Copyright Gil Burleigh 1976
Copyright Keith Fitzpatrick -Matthews
We thus have a complex of monuments in a small area, not all of which are obviously connected with burials. The "double ring-ditch", especially, no longer looks obviously like a two-phase round barrow, especially when the evidence of one of the photographs taken by Gil Burleigh in the dry summer of 1976 is taken into account. On this photograph, there appears to be a third ring inside the inner ring, but instead of being continuous, it appears to be composed of individual 'pits'. There are hints of this feature, too, in the geophysical survey, while the 'kerb' does not appear to extend all the way round the ditches, with a gap to the north-north-west, facing the 'track'. This all looks very suggestive: the 'pits' may be large post settings and the 'kerb' the remains of a bank. This would make the monument a Class Ia henge with internal post setting and two ditches. It is important to point out that a henge was not a stone circle, as many people believe (probably because they are thinking of Stonehenge): it was an area defined by a bank and (usually) an external ditch, but sometimes with no ditches, sometimes with an internal ditch and sometimes with internal and external ditches. They could be circular or oval, and could have one (Class I) or two (Class II) entrances. A few had circles of timber posts or stone uprights inside them, often added later. They were in use mainly during the third millennium BC and fell out of use around 1800 BC. There are other henges locally, including two on the Weston Hills. One of them is an oval Class II henge, quite unlike the possible example here. They exist as individual monuments without obviously associated landscape features. This is what makes the Norton example so interesting: the 'track' is evidently aligned on the entrance, making it a formal approach to a ritual monument, so we can perhaps think of it in terms of a processional way. The surrounding open square enclosure has a parallel at Sutton Weaver (Cheshire), where it has been interpreted as a Late Bronze Age replacement for an earlier henge. The enclosures attached to the 'track' have parallels in enclosed Bronze Age settlements, known as Itford Hill type enclosures. seen to the north-west of the possible henge were where they lived. The peasants, who grew and made the linen that these elites used, perhaps lived further from the henge, somewhere close to the Church Field site.who grew and made the linen that these elites used, perhaps lived further from the henge, somewhere close to the Church Field site.The evidence is beginning to mount that Norton was an extremely interesting place in the remote past. The survival of so many elements of its Bronze Age landscape is unusual and very unexpected in an area that has seen so much development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
We thus seem to have an entire Bronze Age landscape incorporating settlement evidence, a ritual site and burials all to the south of Norton village. This is a very rare situation and it is something that the Community Archaeology Group could investigate profitably. There has already been some fieldwalking around this area, carried out in October 2007, but it would be useful to do a systematic coverage of the whole field. Where does this leave the pit in Church Field? The linen rubber may be a clue. Linen is a cloth associated with élites, but they have been its consumers, not the producers who would have needed the linen rubber. Some prehistorians have associated henges with élites, which seems reasonable enough, and it may be that the Itford Hill type enclosures
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