Stanmore Suprise
Stanmore Common in north west London contains a little known mound which, among the swirls of urban entanglement, even with the faint sound of road traffic in the distance, exudes a spirit of stillness and peace. My own discovery of this lost gem was as accidental as such things tend to be. It was a warm summer day in mid-August of 2003, my birthday. Over previous weeks I had taken to poring over ordnance survey maps in search of wood and parkland in and near London that might have prehistoric significance. After several other explorations Stanmore Common drew me, partly because of easy transport access (it is close to the Jubilee line), partly in view of never having visited Stanmore previously. Even in the absence of apparent prehistoric associations I looked forward to a much needed and enjoyable walk in a new green place. This was to be my present to myself.
The common is basically oak and birch woodland, criss-crossed by tracks and paths, with a few small cleared areas. Fairy tale winding streams cut deep into the earth. Their songs are a welcome antidote to the noise from occasional passing cars, even making them inaudible if the wind is right. Underlying all this are the sand-topped clay deposits found throughout the wider region, with hints of gravel pebble. Plants, including orchids, thrive here and can be seen, if you come at the right time.
The wood can be entered through a car park off Warren Lane. Here a time-worn Harrow council board carries a map that indicates a "tumulus of Bronze Age antiquity". The route seems clear but somehow I strayed, probably encircling the tumulus at least twice before eventually escaping an unexpected downpour.
The real birthday present came with a second visit, a week later. This time the mound was easy to find and, at first view, provoked a familiar response of surprise and recognition. There was no doubt about it: Stanmore Common preserves a classic bronze age bowl barrow. Perhaps eight feet tall, in good shape and surrounded by an impressive ditch, the "Stanmore Surprise", as I have come to call it, asks for attention in the way such structures typically do. The distinctive outline of the inverted bowl within more visually amorphous summer growth is enhanced by being free of trees, while closely surrounded by them. This gives rise to an induced sense of enclosure and difference - a mechanism for delineating the boundary of a special place. To encounter the mound the walker leaves the visible track and reopens a way to another type of journey centred on stillness.
A range of historical and prehistoric artefacts and structures have been discovered on Stanmore Common and English Heritage maintains records on diverse items found. These include Roman coins and metalwork, a bronze age palstave (a type of bronze adz) and a prehistoric axe of "unspecified" age. The wood contains a pillow mound as well as an apparently natural rabbit warren (hence, presumably, Warren Lane). There are also post-medieval earthworks and a Roman way passes through the wood.
The area surrounding the common is equally soaked in prehistoric influence, some understanding of which helps place the Stanmore Surprise in a wider cultural frame. The Catuvellauni tribe are believed to have settled mainly in what is now Bedfordshire, south Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire around 100BC. They were still very much the new kids in town when Roman forces began probing operations into the British interior some fifty years later. In terms of state-building they were probably unrivalled in the British Isles. As early as 5AD, with no Roman enforcers in the country, Rome recognised Catuvellanian leader Cymbeline as king of Britain. Within a few years their king Tasciovanus had established a political and probably religious centre at Prae Wood by Verulamium, modern St Albans. Its surrounding bank, though largely obscured by bracken growth, can still be seen a short walk east from the town’s more familiar Roman relics. By all accounts the Catuvellauni grew and prospered through a combination of conquest and strategic inter-tribal alliances before becoming absorbed, along with other southern tribes, within the Roman cultural then political-military order.
Prior to the Roman ascendancy the bronze age tribes of Europe developed often long distance exchange networks and perhaps gift relationships that effectively spanned the continent. Movement of goods was inseparable from the growing power of tribal elites. Emerging rulers presided over distant exchange networks. They also became associated - and were often buried - with enormously conspicuous status symbols, including sophisticated gold jewelry and artistically decorated weapons. Status, it seems, was projected beyond mortality through construction of great burial monuments such as some of those near Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. Non-utilitarian stone "axes" figured prominently in this exchange of goods and symbols and seem to have consolidated the social hierarchies that the chiefs/kings oversaw.
Wide-reaching spatial links affected different tribes in different ways and involved more than economic contact alone. Even before the Roman invasion the Catuvellauni apparently had stronger cultural affinities with customs in northern France than with those of many other British tribes, at least regarding diet and burial practices. Perhaps this cross-channel association foreshadowed their broadly Rome-friendly adaptation when the Roman-led international coalition of the day arrived in 43AD, at a moment of inner-tribal division. The Rome-administered capital, Verulamium, flourished through the occupation, notwithstanding its temporary annihilation by Boudica's insurgents.
Yet a persistent story of earlier resistance to Julius Caesar's troops in 54BC tells of a battle on Brockley Hill, where the Catuvellauni had a settlement, no more than a mile from Stanmore Common. It is said that the legendary Roman posting station Sulloniacae stood there, close by what had been the southern boundary of Catuvellauni tribal territory. Sulloniacae, however, is elusive and, though it undoubtedly once existed, lack of excavation leaves a question mark above its actual location. Building materials, bones, pottery and so on have been unearthed but a coherent interpretation is not yet within view.
More tangible is Grim's Ditch (or Dyke), a formidable pre-Roman landscape presence that crosses Brockley Hill and passes through the grounds of nearby Bentley Priory. Until quite recently it was doubted whether the various apparently localized earthworks known by that name amounted to a single entity. Since the early 1990's it has been more definitely recognized as a 2,400 year old bank and ditch, some 50 miles in length, running from the northern limit at Dunstable, across the Chilterns, then south toward the Thames. Originally the bank stood some ten feet high with an eight foot ditch alongside. Many archaeologists believe it was a frontier marker, forming with the Thames the eastern and southern territorial limits of a tribal group, perhaps centred on a hill fort near Dorchester. This interpretation has largely replaced an earlier view of the bank as the western boundary of Catuvellauni land. Whatever reinterpretations may follow, the scale and still enigmatic coherence of Grim's Ditch is a reminder of the scope of social relations and degree of political centralization that framed the construction of the Stanmore mound. Once Stanmore Surprise was an embedded component of a matrix of tribal and kin relationships. It was part of the substance of people’s lives and understanding of the world. Now it seems to dream in isolation from social structures, an earthy cultural echo, the closest thing to a ghost that most of us are likely to see.
There is more for the curious to explore. Bentley Priory, just across the A4140 from the common, has been an important Royal Air Force centre since 1926. An eighteenth century country house, the core building has previously functioned as a girl's school and a hotel. It stands on the site of the original twelth century priory, dedicated to Mary Magdalen, that was privatized by Henry the Eighth in 1546 and finally demolished some 230 years later. According to the RAF history, the replacement building became the haunt of society luminaries including Lord Nelson and the poet William Wordsworth. Its inhabitants and visitors may have taken an antiquarian interest in Roman (and presumably largely pre-Roman) Watling Street. That venerable way, reaching from Dover, via London and St Albans, to the Welsh coastal town of Holyhead, passes close by, just to the east of Stanmore Common.
This account hardly exhausts the Stanmore environment's historical interest. There is even a report, apparently not archaeologically confirmed, of chalk phallus carvings being unearthed in the area. But it is the mound that appeals most powerfully to the imagination. Over thousands of years humans have built mounds across the earth. Like some natural hills, they have been persistently associated with other worlds and different realities. Mostly they contain human burial remains, though sometimes - Silbury Hill near Avebury is a spectacular example - they do not. As with Silbury Hill, an individual mound may be one component of a wider ritual or sacred space. Thus, mounds may link up with other human-created or natural landscape features within geometrically or seasonally significant patterns. These enigmatic bumps, viewed as hollow hills in some popular traditions, figure in tales of the fairy folk, dwarves and other now forgotten or sanitized liminal beings. When found in woods, a classic realm of the wild and dangerous, mounds are doubly evocative.
Stanmore Surprise dwells among less audible echoes of now distant human actions. For the first foragers of half a million years ago or earlier, the Thames was an obvious means of entry into densely forested Britain. Certainly by mesolithic times the great river and its tributories were regularly used by people whose flint waste fragments have been discovered. Forest clearance, probably to provide pasture for tended animals, was underway during the early neolithic, prior to the more permanent agricultural settlement of the early and, particularly late bronze age - the time of the mound's construction. What is remarkable is that three dimensional crystallizations of this accelerated drive toward control of labour and nature can still be approached in situ.
Go and see...you're sure of at least one big surprise.
David Binns
5th November, 2004