Sublime

Excavations at West Hill, near Uley, in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, have revealed the history of a major shrine complex that thrived and evolved right through the prehistoric and Romano-British periods and beyond.30 First identified as a special place in the third millennium BCE, the wooded hill top here, once cleared of trees, became a focus fo

Maes Howe belongs to a tradition of tombs known as passage graves, which probably originated in Brittany. It was built in the later Neolithic, shortly after 3000 BC, and consists of a long entrance passage that leads into a central hall with small side cells for burials. In common with the other great passage grave from these islands, Newgrange, in

A few miles north of Greave’s Ash the indomitable twin-domed hillfort of Yeavering Bell looms imperiously over Glendale and the Milfield plain beyond. Here, an Iron Age fortress and summer camp were the focus of regional power and of a tribal cult. Yeavering’s chieftains seem to have retained their power and identity through the Roman centuries and

During the first and second centuries CE the sacred enclosure at Uley acquired a solid timber shrine at its centre – square in form, like so many other contemporary ceremonial monuments identified in Britain and on the Continent. Subsequently a square stone temple, of considerable grandeur, directly replaced its predecessor on the hill top, eventua