(♪ John Barleycorn, Sam Lee ♪)
In the heart of the south west of England the chalk plateau of the Salisbury Plain
stretches out over 300 square miles as far as the eye can see.
As you step through this landscape, you're walking in the footsteps of some of our most ancient
ancestors. Amesbury, a picturesque town thatched town on the southern fringes of the Plain,
is the oldest continuously occupied settlement in the United Kingdom.
But some of the most dramatic evidence of our deep history lies just west of Amesbury. There
stands a ring of enormous stones casting their shadows over the Plain. The sheer
physicality of the structure is staggering. Each stone is said weigh around 25 tonnes.
This is Stonehenge and it's part of the most complex network of neolithic
and bronze age monuments in Britain, including over 100 burial mounds.
Stonehenge is one of the most iconic prehistoric sites in the world, if not
*the* most. Even before the construction of the first enclosure on the site some 5000 years ago,
there's evidence of bands of mesolithic hunter-gatherers in the area. They left
their mark on the landscape in the form of huge pine totem poles that were raised near the site.
Stonehenge has been several phases of construction but the great trilithons,
these fantastic stone uprights with the single stone lintel across the top,
were erected around about 2500 BC or 4500 years ago. This place must have been built
for a spiritual purpose. While awe-inspiring, it serves no obvious practical function in terms of
being a house or a defensive structure. It marks the passing of the year and the
changing seasons which would have had a huge significance for the people at the time.
Over the centuries, countless myths and legends have grown up around Stonehenge.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the 12th century, tells us that the stones
were actually originally from Africa and then transported to Ireland
by giants. They were finally moved to their current site through the skill of
the wizard Merlin and were said to have been erected over the graves of British warriors.
The stones here tell their own remarkable story. The larger stones, or Sarsens,
are made from local sandstone. However the smaller ones, known as bluestones,
were quarried 140 miles away in the Preseli mountains in Wales. It's astounding to think
that these colossal pieces of rock we see today travelled for so many miles.
There are countless theories about the function of Stonehenge but it's certainly a place of the dead.
From the earliest phases, human remains have been buried here, sometimes as cremations and
then later as inhumations where a body itself is buried. It's even been suggested that the
stones themselves might represent effegies of the ancestors. This association with the dead is not
just limited to the site itself but it stretches out into the surrounding fields with monuments
to the dead filling the countryside in the form of these fantastic barrow cemeteries. So really
Stonehenge must not be looked at outside of this wider context. It exists as part of a huge ritual
landscape and we're finding out more about this landscape every year and we're even uncovering
new monuments, some of them on a breathtaking scale, literally dwarfing Stonehenge itself.
In keeping with Stonehenge's rich history of ritual,
we've selected the famous song of John Barleycorn. It's a primitive tale which contains within it the
instructions for making beer told via the murder of a man who personifies the crop of barley.
However, Barleycorn's brutal assault also has a deeper meaning. The song
charts the corn god's cycle of life, death, transformation and regeneration
as well as documenting the important role the brew held in the community in centuries past.