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I wish someone would actually define ritual landscape as an actuality, without always vague references to a hill or a mountain in the distance... You can say Stonehenge has plenty of ritualised areas - cursus/avenue/stone circle/barrows, it could also be a great necropolis though and Avebury also has a similar amount of monuments but you could equally see such places as settlements where the build up of the above comes over time, similar to a town or city....
The Mendips for instance has'nt been given any 'ritual landscape' interpretation, though it has plenty of monuments to be deciphered yet, its longbarrows look more like territoral or boundary markers, as does of course some of the cromlechs in West Wales, which can also be found sometimes next to 'gorsedd' or rocky outcrops....all different, all puzzling, and all different time frames...

moss wrote:
I wish someone would actually define ritual landscape as an actuality, without always vague references to a hill or a mountain in the distance... You can say Stonehenge has plenty of ritualised areas - cursus/avenue/stone circle/barrows, it could also be a great necropolis though and Avebury also has a similar amount of monuments but you could equally see such places as settlements where the build up of the above comes over time, similar to a town or city....
This is a succinct point Moss, thank you. I admit to thinking when reading the original post last night 'not sure what that means'. Your use of the words 'great necropolis' indicates that a ritual landscape is a landscape where there is evidence of prehistoric burials and your examples of Avebury/Stonehenge are appropriate - not just of neolithic but of continued use throughout the bronze age - as there are many round barrows in both landscapes. Last night, my naive question would have been, is a ritual landscape the same as a sacred landscape and is a sacred landscape really in the eye of the beholder. If so, then we could all name our own - I would have to choose the Ring of Brodgar/Stenness/Maes Howe lanscape to add to the examples above.

This may help anyone who like me who was scratching their head.

Prehistoric Ritual Lanscapes