Tombs with a view: landscape, monuments and trees

Antiquity, June, 2003 by Vicki Cummings, Alasdair Whittle

Our final speculations concern the possibility that some monuments were located in order to have specific trees or groups of trees visible. This would take its place in a possible chain of signification. Some timbers may have been incorporated into the fabric of a monument in order to recreate or recall the experience of encountering a wooded environment. In addition to this, living trees may also have been used to demarcate space or to create particular visual effects. Trees may have marked out areas around the edge of monuments, effectively blocking immediate views to the monument or forecourt, or restricting access. It has been suggested that monument builders deliberately created areas of darkness and light within chambers and interiors (Bradley 1989; Jones 1999). The presence of differing densities of trees around a monument could also create effects of dark and light outside a monument as well as inside (Figure 5).

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Trees could also have been used to mark out other boundaries around sites or points of transition. Selective felling could have created avenues for the approach to a monument, and may even have been a forerunner to cursus monuments (so far rather rare in Wales itself) or to more formalised avenues as at Avebury and Stonehenge. This would effectively have enabled people to orchestrate which landscape features were visible from monuments, as well as to restrict the number of people who could see the wider landscape.

Conclusion

We have shown that the environmental evidence from sites in Wales suggests that Neolithic monuments were located in a range of different settings. Some sites seem to have been placed in quite open landscapes, while others may have been surrounded by trees. It seems likely that from sites which were surrounded by trees, the encircling landscape would still have been visible, even if only for part of the year. Likewise, it would have been possible to see the monument from the landscape. This suggests that a consideration of the landscape settings of monuments remains a valid approach and that the presence of trees does not remove the significance of relationships between monuments and their surrounding topography. We have also suggested that trees may have been used to create particular visual effects at differing times of the year, to emphasise views of particular landscape features or even to orchestrate an encounter with a monument, by marking out boundaries around it. In this way, trees may have been an integral part of the experience and use of early Neolithic monuments in their wider landscape setting, just as they were an inescapable feature among which daily life was played out.

Received: 27 March 2002; accepted: 18 September 2002; edited: 4 March 2003

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank: the Board of Celtic Studies for funding this research; John Evans for discussing issues of tree cover; Richard Bradley for providing additional information on the occurrence of monuments and trees; and the referees for their constructive criticism.