When I sat down to write this blog, it was simply going to be about the history of Windmill Hill – more informative than anything else. But these little trips I take, poking around the Wiltshire countryside, looking for ‘things’, well it’s as much about the people I meet – not the dead ones! The people who share their experiences, the people that contribute to the blog, the people that enjoy this subject as much as me – that’s all of you, my fellow Weirdos! Along the way I have formed many friendships. They may only be for a short time or perhaps longer periods. We might not meet often but each one has been special to me – I’ve learnt a lot, talked AN AWFUL LOT and laughed a lot. It’s important, this community we are a part of. Together we are discovering and keeping alive stories of old, before they are lost to the mists of time and recounting and documenting new ones.
So, holidays are very much out of the question this year – finances are tight and Buddy, my ancient and worrisome lurcher has decided he can’t cope with me going away for more than a day! I still wanted to get away from the house and to pretend I was on holiday, so daytrips are the way forward. I haven’t had much spare time to get out and about this year so when the opportunity arose I jumped on it.
Originally, I took the day off to hang out with my intrepid adventuring pals – Professor Jasper and Dr Doug Pitt and I was going to join one of their official history walks up at Stonehenge. That never happened – it fell on one of those alarmingly hot red-weather warning days where the thermometers hit almost 40c. The Professor wisely decided to cancel it (Dr Doug was all for going ahead!) when we all realised, it could turn into the Stonehenge Death March. Imagine the headlines, ‘Twelve went out and only two returned.’ I suppose it would have just added another story to the rich and, at times, macabre history of Stonehenge but thankfully it was decided it was best not to end up on 999 Rescue or some such programme. Personally, I don’t want to be the subjected to the tutting, eyerolling and gentle headshaking of people who then call us ‘the idiots who carried on with a mega-walk in this heat and killed themselves’.
After that wise decision to cancel we were already deep into ‘holiday season’ so it was impossible to rearrange things. The Professor, Dr Doug and I decided to meet up anyway and on a whim I suggested we meet in Avebury and head up to Windmill Hill, yet another Neolithic wonder in the Wiltshire landscape.
They agreed to this plan and, by luck, the weather was perfect for walking, aka not too hot! We headed off across the fields, and managed to take a wrong turn before we’d even got out of Avebury. Across the open downland we sauntered. If I’m honest, it didn’t feel like England. I have not seen our beautiful, lush and green lands this dry and dead ever. I’ve been around the sun 49 times now and never has it looked so barren. If you still don’t believe our climate is changing, rapidly and dangerously, get yourself outside and away from your screen. I can’t believe I’m saying this but, we need a wet autumn and winter this year otherwise nature, and by default we, are going to be in big trouble.
Despite the depressing site of the fields, the set asides were alive with crickets and grasshoppers, and many, many Chalk Hill Blue Butterfies which was lovely to see and impossible to photograph.
Up the gentle hill we went with a plan to take some photos, attempt a bit of videoing, mooch about a bit and walk back down. It was interspersed with a lot of talking and laughing. The photos didn’t come out amazingly as I was trying not to cry-laugh at this point. Blame them two for talking about ‘milking fingers’ (don’t ask!)
After doing the rounds of this very old Neolithic causewayed enclosure it was lunch time. It was decided it would be rude to go to Avebury and not stop off at the Red Lion to visit Florrie and have some well-deserved food.
Cheese and fig pickle sourdough toasties all round went down a treat along with beers. I refrained from bouncing over to the table which sits on top of the well and telling the family sitting there about the macabre story of Florrie, even though I feel it my civic duty to warn anyone enjoying their burgers that, it’s not beyond the realms’ of possibility that the ghostly and much decayed form of Florrie could climb out of the well while they stuff chips in their mouths.
Not sure who Florrie is? Read all about The Red Lion and its many ghosts here: https://weird-wiltshire.co.uk/2022/03/13/the-ghosts-of-avebury-red-lion-inn-ghosts/
Following lunch, as usual we all trooped into the Avebury Henge shop and I, as usual, had to buy something – this time it was a coveted book I have been looking out for. The Professor would have had us purchase the novelty felt hats with tried on, although Dr Doug did look somewhat like he should be growing out of a flowerpot!
After this it was time to say adieu as they had to catch the No. 55 to Swindon. The Wilts and Dorset Reds wait for no man.
Now you’ve heard about the day out behind this blog, let’s find out a bit more about Windmill itself. It’s yet another very special part of the Avebury. But what was the purpose of the enclosure up there on the top of the hill and how does it fit into the rest of this ancient landscape? I’m going to let the Professor tell you all about the history of Windmill Hill because he is our expert in all things old.
To start us off, I spent hours faffing about with the video we took up on Windmill Hill with THREE amazing facts for you to digest. This was our rookie attempt at producing some video content. Alack, alas the communication Gods are not shining down on me today. Despite a frustrating few hours putting it together it now turns out it’s too big a file to be featured here on the blog. Ack! I tried to post it on Instagram but the sound is bad it can’t go there either. The tech knowhow is beyond me for now but I’ll find a way.
Here’s Professor Jasper’s fun Windmill Hill history round up instead.
Not Quite Running Up That Windmill Hill
When Neolithic people first started heading north across the Channel around 4000 BCE, BIG changes were coming down the (long straight) track for the landmass that would one day become ‘Britain’. Biggest of all? The arrival of farming. Domestication of crops and animals required partial clearance of woodland that had sprung up since the last Ice Age literally melted away 6000 years earlier. But the Neolithers – as I like to call them, though no-one else does – shaped their surroundings in other ways too. Indeed, well before they began building henges and stone and wooden circles, they left their calling card on the landscape in the form of long barrows (where the remains of some of their dead were interred) and what are now called ‘causewayed enclosures’.
Built between about 3700 and 3400 BCE, traces of these enclosures can still be found mainly on high ground: circular(ish) ditches (sometimes just one, sometimes as many as four in concentric rings), with small banks piled up from the dug-out spoil on the inside edge of each ditch. There are around 70 scattered across Britain, including one at Larkhill near Stonehenge and another not far from there at the improbably but splendidly named Robin Hood’s Ball. But the biggest of all is up on Windmill Hill, peering down over Avebury from a mile or so to the northwest, with mind-boggling, manmade Silbury Hill – built well over a thousand years later – looming enigmatically in the distance three miles away to the southeast. Indeed, the best part of 400 metres across, the causewayed enclosure on Windmill Hill – older even than the long barrows just down the road at West and East Kennett – is about as ginormous as the mighty henge and stone circle in Avebury itself.
Now widely overgrown and filled-in, back in its heyday – with its triple ring of ditches each broken up by multiple crossing points (i.e. causeways) – it really must have been quite something. But what sort of ‘something’? Before we get on to that, let’s note that its ‘specialness’ was clocked by the next wave of incomers to Britain – the non-heavy metallers of the Copper and Bronze Ages, who began arriving in this neck of the woods around 2500 BCE. As we find at many Neolithic sites, they scribbled their own distinctive signature in the form of round barrows that still sit impressively slap-bang on the top of the hill. Mind-boggling to think that, by the time these prehistoric barrow-builders did their thing here, they were separated from the enclosure’s construction by an ocean of time as vast as the one separating us from the Roman occupation of Britain. Do allow yourself a quick ‘Wow!’…
Anyway, it’s estimated that around 60,000 Neolithic ‘man’-hours were needed to transform the top of the hill into…well, WHAT precisely??? What was the purpose of this particular causewayed enclosure? One thing it WASN’T was a settlement or fortified strongpoint. Excavations either side of World War Two turned up no postholes or other tell-tale signs that it might have had such uses. What DID come to light were loads and LOADs of animal bones, a lot of human ones and the inevitable glut of both pottery fragments and lithics (flint tools and flakes – the characteristic detritus of the Neolithic period, or New Stone Age). There were even a range of ‘rude’ objects carved from chalk and VERY MUCH falling into the “ooh, matron!” category…
The presence of human bones – some, at least, probably from bodies left there to decay (possibly with the aid of the local wildlife…ugh!) – indicated that the enclosure likely had a ritual function. And the sheer number of animal bones revealed that feasting was probably often on the menu, so to speak; in other words, this location played an important social purpose too. Maybe it even hosted some sort of infrequent but regular animal market. With different functions all wrapped up together, then, let’s plump for the descriptor ‘multipurpose’ – the watchword for so many Neolithic sites, from Stonehenge and Avebury right down through the ‘food chain’ of amazing monuments from that era.
Definitely well worth the hike! Definitely well worth a ramble and a rummage round! And definitely well worth taking a few moments to stand at the top, have a good gawp and drink in an awesome landscape in the making for an extraordinary six thousand years…
Professor Jasper Heathcote-Beech
I always like to flag up a new offering from the Professor. I love history but I admit, I find it as parched as the Sahara sometimes. Professor Jasper’s books are a joy to me. I get to enjoy the far-fetched but totally true stories of places far away, things I would never normally read about because I’d find it too hard to digest. All of the Professor’s book are easy to read and above all FUNNY! I have to put that in bold because, how often do you read history books that make you laugh.
If you haven’t already, pop over and have a browse and treat yourself. If you like history you won’t be disappointed.
Jasper’s latest rollicking non-blockbuster ‘An A-Z of WTFs in History. The Bizarre. The Bonkers. The Barely Believable’ is now available on Amazon or (signed) direct from Jasper himself (for a mere tenner, including P&P; special offer – two for twenty quid. Oh. Wait…).
By coincidence, or is it serendipity, I had a look into any strange and unusual stories associated with Windmill Hill and, if I’m honest, there wasn’t much happening. But then, regular contributor and our Weird History Expert – David – dropped me an email to say he was writing up an account of a very odd experience he had at Windmill Hill! What good timing/ luck. I do like to include a bit of weirdness on every blog – it’s what this place is about after all. Here’s Davids story.
Elf Shot at Three A.M
Elf Shot – is an historic term from Anglo-Saxon and British folklore describing sharp physical pain believed to be caused by invisible elf arrows
What follows is a true account of what happened when I slept out at night on Windmill Hill a mile north of Avebury. If you’ve read any of my previous posts you’ll have spotted that I get a bit impatient with headless figures walking through the wall of the Ladies’ changing room at Debenhams or a ghost on the checkout at Lidls. So I’m the last person who should be asking you to believe a ghost story about being on a Wiltshire hill at three in the morning and being pranged by 5000-year-old arrows. All I know is that it felt real and was bloody frightening.
It happened during the mid 1970s when I was sky watching on Cradle Hill near Warminster. I’ve described in ‘A Sky Watcher Remembers’ how a group of us would hire a car and drive from London to join the locals on the hill gazing hopefully at the sky each night. And I described my gradual disenchantment with Warminster and took the mickey by describing how the chief skywatcher had a glass eye. It must make what happened to me on this other hill sound even more like a sceptic getting his come-uppance.
One night I took a break from Cradle and hitched and walked to Windmill Hill late in the evening – not to UFO watch, just to see if I had the nerve to sleep out on my own. There’s a winding lane up Cradle but Windmill Hill is much steeper. Feeling too tired to climb to the top, I laid my sleeping-bag on the lower slopes and bedded down for the night. ‘Sleeping under the stars’ is a misnomer — there’s usually a layer of canvas between you and the stars. If you’re just in a sleeping bag – no tent – you’re exposed to the full blast of the night sky with stars boring down at you from all directions. To get any sort of sleep you have to shut your eyes and blot them out. I’d made the mistake of bringing a Tog 4 bag because I knew how cold a Wiltshire night could be but I began to sweat and get wet from condensation. Also, I couldn’t move about like you normally do to get to sleep because my arms were pinned to my sides. However, despite feeling wet and trapped I finally got to sleep.
Before describing what happened next, I need to describe the Hill because what went on there 5000 years ago must be key to what happened. Windmill Hill is a Neolithic Causeway Camp. The top has rings of ditches but instead of being continuous they have gaps called causeways so people could go in or out. They are believed to be tribal centres where people met periodically as a way of holding society together. Marriages were arranged, territorial disputes settled, cattle traded and shamans wearing cattle skull head-dresses danced and foretold the future. They would have been noisy places combining the bellowing of cattle with the beating of tom-toms and the sound of bone flutes. The gatherings came to an end with feasts involving 100s of cattle being killed and their skulls and bones were shovelled with the leftovers into the ditches. A grisly aspect is that the dead played an important part and the leg and arm bones of ancestors were exhibited on platforms and passed around, then tossed into the ditches with the cattle bones and feast debris as a way of sharing it with them. To keep up the supply of bones, either inside the enclosure or near it were sky burials where corpses were exposed to the elements and de-fleshed by birds and rats. So to the noise and smoke we have to add the smell of death.
There’s nothing nice and twinkly about the stars in a Wiltshire sky at night. The sky is really black and the stars really blaze, not just above your head but all round the horizon and as if they’re pointing at you. Whether this feeling of being pointed at had anything to do with followed I don’t know. You could argue I fell asleep feeling like a target and the dream invented the rest.
The bag was so uncomfortable that I only managed to get a few hour’s sleep and I woke at three to find the stars blotted out by a heavy ground mist. Three a.m is an important time. It’s a genuine witching hour which is completely different from one a.m or two a.m. It’s the time when the human body is at its lowest ebb. Your hair stands on end without you knowing why and you feel anything can happen. By three a.m at Warminster most people had gone home. What had been a friendly atmosphere before with aliens keen to communicate, turned into something different. I’ve described how the air began to crackle with the feeling that the aliens were real but also far from friendly and quite un-human. Here there was the same nasty feel to the atmosphere but the unfriendliness came from what was human or had been human.
For the first time I began to feel the gruesomeness of the camp above me – particularly those trenches filled with cattle and human bones which had been left in place by the archaeologists, including the bones of a child and a dwarf. I remembered the narrow, delicate, dolichocephalic Neolithic skulls and equally delicate arm and leg bones in Salisbury Museum — the skeletons of small adults almost the size of children. At the bottom of the hill where I was, I wanted them very much to stay at the top where they belonged, but I had the suspicion that they weren’t staying put but were coming down the sides.
I felt rustling in the grass as they slid down but finally the movement stopped and I felt them positioning themselves all round me. I became aware of little eyes staring with interest and calculation, weighing me up and waiting for me to make a move, which of course I couldn’t because my arms were trapped in the bag. Then the first arrow hit — an experimental shot to see how I’d react. When I didn’t and they realised I was helpless they got more confident and I felt scores of little bows bent back, about to shoot. The first arrow had thudded into the sleeping-bag but hadn’t hurt, but as more and more arrows thudded into it they began to get through the stuffing and puncture my skin. Soon there was what felt like an arrow shower from all sides and what had begun as pinpricks began to really hurt..
I realised I wasn’t the first to have been shot at. And that the phrase ‘elf shot’ had been used to describe it. Even though folklorists say this referred to pains people got AS IF they’d been shot by elves, the sufferers certainly thought they’d been really shot.. Their only mistake was not to realise it was their own small ancestors shooting them, defending their fortresses like the Causeway Camp which they had had to defend over and over again, over the centuries, with their arrows .
I couldn’t say how small they were or how small the arrows were – perhaps the size of small straws with tiny flint arrowheads. The closest comparison I can think of is being like Gulliver tied down with threads by the Lilliputians, unable to brush them off. Or an experience I had on a bus when a crowd of little boys behind me began to pelt the back of my head with balls of paper. Neither of them particularly fatal, just maddening to be at the mercy of something smaller than myself.
To protect my face I pulled the sleeping bag over my head. Then there was a lull and they stopped firing volleys to let the crack shots take over, who took aim at a particular part of my body like a knee or elbow. Then the arrow storm started again and all I could do was wait till the arrows ran out. In the end they stopped and I sensed bows being lowered and the calculating little eyes that had sized me up before, were once again sizing me up to see what effect the arrows had had. They seemed to be satisfied that I‘d been thoroughly dealt with because this was followed by the shuffling and rustling of them moving back up the hill.
I lay doggo, not sure whether it was over or not, but I knew it would get light at four and that four in the morning in summer would start to bring back the light of day and prove I’d imagined or dreamt it. I must have gone to sleep again because I woke up to find the sun blazing and I climbed out of the bag. I was stiff and I had pins and needles from lying on the ground and my knees and elbows were stinging from the crack shots. Before I rolled the bag up I checked for holes. It felt as though it should be as perforated as a pin cushion and I’d like to say I found some – even one. But you know the answer. There wasn’t a single hole in it.
David Aneurin Morgan
Well, that’s quite a story, and as you know by now, David is quite the sceptic, so for him to have an experience like this is very, very strange. We must remind ourselves, this is Weird Wiltshire after all.
That draws this Windmill Hill blog to an end and in my view, this has been a great project. I love being able to bring together my fellow lovers of the Weird for a collaboration. As ever, my massive thanks go out to David for sharing his story and to Professor Jasper Heathcote-Beech and Dr Doug Pitt for a really fun day out. I look forward to doing it again sometime soon. And Professor – thanks so, so much for lunch. What a treat!
Don’t forget; I’m always on the lookout for spooky and weird stories from Wiltshire and beyond. If you have a tale you would like to share I’d love to hear from you. Contact me here.
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