Original subtitles

This is the story of how Britain came to be, of how our land and its

people were forged over thousands of years of ancient history.

This Britain is a strange and alien world, a world that contains the hidden

story of our distant prehistoric path.

We began as hunters who came from mainland Europe before Britain was an

Instead of hunting mammoth and reindeer in the snow, he hunted

red deer in the wild wood and continued into a new age as the first

farmer built monumental tombs to their ancestors.

Nothing like this had ever been seen before in Britain.

Now the journey continues with the next chapter in our epic story.

Of course, what everybody's waiting for is the sunrise.

An age of cosmology when our lives were ruled by the sun and the stars.

The birth of earthly power and social class set against some of the greatest

wonders of the ancient world.

I'm going back almost 6 ,000 years to a Britain in the throes of the Neolithic

Revolution.

The first farmers were forging a whole new relationship with the land.

A land that was alive with spiritual meaning.

The wild wood that bordered their fields.

The boundary between land and sea.

and mountains that touched the very sky.

Places like the Lake District, with its dramatic valleys and crags, held a

special power.

If your understanding of the world was rooted in stone, then this landscape,

that seems to shout the very word stone, would have seemed especially important.

And here in the central fells, the shout is particularly clear.

Archaeologist Mark Edmonds has spent 30 years on the trail of the ancient people

who came here in search of something very special.

5 ,000, 6 ,000 years ago, the chances are no one's actually living here full

-time. They come here because the highest ground probably had good

But probably what drew them up here was not the chance of living here full

-time. That would happen many years later.

It was the stone that brought them up. It was the stone that they came for.

Over 5 ,000 years ago, Neolithic people climbed these same precarious paths.

What they were heading for were high outcrops of volcanic rock called

greenstone.

The crags that have worked the most are some of the highest and some of the most

difficult to get to. And I think that's part of the attraction of the place. It

involves risk, it involves danger.

OK, so nearly there.

Nearly there.

The debris of ancient stone working still lies all around.

Hundreds of offcuts of very special stone axiom.

And this is what we climbed for.

Look at the stuff. This is amazing.

I know. It's ridiculous, isn't it? The volume of it.

So every single bit of this is the result of people making tools.

There was this stone to be had that could be worked and worked well to a

finish. So this is a must -have raw material.

It's an extraordinary raw material.

So this whole area is an axe factory.

Yeah.

You don't find many of the axes themselves up here, but fortunately I

them with me.

And this is what we call in the trade a rough -out.

So that's halfway through the process of making.

Yeah.

Absolutely exquisite. It's a thing of beauty, unfinished or not.

Well, this is what they would have looked like when they left the crags.

And then, pop that down there.

Once you get down into the lowlands, down into the areas where people

traditionally would have been living, that's when the more glacial flow

of grinding and polishing would be undertaken to get them down to something

that. How long does it take to get from that?

to the finished art. Well, you can see in the two forms that already the idea

what it's going to look like is there.

In a custom hands, you can make one of these in about 45 minutes, flaking as

go. This, at least several hundred hours, possibly even thousands of hours

get a really good luster, a good polish which brings out the color of the stone.

And why go to that effort? Because it doesn't make it a better axe, does it?

it doesn't. It doesn't improve the effectiveness of the tool very much. I

think... What's important about these things is not simply that they're tools,

but they were also very important because they were tokens of identity.

They said something about the people who made them and used them.

It wasn't just the stone that made these axes special, but where it came from,

the sky.

Although it's a mountain, what we're dealing with here is a monument, a place

that draws people up, draws people together, at which they can work the

produce.

objects that matter to them because they say something about who they are.

So in a sense, the journey from the low country up here probably takes several

days, exposing yourself to danger, to the risks of falling, to come up into

clouds sometimes as well, is as much a rite of passage as anything else, an

activity that's as much ceremonial, possibly spiritual, as it is practical.

The Cumbrian axe factory reveals a relationship between people, their

and stone itself.

This belief system would change over time.

It would develop into something much more complex and for us, something

fantastically enigmatic.

Something that represents the beginning of a whole new age in our history.

A time that experts refer to as the age of astronomy.

When we moved away from this more earthly ancestor worship towards

much more cosmic.

What we see is a radical change in thinking that manifested itself in

staggering.

The construction of monuments in stone.

On an unprecedented and massive scale.

Some of them astronomically aligned.

What's becoming clear is that for the people living 5 ,000 years ago, this new

age wasn't bringing a new way of thinking about the ancestors.

Rather, it was a new way of thinking about themselves.

as individuals within an increasingly complicated society and an

connected world.

All of that and the universe itself.

Where did we fit into time and into the cosmos?

In a valley, just beneath the Greenstone Axe Factory, there's evidence of these

new ideas.

Places like this, they have an atmosphere.

When you happen across one in the landscape, it makes you pause and think

wonder, you know, what's going on?

Stone circles are almost unknown outside Britain and Ireland, but we have

hundreds of them.

And they're often found in the most dramatic of locations.

First of all, this place, these stones mattered.

This is quite a small stone circle, but still the effort involved suggests you

don't go moving things this size just for fun.

And building monumental structures like this was part of a tradition that lasted

for over a thousand years.

Five thousand years ago, people living here in Cumbria and all over Britain

making spiritual connections that had never been made before.

Not just between their lives and the land, but between their life and the

the cosmos as well.

Perhaps the very idea of heaven.

This is a new Britain, the Neolithic reaching its very height.

And it's one of the most mysterious and glorious periods in all of prehistory.

Welcome to the Orkney Islands off the northern tip of Scotland.

I've come here to explore a landscape that holds some of the best preserved

Stone Age structures in the whole of Britain.

Here there are relics of the lives and the beliefs of the people who lived here

at the very height of the Neolithic.

Orkney's a wild play, whipped by North Atlantic winds.

Even from the air, there's not a tree to be seen.

But it's more than the wind that's responsible.

There were trees on Orkney once upon a time, but it's thought that the first

farmers cut them down to prepare fuels for crops and keeping animals.

And given that Orkney's not a big place, it didn't take long to... clear the

lot.

Fortunately though, Orkney was rich in another building material.

The whole island is made of this horizontally bedded, fractured sandstone

splits very easily into useful slabs and sheet.

And around 3300 BC, the people living here began to use this stuff.

to build some of the most enduring structures of the ancient world.

Magnificent stone tombs and vast stone circles give us a unique insight into an

extraordinary moment in our history.

When we first turned our spiritual gaze towards the heavens,

here, Even domestic houses have been preserved in stone.

The very homes of the people who were pioneering this new age.

Some of the most special are perched on the far west coast of Orkney.

Here it is, Scarabray.

It's an extraordinary place.

and it lets us get as close as we could possibly hope to to the way domestic

life was lived on Orkney in the Stone Age.

The village was occupied for over 600 years from around 3100 BC.

What you've got are eight houses arranged on either side of a long

passage and because the whole thing is...

It's semi -subterranean. It does a great job of keeping the wind out, cutting

down the drafts.

And because there wasn't any wood available, it wasn't just the houses

built of stone, but everything inside as well.

Right.

This is the inside of one of the houses.

What you notice right away is that big square hearth for a big roaring fire.

These are bed recesses. These are places where people would have laid out their

bedding. This arrangement here looks a bit like a dresser, because it is a

dresser. It's directly opposite the only entrance, so it's the first thing that

guests see as they enter. And in here on these shelves, you would put the things

that mattered. It's the equivalent of having somewhere to put the good wedding

china.

Everything about this design, this house, is so clever and it's so human.

But wonderful and evocative though this place undoubtedly is.

It's all a bit too neat and tidy. It's a bit sterile. The grass is too mown.

The first time I came here, I heard a song in my head and I've heard it every

time since. And it's Flintstones. Meet the Flintstones.

Modern Stone -ish family.

What you want here in addition to the sights are the sounds of conversation

lives being lived. The smells of all that human activity.

But we can get closer.

You all right? Yeah, lead on.

OK, here we go.

Alison Sheridan, a specialist in prehistoric artefacts, is showing me one

that's so well preserved, people aren't usually allowed inside.

Gosh, it's not the easiest place to get into, is it? No, but it's cosy.

So what would life have been like for Scarabray residents, do you think?

It would have been pretty comfortable by the standards of the age because you've

got this wonderful central hearth.

So it may have been dark because of the roof, but it would have been warm.

They've also got convenience.

They have a toilet.

How do you know that's a toilet and not a storage space?

Well, there's actually a drain underneath it, and actually they did

Oh, really?

Oh, so the hard evidence is there?

Yeah.

Remarkably. These houses also contained artefacts, the precious possessions of

the people who were living here 5 ,000 years ago.

I've never found anything like this in my entire life.

Miserable bits of broken stone was all I ever found.

So what have we got?

Anything but miserable bits of stone. These are absolutely amazing.

What are they generally called if you were to group them as a class of find?

Enigmatic carved stone objects, only because archaeologists haven't...

worked out exactly what they are.

And in the absence of materials that we would consider precious.

Like gold and silver, I suppose these have to be the equivalent of it because

the time that they represent and the skill that they represent.

That's right, because we're in an age that's well before the earliest metal.

So the stone itself is not intrinsically valuable, but as an object, it meant a

lot. And what about the rest of them, these pieces of jewellery?

Yeah. In fact, they found something like 8 ,000 beads in this structure. In this

house? Yeah.

Right. So on a very practical level, it says that...

Someone's got the time to do this.

Rather than being out growing, herding, whatever, someone is able to set aside

part of their day or maybe all of their time to specialising and being provided

with everything else they need by the rest of the village. That's right.

These are just wonders.

Which one can I have?

Take them all.

We know where you live.

But as well as jewellery and carved stones, this house also revealed a

secret.

Intriguingly, two adult women skeletons were found underneath the bed, uniquely.

You mean below floor level?

Yes.

It's as if during the lifetime of the house, they lived here, they died here,

they were buried here.

Under the bed? It's like granny, granny under the bed.

It was a house for the living and it's also a house for the dead.

The precious artefacts and the presence of human remains might mean that these

houses were special.

No one can be sure, but the people who lived here might not have been ordinary

farmers, but some of the earliest priests of a new religion.

Within just a few miles of Skara Brae, built around the same time, is this.

A stone tomb constructed on a truly grand scale.

Fantastic.

Already you get the sense that you've left one world behind and come somewhere

different.

And what you're rewarded with after bending down and struggling through is

access. A masterpiece in every sense of the word.

What you also see right away is the similarity between the interior of this

and the interiors of the houses in Skara Brae. And in fact, there was a house

here once upon a time and a circle of standing stones all before the tomb was

ever built.

It's a classic example of somewhere domestic being altered, becoming

other, something ritual.

Over here, again, a shadow of something domestic.

It's a rethe, similar to a bed.

But of course, the people put away in there are having a much, much deeper

sleep.

May's Howe is a triumph of ancient architecture.

Not only in its stonework, but in the way it's been positioned in the

For a few days each midwinter, the setting sun is framed by two distant

the neighbouring island of Hoi.

And as the sun drops onto the horizon, it shines through the passage, lighting

up the inner chamber.

Mayhau was aligned to the heavens and to the dramatic features of the Orcadian

landscape.

When you look around here, you realise that you're surrounded by hills and

water. It's a natural amphitheatre.

It's a stage set for drama.

And it's here, across the promontory from May's house, that the Neolithic

of Orkney decided to build another extraordinary monument in stone.

The Ring of Brodgar is one of the biggest stone circles that we know

anywhere.

It's over 100 metres across, and while there are 21 stones standing today, in

its original form, there would have been as many as 60.

And that's not all.

This stone circle was also surrounded by a ditch.

Not just any ditch.

This is 10 metres across and over 3 metres deep.

And it's not just cut into the soil.

It's been cut into the living bedrock.

It's been estimated that it would have taken 100 men six months just to cut the

ditch.

This is on an epic scale.

The Ring of Brodgar is vast, but incredibly, it actually forms part of

even bigger.

And here's a clue.

The ditch isn't actually complete.

There's a causeway across it, right here. And there's another one on the

side. It's thought that these are an entrance and an exit.

Which means, perhaps, that the stone circle isn't itself a destination.

It's some kind of portal, maybe. Something you pass through on the way to

somewhere else. And that somewhere else is down there, just across the

peninsula.

The Ring of Brodgar points you across a narrow land bridge towards another, even

older stone circle, the Stones of Stennis.

Few of the original stones survive, but those that do reveal yet more connection

to this monumental landscape.

What's striking here is the way some of the stones are positioned.

This pair here are aligned so that when you look through the gap, May's Howe is

perfectly framed against the hillside.

Originally, there would have been a complete ditch encircling the whole

monument. And the thinking is that that ditch would have held water so that it

would appear as a moat.

So, maybe...

What you've got 5 ,000 years ago is the builders, the architects of this

monument creating an island within an island, a miniature, a microcosm

of their world as they saw it.

The creation of monumental architecture around 5 ,000 years ago can be seen in a

sense as an evolution of earlier Neolithic culture.

After all, these people had been building huge earthen enclosures and

cursus monuments for generations.

It was the connections between the monuments and astronomical alignments

was new.

The earth, the landscape, was as important as it had always been. But

it was being seen as part of a bigger picture.

The sky, the sun and the moon, the heavens.

That's what this age of astronomy seems to have been all about.

Our human need to understand our place in the cosmos still resonates today.

This is mid -summer.

Just before dawn at the most famous Stone Age monument of them all.

This play, Salisbury Plain, has been attracting people for millennia and it

still does.

There are literally thousands of people here.

Some of them have come to worship ancient gods.

Some to connect with Mother Earth.

Some have come in search of themselves.

But to be honest, I think a lot of them are here just because everyone else is.

Just for the spectacle.

Of course, what everybody's waiting for is the sunrise, which...

will be over there and by my reckoning will be in oh several minutes time

can't wait

funny

thing is it's actually very hard to see the sunrise because of all these stones

and all these people

Oh, there she blows.

And presumably, it's a rivalry they mean.

Well, something different to every one of these people here.

And there's several thousand of them, so that's several thousand meaning.

Take your pick.

But what did Stonehenge mean to the people who gathered here 5 ,000 years

To begin to answer that, you have to go back to the stones themselves.

And I don't mean the most obvious ones.

The Tharsen Stones and the huge trilithon, they weren't part of the

monument. If you want to get back to the start of Stonehenge...

You have to look at these smaller stones that are all around the interior.

Unlike the farsons, which were dragged here from just 20 or so miles up the

road, these are from much, much further away, off to the west.

The wild south -west of Wales.

High in the Pritheli Hill, the rolling landscape is broken by huge outcrops of

very distinctive stone.

Now the thing is, studies have shown that this kind of stone is identical to

original boulders of Stonehenge, built over 200 miles away in that direction.

Geologists call this a spotted dolerite.

And this is the only place in Britain where this particular type exists.

This has been amazing to me for more than half of my life.

I mean, why do it at all? What motivated them? Why these stones from here?

Now, it does have to be said, there are a couple of things about this rock that

are unusual.

First of all, I'm going to don my Stone Age goggles.

And hit this as hard as I can.

Now, on that fresh face there, if I wet

that freshly broken face, look at that, isn't that lovely?

See how it changes colour? It goes this soft blue shade.

Obviously, it's why this stuff is known as blue stone.

And it's speckled throughout with these little flecks of feldspar.

These properties, these unique freckles, would have made this rock seem very

special. It might even have seemed magical.

We might never know exactly why this place and these crags were chosen, but

it reminds me of the Lake District axe makers on a much grander scale.

What we do know for certain, though, is that this place was important.

So important...

that it filled the ancient people with an urge so powerful that they were able

to find the strength and the will to move over 200 tonnes of this rock and

it to set up the first stone circle of Stonehenge.

Now that takes some belief.

5 ,000 years ago, the Stonehenge we see today simply didn't exist.

Instead, there was a much simpler circle.

After their long journey from Prutheli, the blue stones were put up in a great

big circle round the outside on the inner edge of this bank.

So for 500 years or so, the blue stone circle was Stonehenge.

And then, for some reason, the people living around here decided to give

themselves an even bigger challenge.

Around 2500 BC, a new generation of builders created their ultimate

Using massive blocks of local sandstone, they constructed something

unprecedented. A ring of standing stones capped with lintel.

Inside, a horseshoe of yet more stones.

And at the same time, for good measure.

they moved the original boulders of bluestone right into the centre.

Unlike the bluestones, these gigantic sarsens were only transported 20 miles

so from up the road.

But given that each one weighs anything up to 40 tonnes, well, the effort

required to shift them was phenomenal.

This new stonehenge marked special days in the cosmic calendar.

spring and autumn, as well as the well -known alignment on the midsummer

sunrise.

But the midsummer sunrise exactly matches another event, the setting sun

at midwinter.

The latest evidence suggests that our most famous prehistoric monument of all,

might not have been a celebration of summer and life, but a commemoration of

winter and death.

Like the Orkney monuments, Stonehenge is not alone.

Nearby, this field contains all that remains of an ancient site of winter

gathering.

Have a look at these.

Animal bones and teeth.

Just a sample really of the thousands of animal remains found scattered all

across the site.

These are pig bones.

Piglets are usually born in the springtime and the vast majority of the

remains at Durrington Walls show that the adult animals were slaughtered

nine months. That's in mid -winter.

Also the teeth reveal

that the animals had been specifically fattened up prior to the feasting. And

can tell this because the teeth are rotten.

What we have here isn't just casual feasting.

This is one final commemoration.

It's one big celebration of life before the ancestors commence their journey to

Stonehenge and the land of the dead.

It's thought that each winter, people would come here from hundreds of miles

around to commemorate the lives of their ancestors and to ensure the souls of

the recently dead reached the safety of the afterlife at Stonehenge itself.

I think it's fascinating that everyone believes they know Stonehenge.

It's like the Mona Lisa or the pyramids.

It's so familiar.

It's hard to see it with fresh eyes.

But I think we've discovered something by coming here.

I think we've discovered a new Stonehenge.

And it's as far from the golden warmth of a midsummer sunrise as it's possible

to get.

It's somewhere that still carries a charge.

You can feel it.

And if you come here at midwinter, you can feel that charge just a little bit

more.

The coldness of the stones, the open landscape.

It's not hard to believe that this place is somewhere that belongs to the

dead.

When we look back to the time of the great monuments of the Neolithic, we see

whole new age dawning.

In belief, but also in society.

There's no doubt that the creation of these vast monuments was a religious

It's about finding and defining a place in the universe, in time, in life and in

death.

The special objects found at Orkney, the arrangement of the temple complex,

These things imply the existence of a priestly class that the farmers

were supporting.

And the sheer scale of these enterprises, the planning and

by Stonehenge, by the Ring of Brodgar, suggests that some group was in charge

and they were out to impress because these monuments themselves were

And we know that people were moving between these great monuments because of

this.

It's a style of pottery.

It's called grooved ware because of the grooves that decorate the surface.

It was made, first of all, in Orkney.

It's also the first pottery we know of in Britain and Ireland with a proper

bay. This style of pottery was subsequently found at Stonehenge in the

England. and it's found at all points in between.

What the experts are now imagining is a kind of elite world travel, if you like,

where important people move between the great Neolithic monuments on a kind of

grand tour.

5 ,000 years ago, there was only one way for a serious Neolithic traveller to

get around.

So is she doing what she's supposed to, Clive? She's doing exactly what she's

meant to do. Yeah.

So, very impressive. And it's completely dry.

She is.

I'm joining the crew of a sea -going curragh, built by Irish boatbuilder

'Gibney, using 5 ,000 -year -old technology.

A frame of havel covered with cowhide.

and sealed with pitch.

It's as smooth as spreading a nice piece of butter on a bread, isn't it? Every

now and again I can persuade myself I'm in time with somebody.

That's it. Aye, well, if it's with me, Neil, we're in trouble.

We're both out.

Rowing's all very well.

All right, lads, we'll give it a crack.

But Clive believes that longer voyages would have required some sort of fail.

OK, now I'm going to go overboard if we do this.

In the Neolithic...

There was no cloth technology.

So Clive has used hazel rod and strips of cowhide.

No one has ever attempted anything remotely like this before.

So we just need everybody to be calm.

Now I'm going to move that way with this sail. I'm going to try and pull over

towards you.

Is there alright lads? Sit down.

Do you hear it?

All the way.

It's a heavy and cumbersome rig.

But amazingly, it actually seems to work.

So how does it feel, Clive, seeing it for the first time?

Absolutely thrilled and delighted, let me tell you. It's one thing imagining

but to actually feel it working.

I wanted to hear it. I wanted to feel it. And that's exactly what we're

now. It's one of the best experiences I've had in my life. It's definitely a

sailing current.

It's definitely a sailing current. There you go, Neil.

Well,

we'll just go to England, Clive. Aye, come on. Where are you going? I got to

lunch. I got a gram of something in there.

It's easy to imagine boats like this sailing between the great sights of

Neolithic Britain.

Carrying people, ideas,

belief and precious objects.

One remarkable find epitomises this age of elite travel.

It was discovered just north of Dublin, but it's thought it was made across the

sea in Britain.

This is a ceremonial maith head.

It's 5 ,000 years old, there or thereabout, and it's made from a single

beautifully worked flint.

In every possible way, it's an object of wonder.

Now, the person who made this wasn't just technically skilled, but also

an artistic genius.

Do you see the way that...

That spiral there suggests two eyes, and then the hole to take the shaft of the

mace could be the mouth.

The hole for the shaft has been drilled out.

Now this was from a time before any metal, so the drill bit was a piece of

and the abrasive action has been achieved by using sand or ground quartz.

But even saying that, you're still looking at countless hours and days,

even weeks.

of painstaking effort to create that perfect new whole.

It's technically flawless, but it also reveals a level of sophistication and

refinement of design that you simply don't see in any other artefact of the

period in Britain or in Ireland.

This new art speaks of power and prestige, of an emerging world of

chieftains. People whose status was displayed in the possession of rare and

exquisite objects.

As well as Stonehenge and Orkney, it seems that these people also came to

Ireland.

5 ,000 years ago, travellers would have sailed or rowed up here, the River

Boyne, to the most sacred landscape of them all.

the Brunobogne, the Palace of the Boyne.

This is another sacred landscape constructed around 3200 years BC which

that it probably predates the bluestone phase at Stonehenge and the stone

circles of Orkney. This could be where it all began.

And right at the centre, a mecca for tourists from all over the world, is

massive passage grave, Newgrange.

Of course, the mound as you see it today isn't original.

It was excavated in the 1960s and then reconstructed in this, well, very

confident style.

I'm in two minds about it actually. On the one hand...

It's very striking and it attracts a lot of people, maybe inspires a lot of

people to find out more. But on the other hand, it's a bit brutal, a bit

overdone. It's kind of like Stalinders the Stone Age.

Inside, though, its magic still rings out.

This is the very earliest building of the new Neolithic cosmology.

created hundreds of years before even the Egyptian pyramids.

What strikes you immediately is how much this feels like Maize Howe on Orkney,

with this narrow, low passageway leading from the world of light into the dark

world within.

And in fact, this may have been the inspiration for Maize Howe, because this

tomb was built first.

And again, like Maith Howe, there are three recesses that once upon a time

have held the remains of the dead.

But this one is altogether more rough -hewn than Maith Howe. It lacks the

perfection. It's more Stone Age, if you like.

Like Maith Howe on Orkney, Newgrange is carefully aligned on the movement of the

sun.

Above the entrance, there's a stone frame that lets light into the passage.

A roof box.

If I get down here, you can see what I mean.

On a day like today, it doesn't let a lot of sunshine in.

But once a year, on the 21st of December, the winter solstice, the sun

directly in front of the entrance.

And the roof box lets the sunlight all the way up this passageway until it

illuminates the entire chamber.

It lasts for about 17 minutes, and then the chamber is plunged into darkness for

another year.

Now, that trick makes this place one of the earliest astronomically aligned

buildings anywhere in the world.

Like the other monuments, Newgrange marks midwinter.

But here, there's an additional clue to Neolithic belief.

That time flows in a cycle.

And even in death.

there is a promise of rebirth.

There's a reason for the alignment of the passageway.

It's to allow the sun to illuminate this stone and to pick out this carving, the

only carving in the recess.

It's something called a triple spiral, the very earliest example of a triple

spiral.

It's one continuous carving with no beginning and no end.

It's a kind of perfect form.

The illumination of this carving once a year in a piece of religious theatre lay

at the very heart of the beliefs of the people who designed and built this

place.

The great sacred sites of Newgrange, Stonehenge and those on Orkney were

for elite travellers who, 5 ,000 years ago, took inspiration and ideas from one

another.

What we're left with today are monuments that are unique in Europe, created by

powerful and commonly held religious beliefs.

From the Otten Islands in Scotland to the Preseli Mountains in Wales, from the

Lake District in the north of England to Stonehenge in the south, and finally

here in Ireland, it's all connected.

And all that time, there must have been some sort of priestly caste marshalling

all that effort.

the people who carried the mate heads.

And in some of the tombs surrounding Newgrange, there are clues to their

beliefs, and in particular, to the treatment of one of the first elites of

ancient society.

Within sight of Newgrange lies yet another tomb, Nouth.

More than 400 of its stones are covered in swirling abstract art, almost half of

all the megalithic art in the whole of Western Europe.

This is where the precious knife head was found.

And it wasn't the only spectacular discovery.

Archaeologist George Ogan has been studying Nouth for 50 years.

You could picture that you had a religious person, the equivalent of a

you see, who could stand here before the entrance.

This is directly opposite the entrance, and in between you have this splendid

sandstone, six feet or so in height, with a vertical line which leads up the

centre of the passage.

So what would have happened inside?

You know, who gets in there?

Well, I would think that only a very small number of people went inside,

probably even an individual who just took the remains and placed them in the

tomb. And we can have a look?

We can, indeed.

Good. Lead on.

Back in 1968, George was the first person in modern times to break into the

tomb. How long is the passage?

About under 40 feet.

Are you winning?

Ought to take me a long time.

No hurry.

Right.

I see why you don't have this place open to the public, George. Yeah.

It's not the easiest place. No.

Now.

Oh, my.

I say.

Look up.

Now, that's a bit good.

And this is as it was.

This hasn't been reconstructed. Oh, no, not at all.

What was it like the very first time you came in here?

But how did you feel to be the first person in here? Goodness knows how long.

Well, I was unbelievably excited.

What George found were the untouched remnants of ancient sacred rites.

A time capsule of Neolithic belief.

And scattered in and around this exquisitely carved basin was evidence of

something new in Stone Age society.

Burnt human remains.

These. are some of the earliest remains of ritual cremation ever found.

Well, the skull is the easiest to find because the skull is very distinctive.

has an inner layer and an outer layer and a bit of spongy bone in between.

Although only fragments survive, under expert eye, these remains reveal a

of information.

Some areas of the skull are more important than others, and this part in

particular. It's called the petrous portion of the temporal bone, and it

survives very well because it's thick.

And from this, I can identify which side of the skull it came from. So it's

useful in determining the number of individuals, because if I've got two

temporal bones, then I've got two different individuals.

Forensic science reveals that now they contain over 100 cremated bodies.

But those cremations were accumulated over centuries of use.

The radiocarbon data shows that that was over approximately a 300 -year time

span. And that works out as one cremation every two to three years.

So therefore, cremation wasn't that common.

What Laureen Buckley's work shows is that the new practice of cremation was

unusual.

This rarity...

and the discovery of the Nouth Macehead suggests that it was an honour reserved

for only the very highest levels of late Neolithic society.

The cremated remains at Nouth show that there was a hierarchy at play which

determined how your mortal remains were treated.

Put simply, if you were important, your remains were burnt, cremated.

And presumably...

That meant that your spirit was being treated differently and was going to go

somewhere different than the remains of those left behind on earth, simply to be

buried.

I'm going to have my own experimental cremation right here in the shadow of

Nouth Tomb.

The thing is, cremating a body is about much more than just lighting a fire.

It's a technological challenge, which is why I've brought two Dublin firemen

with me.

We need to get it between 1 ,500 and 1 ,700 degrees Celsius in order to totally

cremate the body.

And how long does it have to sustain that kind of temperature to do away with

something like a human body?

About two to three hours. But then the idea of building the pyre like this is

that it holds its structure.

So as it ignites, the structure remains intact, and then it collapses inwards.

Lovely.

Since I can't find anyone to volunteer, we've taken a trip to the local

butchers.

At around 70 kilos, a medium -sized pig makes a good substitute for an average

adult man.

Almost a third of its weight is fat, and that's important, because although

wood is needed to get things going, The main fuel in a cremation is the body

itself.

You know, we've ordained that our cremations are performed out of sight

of mind, but this is really what it's all about.

Flesh and bone being consumed by the flames and turned into smoke.

I quite like it.

It's a process that takes hours, time enough to reflect upon a leader's life

and their journey to another world.

You have to try and imagine the impact of this on people 5 ,000 years ago when

chieftain or a priest died.

Their body would be consumed by fire and be reduced to virtually nothing.

And then to see a few earthbound remains, a handful of dust and crumbling

picked out of the embers and placed.

In a recess in that tomb forever.

While all the rest of them had disappeared into the sky.

Who can imagine what impact that would have?

The following morning, and only a few smoking embers remain.

As a first attempt at Neolithic cremation, I think that's quite good.

The flame has done away with most of the body.

So we've sent that pig into the afterlife, if you like.

The discoveries in Ireland show a new society emerging through the late

Neolithic. A society where status mattered.

It determined the objects you possessed in life and how your body was treated in

death.

This was a society where ideas travelled and where new beliefs were manifested

in the greatest ancient monuments the world had ever seen.

And it's in those very monuments that today we're able to glimpse the very

of a whole new concept of existence.

From around 3000 to 2500 BC was a time when we became aware of our place, not

just here on Earth, but within the cosmos.

The great tombs, the stone circles, they were an attempt to make sense of the

movement of the sun and the moon, of an entire universe that shapes and governs

our lives and our time.

Those forces went way beyond the reach of the ancestors, so much so that from

now on, when some people died, they were to be sent to a new place, a different

place, not down into the earth, but up into the sky.

It seems to me that it was in the Neolithic that people first conceived of

idea that endures to this day, that somewhere up here was heaven.

Next time, my journey continues.

Look at that.

As I discover a new age.

That is magic.

One forged in metal.

Are you impressed? I'm very, I'm deeply, deeply impressed.

By a new people.

He knew how to get metal, how to make metal, and how to work metal.

A people inventing a whole new way of living.

As well as men working down here, there must have been children.

Some of the spaces are just too small.