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thesweetcheat T
thesweetcheat Jul 23, 2009 20:29:30
Replying to GLADMAN

GLADMAN wrote:
Whoah...... there are some great points being raised here by NG. When do you draw the line under a sites period of active use in terms of serving the human spiritual condition?

.....

Interesting that there may be less of a tradition of summit burial in Scotland? Only been to about 20 tops, so can't really comment. Guess I need more fieldwork. England, too.

Hey Gladman, this is an interesting debate - I have wondered about a lot of the sites on here that are just described as "Sacred Hill" - often they are clearly an integral part of a ritual landscape (Blakey Topping for example) but in themselves they have no prehistoric remains on them at all. Yet that seems to be accepted as a "legitimate" site. Surely a hill with a cairn on top that has at least a fair likelihood of being prehistoric (no matter how altered) could be considered to be a "sacred hill"?

As for England, our most recent Cornwall trip highlighted a recent walker's cairn that has been built out of a well-established bronze age cairn on top of Watch Croft in West Penwith. Shame.

T tiompan
tiompan Jul 23, 2009 21:23:46
Replying to thesweetcheat

thesweetcheat wrote:
GLADMAN wrote:
Whoah...... there are some great points being raised here by NG. When do you draw the line under a sites period of active use in terms of serving the human spiritual condition?

.....

Interesting that there may be less of a tradition of summit burial in Scotland? Only been to about 20 tops, so can't really comment. Guess I need more fieldwork. England, too.

Surely a hill with a cairn on top that has at least a fair likelihood of being prehistoric (no matter how altered) could be considered to be a "sacred hill"?
Nearly every hill I know has a cairn on top .

M Moth
Moth Jul 23, 2009 23:50:26
Replying to thesweetcheat

Definitely an interesting debate, and you've touched (back) onto a crucial point for TMA:

thesweetcheat wrote:
...a cairn on top that has at least a fair likelihood of being prehistoric (no matter how altered) could be considered to be a "sacred hill"?
The difficulty for whether they're appropriate for TMA is how do we judge/who judges that likelihood? Personally I'd say there needs to be some form of documented evidence that there was summat prehistoric there before/underneath/whatever. Otherwise we just get too many speculative sites cluttering up TMA.

love

Moth