Landscape Artistry and Positioning - Ancient Penwith | Cornwall

At many ancient sites, their positioning is a major factor. It gives them meaning, context and sometimes a feeling of grandeur.

Stand at the site and quite often remarkable landscape features or panoramic sweeps are visible - a hill appears behind another, another site becomes visible, or the sun sets at solstice over a nick in the skyline. When you step away, that perspective disappears. A sense of centrality at the place gives the feeling that everything revolves around it.

There are no rules to the placing of ancient sites - there's an artistic element to it involving tweaking an existing landscape. It can be highly nuanced: at Tregeseal, a number of separate surrounding hills merge to form a bowl enclosing the locality, directing attention out to sea toward the Scilly Isles and winter solstice sunset.

The menhir on Watch Croft is positioned on a 'false horizon' - that is, not at the top of the hill - to make it visible on the skyline when seen from Mên Scryfa. (This adds weight to the possibility of Mên Scryfa being a Bronze Age menhir, not Iron Age, as is often believed.)

The landscape changed enormously between the Neolithic 3000s and the peak of the Bronze Age. People were not madly deforesting the land with chain-saws, but they needed wood for fires, construction and implements.

When they needed to create a field they would remove trees and undergrowth by felling and burning over a period of time. This impacted on nature but people cared for nature and, by the peak of the Bronze Age, half of all land was still wooded.

Since landscape factors were important in ancient sites, it follows that the ancients would selectively fell trees to highlight landscape features around a site - particularly in stone circle complexes. At the Merry Maidens and Boscawen-ûn landscape visibility is a key issue, currently obstructed by hedges, telegraph poles and visual obstructions. Nowadays we isolate stone circles within a small patch of property,  and landscape design, such as it is, does not consider ancient sites.

One of the key purposes to building so many ancient sites was to enchant and enliven the landscape, to perfect nature and improve everyone's lives. It is difficult to read the thoughts of ancient people, but there are plenty of signs of sophisticated thinking in their landscape design.

Also, this is a question of the way that nature has laid itself out, and the way that the ancients made use of topography and scenery.

  

Archaeologist Paul Bonnington discovered how Chapel Carn Brea is visible from all of the many clifftop cairns between Cape Kenidjack and Mayon Cliff, as seen above.

Since Chapel Carn Brea is the first and last hill in Britain, these ocean-watching cairns could be regarded as energy-collectors and distributors for an energy-stream coming down or going up the South West peninsula of Britain, ending or starting at Chapel Carn Brea. Even today, when beacons are lit nationally, it is the first to be lit.

All of the cairns have a visibility connection with Scilly, by dint of the ocean-facing panorama they all share. This is clearly part of the energy and landscape structure of the west-facing cliffside landscape temple that stretches along the coast (see below).

Some sites are naturally sophisticated in their geomantic qualities - this suggests a certain order in nature that arranges this.

Trencrom Hill, a Neolithic tor and Iron Age hill camp, is remarkably well-placed, even though it's a natural site. The summer solstice sun rises over St Agnes Beacon, NE up the coast, at winter solstice it rises over the gap between Godolphin Hill and Tregonning Hill SE, and at summer solstice it sets in the dip between Trink Hill and Rosewall Hill NW, rolling down the left-hand slope of Trink Hill until it sets at the bottom (see below). Now who organised that?

It's a concise visual landscape which fits together in terms of its look and feel, its psycho-geography, particularly as seen from certain ancient sites central to them. In Penwith it looks as if landscape temples often coincided with tribal areas.

One example is the high coast from Cape Cornwall to Mayon Cliff (in blue, around Boscregan Cairns, below). It was presided over by Chapel Carn Brea. The clifftop hills along the coast are each topped by a series of clifftop cairns that complement one another, overlooking the Longships Rocks and Scilly.

This was a landscape temple. Here lived a tribe of people, probably related to Scillonians. They would have been involved with Scilly contacts and trade via Sennen beach. This was their patch. They would have been big on fishing, metal streaming and seafaring, with a likely tribal centre at Nanquidno.

The map above is solely hypothetical, though it does roughly sketch out the natural areas and likely tribal areas of West Penwith.

They will not have been rigid territories since intermarriage, conventions, social interaction and necessity will have bonded the tribes. The basic similarity of ancient remains across the peninsula indicates collaboration and interchange.

The Cornish are not by nature competitive and bellicose - a marked characteristic throughout Cornwall's history. Territoriality in Cornwall grew after the end of the megalithic period, from 1200 BCE onwards in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages, and particularly when the Romans, Saxons and Normans came along.

When visiting ancient sites, take a look around to see the shape of the landscape around, and check other ancient sites that might be visible or in the vicinity.

There's a poesy and artistry to the way sites were positioned in the landscape and in relation to each other. Positioning and visibility are not rationally organised. So when roaming around visiting ancient sites, it's necessary to have a 'magical eye' when surveying the scene, because that's the way the ancients saw things.

They did not impose a uniform system on the landscape - they didn't think that way. They made intuitive choices, doing what they felt was best with what was available, as if decorating nature. There was something creative and evocative to it.

Yet there was also system to it. The interlocking of the logic of this system of thinking and design and the artistry of ancient site placement is one of the wondrous aspects of this subject.

The moorlands of the north were then made up of green grassland between patches of woods. The densely wooded lands of the south of the peninsula were cleared and colonised in the Bronze Age. Arable farmland was not as extensive as today - much food was foraged, trapped, fished and hunted - but there were grazed parklands and farmed fields amidst the remaining woodlands. By the peak of the Bronze Age around 1800 BCE Penwith was 50% cleared - tin smelting consumed a lot of wood.