There has been much stress in academic circles on the competitive nature of later prehistoric society in Britain. The rise of powerful leaders, the importance of impressive hillforts and the growing luxury of fine objects, including massive gold neck-rings (known as torcs) and even the importation of wine from the Mediterranean.h

Onions provide the basis for many modern dishes, but the large cultivated varieties originated in the Middle East and Asia and probably only reached Britain in Roman times.

The sheer number of barrows surrounding Stonehenge can best be appreciated by walking through the landscape on a spring or autumn day, when the air is clear and dry and before the crops become too high. Most of the hundreds of tourists will be trudging around Stonehenge and you can see them, and of course get some superb views of the Stones, from

Rather like the cathedrals and churches of our own times, many prehistoric tombs and shrines have complex histories. When you enter Maes Howe, for example, you will notice the huge upright stones at the corners of the main hall – these most probably formed part of a pre-existing stone circle, now built into the tomb. It’s also very probable that an

Wet areas have long been regarded as special. In part this reflects their liminality, but there is also something supernatural about water itself: a mirror on life, but a cause of death.f These ideas probably help to explain why so many dry ‘islands’, such as the Isle of Ely, were seen in the past as sacred places. Glastonbury is and was the

The famous burial of a man known as the Amesbury Archer, not far from Stonehenge, is a case in point.2 His grave, which has been radiocarbon dated to between 2470 and 2280 BC, was carefully arranged with five complete Beaker pots, a large collection of fine flint and polished stone objects, and no fewer than three copper daggers, plus a pair of

By the final five hundred years before Christ, the broad sweep of the British landscape would have become recognizable to many people living today: roads, fields, farms and villages had replaced the forests, moors, heaths and open floodplains that dominated the view when the first farmers arrived in Britain, four millennia earlier.

there is increasing evidence that in common with the chamber tombs of Neolithic times, more than a millennium previously, greater emphasis at many ceremonial sites was placed on rituals associated with the midwinter solstice (21 December).

Today there are many other techniques of science-based dating, some of which can be astonishingly accurate – if bark is present, tree-ring dating (or dendrochronology) can provide dates to the nearest three months. For example, the waterlogged circle of Bronze Age timbers known as ‘Seahenge’, from Holme-next-the-Sea in Norfolk, is known to have