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The cairn, Long Mound and Sacred Circle
There was apparently a religious element to part of the last Neolithic settlement, in the form of the shrine. However following the destruction of this settlement, and with it the shrine, the religious importance of the site increased considerably. The excavation uncovered a series of religious features which are currently unique in the UK. It seems that in the absence of settlement for the next 2000 years, ritual activity continued in a very significant way.
The first development was for a stone Cairn to be built in the NW end of the valley, about 30 metres long, over the top of many elements of the earlier shrine. At the SE end of this, a series of hearths, slabs and small stone mounds formed part of the monument.The Cairn was covered in a very curious set of grooves or channels. This Cairn was used for a long period, because the surface is very worn.
Eventually, this first Cairn was buried in soil for it’s whole length, and a second set of features filled the next 30 metres of the valley, this time right in the centre. The earth mound covering the earlier Cairn included slabs along the edges which seemed to seal the ends of the earlier grooves. In time, this second set of Cairn structures was also buried in soil, also with slabs, and a third set of Cairn-related structures, this time small piles of stones, continued the development of the site along the valley to the SE. Eventually, the earth mound was extended again to cover all the features in the valley.
This Long Mound is still visible today. It extends for 100m or so along the whole length of the valley in which it is set, and with slabs marking the edges. Many of the slabs have deposits of slaughtered animal bones underneath. There are other finds, often of bronze, buried in the Mound, dating right up to the Roman period and perhaps even later.
At the end of the Mound where the view over the Severn valley opens out, the site of the shrine was replaced by a large circular cobbled area, surrounded by small vertical slabs and with a large flat ‘altar’ stone in the middle - the Sacred Circle. The amount of effort involved in constructing this site means it must have been an important religious centre.
Much about these monuments is enigmatic and we will never know how for sure how they were used. Recent work has shown that these monuments were used and evolved over a very long period, from the Bronze Age of around 2000BC right up to the mid-Iron Age after 400BC, probably with a gap corresponding to the building of the first Iron Age hillfort.
The religious use of the site is explained in the second part of the site video, although many of the interpretations have evolved a lot since it was made:
Click the photo to see the stone circle at the NW end
Click the photo to see the whole Long Mound
Grooves in the surface of the Cairn