loved

ones seem to be just individuals, members of the community.

They become part of one collective presence, the ancestors.

Strangely, though, tombs like this weren't fuelled.

but left open.

In some ways, they were more akin to temples, which you could enter to

with the spirits of the dead.

And imagine what that felt like for people who truly believed that their

ones, as well as the ancient dead, were somehow in here, that their will was in

here, and that they were watching them, and that they were aware.

So you would come in here.

with great reverence and great respect, with the hairs going up on the back of

your neck and all over your body, as you wondered what would happen next.

But these great structures also had an earthly function.

All around us is rich and fertile farmland, highly valued.

By building this here, the people are laying claim to it.

This long barrow forged a permanent link between the community, their ancestors,

and the fields they had farmed for generations.

This is about the arrival of something new in our history, the concept of

ownership.

But the notion of ownership, the idea that a place, a territory, belonged to

tribe and their ancestors,

was to have consequences.

Up on top of this hill is the site of one of the earliest examples of a great

watershed in British history.

Armed conflict.

Look at that for a view.

That's the Severn Valley down there.

Over there, ghostly, in the mist, the Malvern Hills.

Over in that direction, the Forest of Dean.

Beyond that, the Black Mountains, and onwards into Wales.

That's modern -day Gloucester down there.

But of course, five and a half thousand years ago, that landscape would have

been predominantly woodland, with the occasional farmstead and cleared field.

And in a sense, whoever controlled this high ground controlled the landscape

below. So if you wanted to lay claim to all that valuable land, you had to take

this, the top of Crickley Hill.

And what's been found up here is testament to that.

Look at the either half a dozen flint arrowhead

And they're from a collection of around 450 complete arrowheads or fragments

that were found, gathered all across the top of Crickley Hill.

To my eye, these are just the most beautiful things.

They're so symmetrical, so beautifully shaped.

Look at the profile of that. Look how fine it is. How much effort has gone

taking off infinite numbers of tiny flakes.

to produce that pier -shaped arrowhead.

But as well as appreciating the beauty of them, and some of these could be

jewellery, as well as appreciating all of that, you have to appreciate that

is also evidence of the cruel intention to kill.

5 ,000 years ago, the longbow was state -of -the -art technology.

So what we've got here is a Neolithic longbow.

This particular piece of wood is ash.

It was cut down a year ago, so therefore it's not carrying too much moisture.

That makes it nice and springy.

Now, we've made a fairly heavy bow here.

If it bends and it works...

I hope your guy Neil has got some strength behind him, because...

There's no kids, Bo.

Pine resin makes a strong neolithic glue to fix the arrowheads.

And for the flight, crow's feathers.

So that is ready to go.

In the attack on Crickley Hill, the Neolithic bow proved decisive.

Right here, five and a half thousand years ago, the defenders were routed.

I'll show you how to use it and then we'll see what you're like as an archer.

Because we're always looking for good archers on English territory.

Not Scots, surely.

You don't want that.

Dead centre.

So... Right, I'll do the Robin Hood shot now. Let's see how you go. I'll split

that shaft.

Right, I think I'll go for three fingers.

Righto. Okay.

Put some shoulder behind it.

Give me another arrow.

You go for it. I'm sure there's a lucky one in here for you.

That looks more like it.

It's clearly the arrow that was wrong. Yeah.

As opposed to my technique.

Even in the hands of a beginner, this weapon is lethal.

An arrow fired from 30 metres would have gone straight through any medium -sized

animal.

Or human.

Right, well, what's the damage?

Well, as I think you're going to see... See, check that out, right the way

through. And that's flesh and bone, so that's what these things are capable of.

And of course up here on Crickley Hill it was being used against more than

of pork.

Human beings were the prey that day.

You wouldn't want it in your leg, would you?

No.

Back at the Natural History Museum, there's direct evidence of this violent

world.

Look at this poor chap.

The condition of his teeth suggests that he died probably in his mid -twenties,

no older than that.

And he died because someone smashed his skull in with

a blunt object, maybe a stone axe or a stone hammer, and the wound was

with such force that it caused this fracture line to

radiate right round to the other side of his skull.

He would have been killed instantly.

And the violence at that time wasn't limited to the men.

This is a woman's skull.

And there's a wound here towards the front.

And then, much easier to see, there's another dimpled wound to the back of her

head. But she survived the attack that caused these wounds.

We know she survived because she lived long enough for the wounds to heal over.

And she also lived long enough to have lost all of her teeth by the time she

finally gave up the ghost.

What we can say about this is really quite shocking.

It means that if you lived in those first centuries of the Neolithic, at

between 4000 and 3000 BC, people would have known about, they would have

witnessed.

And they might even have experienced extreme physical violence.

There was a lot of it about.

In just a few hundred years, the population of Britain exploded.

From just a few thousand hunters to perhaps 100 ,000 farmers.

As contact between groups became more frequent, people needed to find new ways

of coming to terms with it.

without always killing one another.

They also had to lay the foundations of a kind of local politics as well.

It was as if they were saying, it's not enough just to change the way we live,

the way we work.

We'll have to invent society as well.

This need to cooperate, to get along, gave birth to monuments on a truly grand

scale.

The very act of hundreds or even thousands of people collaborating would

bound Neolithic communities together.

The earthworks they created are so vast they remain etched into our landscape

even today.

despite the ravages of thousands of years of wind and rain.

One of those giant monuments can be found here in Wiltshire.

The trouble is, it's so big that up close you can't even see it.

I'm right in the middle of something archaeologists call a cursive.

This one is three kilometres long and 150 metres wide.

Some are even bigger.

To be honest, you could be forgiven for walking right past it without even

noticing.

Down there is the remains of a ditch. It's very shallow now, but it stretches

almost as far as the eye can see.

It's barely perceptible, but in its original form, it would have been quite

distinct. Chalky white soil against the green of the grass.

And it would have marked out the interior as a very long, thin lozenge

These were originally called cursices because they were thought to have been

remains of Roman racetracks.

But of course, we now know that they're much, much older.

This thing was built by Neolithic farmers.

3 ,500.

Today,

the only way to really get a sense of the shape of monuments like this is from

the air.

Even from up here, it's not that easy to see.

But after a while, you get your eye in and you begin to see what it is you're

supposed to be looking at.

From one end, the cursive can be seen cutting through a bank of trees, almost

like a gigantic runway, disappearing off into the distance.

What you're struck with, though, more than anything, is the scale of the

thing. And what hits you is the level of effort that was involved, not to

mention the sheer determination.

Of course the big question is, what does this shape symbolise?

Is it a boundary?

Is it a processional way?

Is it even a narrow vessel designed to contain the dead?

Perhaps it's a bit of all of those things.

But the simple truth is, we don't know.

But there are other monuments we do know more about.

Massive earthworks.

known as causewayed enclosures.

And there's one.

Three concentric circles, like three necklaces, looped around the hill. Right

down there.

These monuments are meeting points where people came for large gatherings,

perhaps at special times of the year.

For archaeologist Alistair Whittle, they reveal the beginning of Stone Age

society.

Co -operating closures are very exciting places and all sorts of things go on.

So they could, I don't know, settle disputes or meet husbands and wives, you

know, marry people off. I think all these things would have gone on. And do

have the artefacts, do we have the things left behind?

We have lots of artefacts. That's one of the big things about these sites, that

they're rich in material and we have lots of artefacts.

So here we've got the top of the skull and the horn towards the front, as

it's called, of a domesticated cow or ox.

So how old is that skull?

A little over 5 ,500 years.

That's a hugely significant find for me to see something like that. You know,

that's... That's so early in the story of farming. They thought that that beast

was walking the ground here when this was a shining white model looking out

woodland. And then it met its fate, perhaps its sacrifice, it's probably

Then we can look at the spots here. And again, is this of a comparable age to

the ox bone?

This is the same age, so we're looking at about 5 ,500 years old.

I mean, it's so redolent of everything that the Neolithic is about. You know,

the domesticated animals, the new ceramic, the new foods that were made

because of this. I keep thinking of a time capsule. Is this a conscious effort

for people to remember where they came from, how far they've come?

I think it is. I think memory is very important.

And coming to terms with a huge...

Coming to terms with a really big change in existence which has been played out

over these opening centuries of the Neolithic.

The early monuments of the new Stone Age are about people coming to terms with a

whole new world.

Not only with each other, but the land itself.

And their place within it.

This place encapsulates what these people who lived in Britain, these early

farmers, were trying to work out and to understand.

And discoveries made here go some way towards summing it all up.

Look at this.

This is the ankle bone of a domesticated cow.

It was found buried within the ditch that encircled the topmost, innermost

of this hill that's where all the pottery was found as well incidentally

represents is the world that the farmers were trying to create the

safe domesticated controllable world by contrast

look at this one this is the ankle bone of a wild cow an

undomesticated animal you can see right away how much bigger it is than the bone

from the domesticated cow now this wasn't found up here instead this was

right at the base of the hill down there out there is the dangerous world

the wild world the uncontrolled undomesticated world and to me

there's something a little bit sad about that because it's the wild world that

the old way of life of the hunters was so in tune with.

And yet it was that world that the farmers were trying to be separate from,

cut themselves off from.

Here, around 3 ,800 years BC, the farmers were trying to

make sense of all of that in their own minds.

Just where was the boundary between the wild and the domestic?

Where had the brave new world that they'd created actually brought them.

It's as though they realised that now they had made their bed and that they

would have to lie in it.

And, to some extent, so must we.

Next time, my journey continues.

Of course, what everybody's waiting for is the sunrise.

As I discover a whole new age.

Which one can I have?

Take them all.

A time of elite travellers.

I actually feel it working. I want to hear it, I want to feel it. Now that's a

bit good.

Vast cosmic construction.

I see why you don't have this place open to the public, George.

And the very invention of heaven itself.

When some people died.

They were to be sent to a new place, a different place.

Not down into the earth, but up into the sky.