StoneGloves wrote:
Strip-lynchets are medieval, as far as I know - I'm not an agricultural historian and dredge stuff out of unconscious memory - not always reliable. In Northumberland there was strip cultivation, and the ancient village strip, where I used to work, can be identified through later field boundaries. There were long strips that were cultivated by a single family, I believe, and my instinct is that these have partially survived as the allotment movement. The rent for the strips was harvest labour on the Lord of the Manor's crops. I guess the lord in Glastonbury would be the boss of the abbey. The notion of prehistoric sacred landscapes is ours, entirely. I've found a long cairn in rural Northumberland that appears to have had a sheep or cattle fold integrated into the structure, at the front. Assuming that the two features are contemporary - can only be proven by excavation, which is unlikely in my lifetime - then the sacred (burial of ancestors) and the profane (commercial farming) are intimately mixed and not, in any way, separate, as we prefer to see them.
But then we'd come back to the same obstacle... land wasn't scarce enough to justify the huge effort of shaping the tor for agricultural purposes.