Late Neolithic-Bronze Age
| Drizzlecombe | Devon | stone rows, cairns, menhirs |
| Glassonby | Cumbria | kerbed cairn |
| King Arthur’s Hall | Cornwall | rectangular stone enclosure |
| King Arthur’s Round Table | Cumbria | henge |
| Mayburgh | Cumbria | henge |
| Mên-an-Tol, | Cornwall | standing stones |
| Rollright Stones | Oxford | standing stones |
| Round Loaf | Lancashire | bowl barrow |
| Rudston Monolith | East Riding | standing stone |
| Stanton Drew | Somerset | stone circles (3) |
| Thornborough | North Yorkshire | henges (3) |
| Tregiffian | Cornwall | chambered tomb |
Bronze Age (2500-800 BC)
| Aymestrey, Herefordshire | Beaker cist | EBA |
| Seahenge, Norfolk | timber circle | 2049 |
| Devil’s Arrows, N Yorkshire | standing stones | 2000 |
| Gristhorpe Man, N Yorkshire | round barrow | 2000 |
| Flag Fen, Cambridgeshire | causeway | 1300 |
| Grimspound, Devon | hut circles (24) | 1300 |
| Must Farm, Cambridgeshire | settlement, causeway | 1300 |
| Boscawen-Ûn, Cornwall | stone circle | MBA |
| Crawley Edge, Co. Durham | cairns | |
| Devil’s Jumps, Surrey | round barrows | |
| Grey Wethers, Devon | stone circles (2) | |
| Martin Down, Hampshire | enclosure | |
| Milton Keynes, Bucks | gold hoard | |
| Mitchell’s Fold, Shropshire | stone circle, cairn | |
| Norton Camp, Somerset | hillfort | |
| Ponton Heath, Lincolnshire | round barrows (11) | |
| Ringmoor, Devon | stone row, cairn circle | |
| Seven Barrows, Berkshire | bowl barrows | |
| Small Down Camp, Somerset | multivallate hillfort | |
| Stowe’s Pound, Cornwall | enclosure | |
| Sunningdale, Berkshire | round barrows (3) | |
| Yellowmead, Devon | concentric stone circles | |
| Balksbury, Hampshire | plateau enclosure | LBA |
| Boughton Malherbe, Kent | hoard | |
| Itford Hill, East Sussex | settlement | |
| New Barn Down, W Sussex | settlement | |
| North Ring, Mucking, Essex | enclosure | |
| South Lodge, Wiltshire | settlement |
Beginning about 2450 BC the Bell Beaker people, named after their distinctive ceramic inverted bell-shaped cup, carried the knowledge of metalworking in copper, gold and later bronze into large areas western Europe, including Britain, mixing peacefully with the Neolithic communities.
Our knowledge of the Bell Beaker people comes mostly from their burials. Unlike the Neolithic settlers, they buried their dead in individual graves, mostly inhumations but some-times under round barrows, accompanied by grave goods. Archery played an important part in their lives and is possible that they seized the scarce farming land by force.
The Boscombe Bowmen refers to the remains of a group of Late Neolithic people found in a shared burial at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire. They are known as the bowmen because of several flint arrowheads that were placed in the graves, found together with other grave goods that included flint tools and eight Bell Beaker vessels.
The Amesbury Archer was buried in a single grave 700 metres away in Amesbury, Wiltshire. He is nicknamed ‘the Archer’ because of the many arrowheads buried with him.
At first the Bell Beaker people made items from copper and gold, but from around 2200 BC smiths discovered how to make bronze (which is much harder than copper), an alloy of copper and about ten percent tin. Bronze gradually replaced stone as the main material for tool and weapon making.
The unequal distribution of sources of metals across the ancient world meant that to acquire bronze tools and weapons some Bronze Age communities had to rely on trade. Long distance trade routes developed transporting ores of gold, copper, silver, and tin; amber, furs, and also finished products including jewellery, cloth, wine and oil.
Primary sources of copper were on Ross Island (2400-1900 BC), in northwest Ireland and Great Orme (1800-600 BC) in North Wales. Sources of copper in England were rare, but Cornwall (2000 BC) was a major source of tin.
The early attempts at woodland clearance, which began during the Neolithic to increase the amount of land for farming, now accelerated, particularly in upland areas.
Celtic fields are patchworks of plots rarely more than 2000m2 in area, a relatively small size suggesting cultivation by one person or family. Across Dartmoor, Devon, the land was marked out by walls of stone called ‘reaves’.
Around the middle of the second millennium BC long linear banks and ditches known as ‘ranch boundaries’ were laid out, often without regard to the Celtic fields (by now the reaves on Dartmoor had been replaced by Celtic fields). Within these ‘ranches’ there were large field systems.
Towards the end of the second millennium BC the farming communities, possibly driven by poor soil conditions, combined with a drop in climate, abandoned the uplands and moved down to the lowlands.
The fens near Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, was a large area of natural wetlands until they were drained a few hundred years ago. At Fengate a series of ditched fields were connected by paths and some of them led to Flag Fen, a basin of low-lying land to the east, which was flooded in winter months. It is thought that animals fed in the pastures of Flag Fen during the drier, summer months and returned to higher ditched fields for the winter.
About two kilometres to the south of Fengate there is an exceptionally well-preserved settlement at Must Farm, a site on the bed of a defunct river of the Flag Fen basin. Included with the finds were nine Bronze Age logboats.
Stowe’s Hill, Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, is a granite ridge dominated by Stowe’s Pound, a huge tor enclosure comprising two massive stone walls. Inside the enclosure are two cairns, a stone roundhouse and over a hundred house platforms.
During the Bronze Age the predominant building was the roundhouse the walls of which were made of stone or wooden posts joined by wattle-and-daub panels topped with a conical thatched roof. Roundhouses were usually built in groups of two and ten. Some settlements were unclosed, open to the surrounding landscape, but others were surrounded by banks, ditches or stone walls.
During the latter half of the second millennium BC the dominant funerary rite was cremation. Round barrows had been in use since the Late Neolithic and they now covered many Bronze Age Burials. Bowl barrows, the simplest, are formed by throwing soil inwards from a surrounding ditch.
Small embanked enclosures (’rounds’) appear to be domestic settlements having low earthworks and platforms containing the remains of roundhouses and ancillary buildings. Itford Hill in East Sussex has a number of settlement compounds as well as associated field systems.
The large labour forces that built Neolithic monuments such as Avebury were no longer relevant. The small stone circles, standing stones, stone rows and round barrows of the Bronze Age point to a more decentralised society. Drizzlecombe in Dartmoor, Devon contains a number of Bronze Age stone rows, cairns and menhirs.
Mitchell’s Fold is a Bronze Age stone circle in southwest Shropshire. There may have been as many as thirty stones originally. Only fifteen stones survive but they still form a recognisable circle.
Located near the village of Holme-next-the-Sea in Norfolk, Seahenge is a timber circle with an upturned tree root in the centre, apparently built in the 21st century BC.
One of the best known Late Bronze Age settlements is Grimspound, on Dartmoor in Devon, which consists of a set of twenty-four hut circles (the foundations of roundhouses) surrounded by a low stone wall.
Ringforts (ringworks) began to appear during the Late Bronze Age (1000-800 BC). These are specified as having one or more roundhouses enclosed by a bank and ditches. Their size varies considerably, e.g. the area enclosed at North Ring, Mucking, Essex, is 40m in diameter compared with Thrapston in Northamptonshire where it is between 110 and 120m.
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