Cymru Stones and Wessex Girls

First, it should be noted that the title to this blog post should be sung like the chorus of the Pet Shop Boy’s 1984 song “West End Girls” because I am old and my mental playlist is mostly 80s hits. If you are older than 40, you too now have “West End Girls” playing in your head, and are planning to look up the video as soon as you are done reading. Fair play. Look up one of my favorites, “Domino Dancing”, while you are at it and enjoy the homoerotic subtext that flew over my head like a gay falcon when it was playing on MTv.  Secondly, it looks like neither the stones nor the probable architects of Stonehenge were from Wessex, or any other future Anglo-Saxon kingdom.

As it so happens, the most important people (those whose cremated remains were interred in Stonehenge) were – like the very granite of the henge itself – from western Wales.  For simplicity (but not necessarily historical veracity; there is still debate), let us call exceptionally important builders proto-Celtic Druids, which is what the Romans called the Celtic high priests when they invaded Wales more than two millennia ago.

Archeologists have also recently found evidence, in the form of the remains of the pigs eaten at the site, to support the idea that Stonehenge was an important gathering place for the proto-Celtic ethnic groups. Most articles are saying the pigs were herded in “from across the British Isles”, but that isn’t quite correct. The pigs were driven into Wessex seem to have come from mainly western Wales, Scotland and the north east parts of England – which were eventual Celtic strongholds, and that remained culturally distinct from their Anglo-Saxon neighbors. Wessex, as a cultural entity, dates only from the middle of the Bronze Age, when Stonehenge was already 2000 or so years old. Wales and Cornwall are indubitably Celtic nations,  with native Celtic languages, which derived from the proto-Celtic tongues.

Since the proto-Celtic peoples inhabited and rules the lands from Scotland, across to Ireland, and all the way down to parts of Iberia and Western Europe, building Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain would have given them a nice, central location – easily accessed by water for most of the way, a bonus for the seafaring proto-Celts – in order to trade, make political alliances, confirm their joint religious and social identity, and to probably facilitate some genetic exchange. 

The burials, and use, of Stonehenge seems to slow down and sputter to a halt in the Early Iron Age, about the time the people who lived in Wessex were shifting from ‘B’ cultures to ‘C’ cultures, “i.e. cultures of the latest phase of the Early Iron Age which are not simply survivals of ‘B’ cultures.” The proto-Celts were also firming up into what are now known as the Celtic cultural groups, around this time, and their strongholds no longer included Wessex or the Salisbury Plain.

Stonehenge seems to have stopped being the important cultural center that it once was by the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, when new migrations of peoples into the British Isles from Central and Southern Europe and started building hillforts rather than henges. These ‘Bell Beaker folk’ brought change with them, and the proto-Celtic peoples of the area were pushed out or slowly became members of the Wessex Culture, who used Stonehenge less and less. 

However, while the proto-Celtic peoples inhabited most of the British Isles, it makes sense that Stonehenge was their ‘Mecca’, a place for cultural affirmation and trade.