Shafik Meghji reviews Upon A White Horse, a fascinating book uncovering ancient monuments and sites across the UK and Ireland
When it comes to stone circles, Glasgow isn’t the first location that springs to mind. But head to the Sighthill neighbourhood and you’ll find a monumental ring at the top of a steep grassy mound.
Although it looks aged, the circle was erected nearby on the spring equinox of 1979 as part of a government job creation scheme during an era of high unemployment. The monument was subsequently shifted to its current location 40 years later, after being saved from destruction by a local campaign group. ‘I know they are not ancient stones,’ a woman tells author Peter Ross at a solstice ceremony, ‘but to us they mean a hell of a lot.’
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Ancient monuments and sites – and, sometimes, their modern equivalents – have long captured our imagination, as Ross illustrates in his fascinating new book, Upon a White Horse.
Journeying across the UK and Ireland, he delves into their origin, history and
– just as importantly – enduring resonance for local communities and visitors alike. Alongside prehistoric stone circles such as Stonehenge, they include geoglyphs, the Sutton Hoo burial ship, long barrows, bog bodies and Roman fortifications such as the Antonine and Hadrian’s walls.
Ross – whose previous books include Steeple Chasing and the award-winning A Tomb With a View – has a poetic, meditative style, with a sharp eye for detail and a keen sense of humour. The book’s title comes from the Uffington White Horse, whose chalk outline has dominated an Oxfordshire hillside for thousands of years.
It may have been a ‘sun horse’, designed to give the impression that it was pulling the sun westwards across the sky each day, representing a common Bronze Age belief.
Helping out with the annual scouring – aka weeding – of the horse, the author finds himself ‘engaged in that most English of summer pastimes, putting up a gazebo in the driving rain. This was unpleasant but necessary, lest the kids from the Young Archaeologists Club perish while eating their sandwiches’.
Despite the comic touches, Ross takes the subject – and his interviewees – seriously. As well as bringing the sites and monuments vividly to life, he delves into issues of archaeology, folklore, faith and identity, while weaving in elements of personal memoir. His book clearly demonstrates that there is a growing interest
in this subject, driven by a combination of the climate emergency, global conflicts, political failings, economic travails and encroaching technology. An example of this is the popularity of the All Cannings Long Barrow in Wiltshire. A contemporary take on a prehistoric communal burial space, it was built in the 2010s using traditional methods and materials. All of the plots sold out within two years and the ashes of 45 people are currently interred at the site.
When Ross visits the famous stone circles of Avebury – which date back to the Neolithic period but underwent extensive restoration in the 20th century – he meets a pair of artists who tell him they ‘feel like Adam and Eve at the end of the world’. ‘Could that anxiety be what lies behind the present cultural fascination with the prehistoric?’ asks Ross. ‘Unhappy with the present, lacking hope in the future, we seek solace in the ancient past?’
Ultimately, though, Ross has a more optimistic message. The book is filled with people who find perspective, inspiration and comfort in ancient sites and monuments, as well as their modern incarnations. ‘We could make a temple anywhere,’ the woman at the Sighthill solstice ceremony tells Ross, ‘but this circle speaks to us. Let it grow as old as Stonehenge.’
