Cursuswalker

A few miles West of Chanctonbury Ring, and also on the South Downs Way, this prominant ditch and bank straddles the path, and seems to be an Iron Age boundary marker, though I have been able to find little to confirm this.

To reach it head about 2 miles East, on the South Downs Way, from Amberley Train Station. In guides it can be found in the Washington to Amberley section.

An impressively sized Round-Barrow group that meets the South Downs Way at a right angle on the Cocking to Buriton stretch.

This is quite a remote section of the Way, so you have a fairly even choice of routes and can more or less guarantee peace once at the site.
Either walk East along the Way from the Harting Hill car park for about 4 miles, the more picturesque option which also passes Beacon Hill and Pen Hill, or West from Cockinghill car park for about 3 miles, which is probably the less tiring route.

There is an information sign near the barrows.

At the time of posting, the booklet I mentioned in my last fieldnote is unavailable, as the machine is......non-functional. Good to see EH keeping the facilities up to scratch!

Lying to the North of the New King Barrows, this group is slightly older and certainly less imposing.

The more northern barrows of the group are aligned with the Long Barrow that originally was the eastern terminus for the Cursus.

Further to the south another group have been very ploughed out over time, though they remain in clearings that give a good indication of their original size.

My photo is of one of this latter group.

When you next visit Stonehenge, try getting hold of the booklet “Exploring The Stonehenge Landscape” that is sold from machines in the car park, but not in the shop for some odd reason.
I recommend Walk 3, which takes in all the most prominent barrow groups to the north, but most importantly includes walking the entire length of the Stonehenge Cursus, a two mile long processional Neolithic route that leads to a now destroyed long barrow. The sides of the Cursus can be made out along most of its length and it is vast in scale.

For much of its length Stonehenge can be seen right on the horizon, without all the modern rubbish that surrounds it. The walk ends by approaching the Henge up the Stonehenge Avenue, from the exact direction of the Midsummer sunrise.

The walk is about 6 miles in total and gives you an utterly different way of seeing the whole area.

I can understand why there are no reports for Windmill Hill as yet.
Frankly, Avebury is nearby and far more accessible and spectacular, whereas Windmill Hill is relatively unknown outside archaeological circles, a bit of a pain to get to and once you get there there isn’t too much to see.

However...

It WAS the forerunner to Avebury, being of the earlier Causewayed Enclosure type that was the style of sacred circle that led to the Henge. It is also the site from which the entire Causewayed Enclosure building culture of southern Britain is named. In all the aerial photographs of it that you are likely to see, from about 1950, there has been a recent archaeological dig, so the three rings look quite prominent. When I got there one could barely make them out.

The one section of ditch that looks most spectacular is actually a more recent quarry on the north eastern side, but the rings CAN be traced, possibly more easily if the grass is cropped close, and there are two impressive Bronze Age round barrows on the top of the hill, inside the enclosure. This is typical of the later Bronze Age peoples, who seemed to see Neolithic sites as places of death, where it was auspicious to bury their chieftains.

Strangely the centre of the enclosure is not upon the top of the hill, but offset to the northwest. I like to imagine the first arrivals trying to determine where the centre should be, while the place was still forested. Being such a low hill this would not have been easy necessarily, and the centre just misses it. But who knows? Perhaps it was deliberate.

It IS a very peaceful place. The place from which those who first decided to create permanent meeting places in this landscape would have viewed the land around them as the tree cover was stripped away from the hill over the years. Sitting on the hill, looking in the direction of Avebury, it is easy to imagine a person in about 3000BC, whose name we will never know, first thinking up the idea of a more ambitious project in the shallow valley below, and the site of the future Silbury Hill is clearly visible.

You are guaranteed peace on this hill, and I look upon it as Avebury’s “quiet room”, as the tourist trail doesn’t go near it. But it does also seem a slightly sad place for all that. As I traced the circles I felt quite sombre, yet safe and welcome there.

This was on Tuesday 16th February 1999. Immediately after walking to Windmill Hill I visited my last remaining grandparent in nearby Swindon. He unexpectedly died two weeks later, so Windmill Hill will always have a certain association for me.

To sit upon its highest point in silence, with a gentle wind sending waves through the grass around you, is to feel a real connection with a way of life and a culture that has now passed, yet which gave birth to the culture which created our best known sacred sites.