The Isles of Scilly in ancient times - Ancient Penwith | Cornwall

Ancient Penwith
The prehistoric landscape of West Penwith, the Land's End peninsula, Cornwall
Ancient Penwith
Ancient Penwith
The prehistoric landscape of the Land's End Peninsula
Ancient Penwith
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The Isles of Scilly in ancient times

Island of the Dead

In the Bronze Age Scilly comprised one big and one small island (St Agnes). In some respects it was a more viable place to live than today because it was bigger and the climate was better (warmer and less wet, windy and stormy).

The Isle of Scilly constituted a separate world, a somewhat mystic world traditionally reputed to be the Isle of the Dead - and certainly the sheer number of burial-oriented cairns and cairnfields on the islands of today suggest that.

The 'isle of the dead' could be interpreted as an 'isle beyond time' or beyond normal reality - in ancient times it was reckoned that the souls of the dead went westward toward the setting sun. The tradition of a sunken landmass, Lyonesse, perhaps the Scilly island or a landmass between Scilly and the mainland, adds to this mystique.
The Isles of Scilly from the mainland  
The Isles of Scilly as seen from near Tregeseal stone circle

Scilly is dense with ancient sites - mostly cairns, with a large number (83) of chambered cairns, and a few menhirs and cliff sanctuaries. Most of these sites were on higher ground, and many were located and built to be seen from the sea.

Cairnfields

Scilly is notable for its cairnfields - agglomerations of cairns in large numbers, serving as cemeteries. There's something more about these cairnfields than meets the eye. Shipman Head cairnfield on Bryher contains over 130 cairns, most of them flat, low, platform cairns. They took a lot of work to build, so their builders certainly were strongly motivated to build them.

The cairns are not uniform. They include normal humped round cairns, flatter platform cairns, a few D-shaped and oval cairns and some ring cairns, some built around natural boulders or with a rock at one end, some with kerbs and some not. Kerbs are a ring of flattish stones placed vertically in the ground around the cairn, at least to contain the cairn physically and stop it spreading, but probably serving a greater function than that.

Chambered Cairns

Some cairns are chambered cairns, clearly with a different purpose to solid cairns. In the larger cairnfields, such as in the north of Bryher and Tresco, there are just a few chambered cairns amongst a large number of solid, mostly platform cairns.

Often the orientation of the chambers toward a variety of direction-points on the horizon is significant - the only problem being that we don't know exactly how, especially since there is a wide variety of orientations.

In many but not all cases, these chambers, long, thin and sometimes quite low, were oriented toward such points as the solstice sunrise and sunset points, but some were oriented near-due north and in a wide variety of directions that cannot easily be explained. However, on Scilly, many chambered cairns are oriented toward the best view from each particular location.

Elsewhere on this site it is suggested that a, perhaps even the, key purpose for chambered cairns was to serve as places to go to die ('conscious dying').

Chambered cairns (questionably called 'entrance graves') were unlikely to be for burial as we know it. They were likely in some cases to be a meditation or initiatory chamber or a repository for important items - such as seeds for upgrading, herbal decoctions for potentising, or for placing tools, then regarded as sacred, for a kind of reconditioning. But, given the profusion of cairnfields and chambered cairns, this suggests their major function could have been for dying.

Genetic tests have shown that bones left in urns in some chambered cairns tend to be from multiple people, even hundreds, suggesting that these bones were relics of tribal ancestors. But this was not burial, in the way that we know it. Memorialisation of individuals was not greatly important to Bronze Age people, unless perhaps they were the 'great and good' of the tribal lineages - though memorialisation did increase toward the end of the megalithic period. They believed in an afterlife and a form of reincarnation or soul-migration, so death was not imbued with the same significance and finality as we invest in death today.

It is said that, if Scilly was a place to bring the bodies of the dead, then the urns they were brought in would be of a style from elsewhere, yet urns found are of a Scillonian style and origin. However, the suggestion here is that people came to Scilly while still alive, in order to die there.
Shipman Head Down cairnfield, Bryher
There's a sense of pattern to the distribution of cairns within some cairnfields - they aren't randomly placed or in rows but in curvy lines and clusters. Again, the reason why is unknown. They could represent generations of members of tribes. A string of cairns might start with a few generations of a whole family, with additional cairns in a string being built for subsequent burials.

These patterns suggest that there is something more to cairnfields than the simple burial of the local dead. If they were for Scillonians only, why is it that such cairnfields do not exist in West Penwith? Why would Scillonian burial practices be radically different from those in Cornwall, or Ireland and the rest of Britain?

Burial is an assumed purpose for chambered cairns - it is not conclusively proven, and cases of burial remains in these cairns are few. So it is suggested here that there was a dying industry on Scilly, probably for select people, in which the chambered cairns were used for dying and the cairnfields for burial.

In the cairnfield on the map above, there are only two chambered cairns (light yellow), on the south edge of the hill - all the rest are solid, mostly platform cairns, made of a variety of constituents such as soil and stones, or rocks with infilled earth. Many have been raided by grave-robbers, dug through by rabbits or eroded by the weather, so their original internal structure is not clear to see.

A Maritime Culture

Culturally Scilly was connected with West Penwith, and whatever happened in one generally happened in the other, as evidenced by the chambered or entrance cairns uniquely built in both places, from around 2500 BCE in Penwith and 2250 BCE in Scilly (rough dates).

Though these are called 'Scillonian chambered cairns', their construction seems to have started first in Penwith, then to spread to Scilly - there are also some similar though different instances of such chambers in SE Ireland and Brittany.

However, there were differences between Scilly and Penwith - the islanders were isolated during winter months, and the journey to the mainland wasn't easy, so a separate culture developed on Scilly, even though many of Scilly's settlers were probably Penwithians.

One difference is the profusion of menhirs in Penwith and the number and size of cairnfields in Scilly. Scilly does not have the same 'necklace' of cliff sanctuaries as that which surrounds Penwith - perhaps because Penwith's cliff sanctuaries were established in the Neolithic, when Scilly was not constantly settled.

The people of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages were steadfast mariners, using log, plank-built and skin boats (a wooden frame with waterproofed leather stretched over them, like curraghs and coracles). They managed to bring animals with them, sailing from such places as Brittany to Cornwall and Ireland.

Those sailing from Brittany to Ireland would have used Scilly as a stopover, avoiding the strong tides and waves around West Penwith. With small and fragile boats, sailors had to await the weather for a sea crossing, applying sea dogs' intuition.

In good weather the Scillies and West Penwith are intervisible from higher places, and the journey could be done in a day using sail and paddle from Great Ganilly, Scilly's then main landing place, to Sennen beach in Penwith, or perhaps to Priest's Cove at Cape Cornwall. This would have been summer seasonal traffic - in winter, whoever was on the islands stayed there, since the seas, weather and currents could be rough and dangerous.

Scilly was permanently colonised around 2250 BCE, though Mesolithic and Neolithic finds indicate that the islands, then more wooded, were visited during summer months much earlier than 2250, perhaps with bouts of settlement.
Isles of Scilly from Carn Boel
Land and Sea Levels

On Scilly, since the Bronze Age the land has sunk and the sea has risen by 5-6 metres (15-18ft). Some ancient sites, especially settlements and field systems, now lie underwater, though since the ancients located their sacred sites on higher ground, most are still on land today. Sea levels have risen two metres or so, while land levels have sunk 2-3 metres at the same time.

The sinking of land levels comes from the Ice Ages, when land further north was weighed down by ice, causing land further south to rise. Following the last Ice Age we have therefore seen a slow sinking of the land on Scilly and to an extent in Penwith.

The legend of Lyonesse, reputedly located between Scilly and Penwith, and reputed to have sunk catastrophically, leaves a strong, richly suggestive tradition but it is difficult to justify geologically or archaeologically. Either it is a romanticisation and extrapolation of the fact that the Scillies and some parts between Scilly and Penwith sank between the Bronze Age and now, or there is something about the geology of this area that we do not know. (More here.)

The Seven Stones Reef, NE of Scilly and W of Penwith (site of the infamous 1967 Torrey Canyon disaster), is roughly two miles by one, and it would in the past have been more exposed, but this is hardly sufficient a size for the several towns and 140 churches Lyonesse was said to have had. It is difficult therefore to form a sound conclusion on this matter.

A mythic land to the west is a not uncommon theme on the Atlantic coast of Europe. Whether Lyonesse was an actuality or a metaphor, it is true that, when seen from the mainland, the Scillies sometimes appear from Penwith as if they are hovering slightly above the water - often around low tide on a hot summer's day.

Looking at the Scillies from a Penwith clifftop, it holds a mystique - even from Penwith's own mystique-rich viewpoint.
Isles of Scilly from near St Just
Isles of Scilly from near St Just
Alignments on Scilly
Click the map below to see it in greater detail
Alignments in the Isles of Scilly
To do justice to Scilly's alignments, the normal geomancers' rule of four or five sites to make an alignment has been reduced to three - otherwise, much is lost and many alignments disappear. This might not satisfy leyline-sceptics, but just look at the patterns that emerge from it.

A minority of alignments are three-point alignments - most are four or five. There is a pattern to the location of many cairns and menhirs that suggests coordination of their building, either planned or according to a consistent logic.

Some sites are aligned to points on the Penwith mainland. Alignment 78 starts at Bonfire Carn on Bryher, passing through three cairns in the Chapel Down cairnfield on St Martin's, then, over the water, it intersects the Longships Rocks, Maen Castle (a cliff sanctuary), Boscawen-ûn stone circle and St Michael's Mount.

Many of the cairns on Scilly were designed to be seen from the sea. This applies to cairns but not to the modest number of menhirs on St Mary's, all of which are inland.

Alignments on Scilly fall into two main types: those local to the islands (violet and blue) and those spanning the sound to the mainland (yellow and orange). The violet and blue are Scilly alignments, the blue ones being near-parallel. These near-parallel alignments, just one degree or so from exactly parallel, are seen elsewhere in Cornwall and throughout Britain.

The pattern of alignments slightly resembles a 'cat's cradle' with three predominant components: orientations of alignments NE-SW across St Mary's, roughly E-W across the northern isles, and a N-S axis between Bryher, Samson and St Agnes. There are also radials coming from sites on St Mary's across The Road to other islands.

Several sites emerge as being prominent, at least as nodes in the alignments system:
  • Gun Hill cairn on the SE end of St Martin's,
  • Knackyboy cairn in the middle of St Martin's,
  • Castle Down cairn on Tresco,
  • Halangy Lower cairn on St Mary's,
  • Pig Rock on St Mary's,
  • Samson Hill on Bryher, and
  • the multiple cairns on South Hill on the island of Samson.

There are several incoming backbone alignments from the mainland (yellow on the map), and a number of other longer-distance alignments (orange on the map) discovered thus far, all of them striking at least two sites on the Scillies and ending in the west of the islands. These longer-distance alignments highlight Samson Hill on Bryher, Knackyboy cairn on St Martin's, Obadiah's Barrow on Gugh and the Castle Down cairnfield on Tresco.

Two of the backbone alignments come from Boscawen-ûn (one starting at Godolphin Hill and the other at St Michael's Mount). One alignment comes from the Merry Maidens and Carn Lês Boel and one from Cape Cornwall, St Ives Head and further upcountry.

Alignments go from the Scillies to prominent cliff sanctuaries on the Penwith coast such as Cape Cornwall, Maen Castle, Pendeen Watch and Carn Lês Boel, or to hills such as Chapel Carn Brea (a beacon hill). One alignment goes as far as Carn Brea near Camborne.

It's worth noting two 'radiation points' where alignments fan out at a series of relatively close angles, at the Chapel Downs cairns on St Martin's, and at South Hill on Bryher.

Isles of Scilly from near St Just
Isles of Scilly from Carn Les Boel
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