As you sit comfortably in your seat, gazing out of the window at the Island below, the familiar shape, roads, buildings and landmarks of Jersey are all clearly visible.
Then, you fly through some hazy low cloud that obstructs your visibility for no more than a moment (the theme music from ‘The Twilight Zone’ would not be inappropriate to imagine at this point) and you emerge in the Neolithic Age, around 6,000 years ago.
The shape of the Island itself is different, of course, but still recognisable. Fascinated, you see that the long curve of St Ouen’s Bay is simply not there: instead, a high bar of sand stretches from La Pulente to L’Etacq. Behind it there is a wet area of boggy fields and light scrub, with cattle grazing, and wildfowl in the water, and homesteads on the drier ground further inland.
The south and south east coast have changed their shapes as well: the area we know as La Roque is now well inland, and the high-water coastline is somewhere around the location of the present-day Seymour Tower. To the east, land extends far closer towards France, and there is another island in between, that is now the reef of the Ecréhous.
On the shoreline, in areas that would nowadays only be exposed at low tide, are fishing villages, and fields with livestock and herds of pigs rooting around in the woods. Stretching inland from the villages, across the low ground and up the slopes of the more central higher areas, is a network of stones, mounds and stone avenues, forming what could best be described as a ‘complex spiritual landscape’.
In the centre of the Island, the land is less cultivated and quite woody, and although in broad glades in the woodlands there are also mounds and standing stones, the main settlements and the stone alignments of the spiritual landscape seem to hug the shoreline and the top of the slopes at the edge of the high ground.
Then, the dawning realisation that there is nowhere for the plane to land begins to have a more acute interest to you than the observation of the landscape from the windows, so at this increasingly tense juncture, let us return to the safer reality of the 21st century.
A TOMB with a view – the phrase might well summarise what a dolmen is, and where they can be found. There are about 15 of them still visible, with about a dozen in good enough state to comprise more than just a heap of old stones. There is every good reason to suppose that once there were very many more.
They were constructed around 6,000 years ago, and the culture that produced them seems to have lasted for around 2,000 years before evolving slowly and gradually first into a copper age (Chalcolithic) and then into the so-called Bronze and Iron Ages.
Many of them are placed on high ground with a view out to and beyond the coastline. Mont Grantez in St Ouen is a fine example. They would generally have earth piled over them, like smaller versions of La Hougue Bie, and they would have been far more distinctive in the landscape than they are now. Menhirs (standing stones), cists and ossuaries (chambers for deposing bones), stone avenues maybe, were all part of this same integrated spiritual landscape.
And for the Dolmens themselves, they may have been tombs, but it seems unlikely that their primary function was merely to provide a burial place. Similarly, we may inter our dead in land surrounding churches or in the crypts of church buildings, but that doesn’t make a church primarily a burial monument.
In this sense, La Hougue Bie would have been analogous to a cathedral for the Island or to a community centre. Geologists can see that various rocks within La Hougue Bie’s structure come from different parts of the Island’s coastline.
Perhaps these rocks were brought as a ‘contribution’ by separate communities from their own areas towards an Island-wide endeavour of building such a giant monument.
And as the present curator of archaeology, Olga Finch, suggests, it would be unlikely that such an important monument would not have been approached without a stone avenue leading up towards it, probably from settled areas on the Grouville coastline.
We do not know what the Neolithic inhabitants of Jersey believed, or why they went to such extraordinary efforts to build monuments with vast rocks weighing so many tons.
We know very little about the people either: they settled on the coastline, and the sites of their villages are now washed away by the encroaching sea. A small population of perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 people, farmers and fishermen – why did they raise these monuments?
Perhaps important people were buried within them – the tombs were certainly built to last forever. But what did ‘important’ mean to Neolithic peoples? Was it a kindly faith? Was it (as some have suggested) an earth-motherly, matriarchal culture? Or were these monuments built in fear of cruel gods and of crueller overseers wielding the lash? We just cannot know.
La Hougue Bie, where at the time of the equinoxes a shaft of dawn sunlight impregnates the hollow interior of the tomb, might suggest a belief in a union between earth and sky, the fruit of which would be a good and fruitful season for humans, livestock and crops … we can but visit what little remains of this ancient culture, and wonder.
FOR centuries the megalithic remains of Jersey were considered to be magical places, the haunts of fairies or pouques, as in Pouque allées (Pouquelaye) – best left alone except by the very brave, or by the very foolish in search of
treasure.
Some stones were incorporated into later places of worship, as in megalithic stones at St Saviour’s and St Brelade’s Churches. In later ages they were quarried for building material, or removed because their locations were inconvenient for farmers.
Some of the more easily accessible sites, still with sufficient visible remains, are selected by Jersey Heritage for its annual Fete des Dolmens tour. It starts and finishes at La Hougue Bie – the greatest Neolithic monument of them all – and last month the group visited Le Couperon de Rozel, Faldouet, Mont Ubé in St Clement, the two megaliths in St Andrew’s Park, Le Sergenté at La Pulente, menhirs at Blanches Banques, and Mont Grantez in St Ouen.
Guiding the walk were Jersey Heritage curator of archaeology Olga Finch, and the Guardien of La Hougue Bie, Peter Roberts, with Jersey Heritage Volunteer Guides and members of the Société Jersiaise archaeology section stationed at some of the individual sites.
Time and time again the guides told of excavations of a century or more ago that were little more than treasure hunts, and of individual stones re-assembled in shapes more picturesque than archaeologically exact. One of them, Mont Ubé, was subsequently used as a pigsty – and probably made quite a good one.
The sites that can still be visited these days are but a tiny fraction of what was once there in the Island. The website, www.prehistoricjersey.net, compiled by Jeremy Percival, lists a total of 15 still visible dolmens, 11 menhirs, ten megalithic remains of various sorts, 23 stones, some of which may be the remains of dolmens, and around two dozen now lost or destroyed megalithic remains of various types.
All told, the likely number of megalithic sites strongly suggests that these were not isolated or separate sites dotted here and there in a primaeval wilderness, but that all the landscape was formed by an integrated and inter-connected assembly of megalithic structures.
That would have been nothing particular to Jersey; the same mysterious culture that populated Jersey at that time left plenty of traces elsewhere – notably in Britain and western France, such as in Wiltshire, Carnac in southern Brittany, and in the islands to the north and west of Scotland, to name some of the best known areas.
It seems a pity that so-called New Age ‘earth mysteries’ hold such fascination, despite the total lack of proof of their existence, when, in real life, there is ample proof of a very real, ancient and mysterious civilisation, that occupied the coasts of north-western Europe, including the Channel Islands, during the Neolithic Age.
If that long-ago civilisation suggests a fascination with death, it is hardly surprising, considering how much mortality would have been an intrinsic part of the warp and weft of daily life.
What happened to this civilisation? We have no idea, of course, other than a suggestion from the archaeological record that as the Neolithic era wore on, the times became less peaceful and more uncertain, and that in Jersey, great community works like Hougue Bie were no longer built, but succeeded by smaller structures, possibly showing the increasing importance of smaller clan or kinship communities; Hougue Bie, in fact, was ceremonially sealed up and abandoned as a place of worship.
Sea levels rose – perhaps, at times, abruptly and violently, suggesting an origin for later legends of sudden inundations such as legendary Lyonesse or Ys. The great sand barrier on the western coast was blown inland by westerly gales, creating the dunes of Blanches Banques, and hiding a whole archaeological landscape under the sand, still to be uncovered by future excavation.
And the people? They moved, perhaps, or emigrated to other regions – possibly (although this is only speculation) southwards to the Mediterranean area, to where cultures developed that were also absorbed with rites of death and burial, and funerary building on a monumental scale. Who knows?
In Jersey, over millennia, the winds blew, and ancient sites were covered by sand, and forgotten in the sands of time; the seas battered away traces of shoreline settlements; new, more warlike peoples occupied the land.
A high culture faded and disappeared, leaving to us just a dim apprehension of a long-lost civilisation that once flourished in a mysterious time of long ago.
