Transcript: Dr Alison Sheridan, VFT 3: Kilmartin Glen

Question 3: Can you discuss some of the links between Kilmartin and Orkney during the Later Neolithic? Kilmartin, and in particular the Temple Wood stone circles, have a specific western arc link. So, they were part of an amazing phenomenon that linked Orkney with the Boyne Valley in Ireland. This was a complicated link and what we are dealing with really is…there was a society in early Neolithic Ireland, around 3200 BC, where people had been building bigger and bigger, and more elaborate passage tombs. So, the tombs at Newgrange and Knowth and Dowth in the Boyne Valley had become sort of wonders of the ancient world and we know that people were going form far and wide to visit and probably participate in what would have been, certainly at Newgrange, a mid-winter solstice celebration there. And it looks very much as though the elite, or the burgeoning elite, in Orkney borrowed some of their ideas from the elite in the Boyne Valley, so that’s why you get these passage tombs, such as Maeshowe, that have a cross-shaped chamber. And Maeshowe itself was constructed in such a way that the setting sun on mid-winter solstice would shine along the passage and into the chamber.

One of the other things that we know was adopted form the Boyne Valley, in Orkney, was the use of the spiral motif. And the spiral was probably a sacred symbol. We don’t know exactly what it meant but it could have referred to the movement of the sun. So, that if you look at the way the sun actually rises and sets at different times in the year and continue it around, it looks as if it sketches a spiral. If you go to Temple Wood stone circle, the southern circle, you’ll see that there is a spiral carved on, in fact on two sides of one stone. It’s really interesting because it started off as a single side that was decorated in this way, probably done around 3000BC and then at a later date, possibly 2100BC, they built up, they modified the monument, and they covered over that spiral but they sort of replaced it by re-carving it, not quite so well, on the adjacent face.

But let’s go back to 3000BC. In Orkney this was a time when Maeshowe, and other similar passage tombs, like Quoyness, had already been built. It was a time when they were building the stones of Stenness, which is a tall stone circle, with a bank and a ditch – a henge – around it. And it looks as though the use of grooved ware pottery, which is a particular kind of pottery that was invented in Orkney, and the use of stone and timber circles spread southwards out of Orkney. And I feel very strongly that the construction of the stone Temple Wood circles, and in fact the timber circle at Temple Wood north, was part of this southward spread of ideas. So, even though the spiral that we see on Temple Wood might have originated, in its concept, in the Boyne Valley, it probably was used in Kilmartin thanks to a southward movement of ideas and practices from Orkney.

So, it’s not as though people were coming from Ireland to Kilmartin Glen, at that time (they did much later on; they came in the early Bronze Age) but certainly as far as the stone circles are concerned it was a southward movement. And in fact you can see that southward movement all the way to southwest Ireland, and to southern England as well, particularly in the style of grooved ware pottery that is found.

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