Pre-History

The oldest visible signs of man’s activities within what is now the parish of Broadmayne are the Neolithic bank barrow near the top of Chalky Road, the Ridgeway which still marks the southern part of the parish boundary, and the scattered Bronze Age round barrows of later date. The bank barrow and the Ridgeway were there in the third millennium before the birth of Christ, the round barrows a millennium or so later. They are reminders of the long prehistoric ages when our own small corner of Dorset was closer, perhaps, to the mainstream of English history than it has ever been.

When the successive bands of Neolithic settlers arrived from the Continent, from 4000 BC onwards, the forests which covered most of the country had begun their slow retreat, particularly on the wind-swept chalk uplands of southern England. During the third millennium the climate turned warmer and drier (the sub-Boreal phase), encouraging the growth of scrub and grass. The light chalk soils lent themselves to cultivation with digging sticks which were the only agricultural implements then known; and the now-domesticated cattle helped to keep the pastures clear of scrub and tree seedlings. With the change from a way of life based on hunting and gathering wild foods to one of deliberate farming came the slow growth of a common culture with organised communal activities – such as burying the dead in prominent and elaborately constructed Neolithic and Bronze Age barrows. The chalklands of Wessex, with their network of interconnected tracks and ridgeways and their construction over the centuries of such commanding monuments as Stonehenge and Silbury Hill, were at the heart of the Bronze Age ‘Wessex culture’ which spread through the southern chalk country and on into East Anglia, Lincoln and Yorkshire, into South Wales and even further. The Broadmayne area was part of this culture.

Broadmayne’s first monument to its dead – the Neolithic bank barrow.

As the Neolithic Age gave way to the Bronze Age, from about 1800 BC, and the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, from about 550 BC, the changing populations of the area were continually extending their mastery of their environment, their wealth and sophistication, and their numbers; but Britain was still only on the fringe of the known world. Its way of life was not to be compared with the civilisation of Rome or of the lands where Christianity was born, and its inhabitants were few indeed in number. Julius Caesar and the Roman historian Tacitus described us as barbarians. The total population of Britain has been estimated (or guessed?) as perhaps 20,000 in Neolithic times, quarter of a million by 100 BC, and half a million by the time of the Roman invasion in AD 43.

Primitive and barbaric as they were, however, the Neolithic settlers were a great advance on the earlier inhabitants. Although they were probably semi-nomadic, exhausting the fertility of one patch of ground and moving on to the next, they were still the first farmers to cultivate British soil. They grew wheat and a little barley. They kept cattle, sheep and pigs, and had dogs – variously described by archaeologists as “recalling in certain respects a largish fox terrier” and as being “rather like a modern Chow”. They brought with them the previously unknown luxury of pottery vessels to hold food and water – vessels which at this stage were shaped, inconveniently, like leather bags with rounded bottoms. The Broadmayne bank barrow, which they are believed to have constructed by 2500BC at the latest, is a notable historic monument by any reckoning. Some 600 feet long, it is one of the three only known bank barrows in the country – although it has been suggested that there may be more signs of similar structures than had been supposed. The other two bank barrows are both on the South Dorset Downs, at Maiden Castle and near Long Bredy. (On the Broadmayne barrow, flickering lights were seen and uncanny cries heard, one evening in about 1990. The police were alerted, and went to investigate. They found a picnic party from the Women’s Institute, who greeted them with sausage rolls and wine.)

With the arrival of the Bronze Age peoples, tools and weapons could be made of metal. More intensive cultivation became possible, and a simple type of wooden plough was in use. More barley and less wheat were grown. Burials were in round barrows. Ten or so have been identified in Broadmayne – not bad for a parish of about a thousand acres – and there is a remarkable cluster of 233 round barrows over a nine-mile stretch of the ridgeway between the Neolithic bank barrows at Broadmayne and Long Bredy.

Towards the end of the Bronze Age period, the climate became colder and wetter. From about 550 BC, various tribes of Iron Age people came in from France. Their still-standing monuments are not burial mounds but hill forts, such as the mighty one at Maiden Castle and the smaller one at Chalbury, just over the hill from Broadmayne. Many of the later arrivals, notably the Veneti and the Belgae, were refugees from Caesar's victorious campaigns in Gaul. The Veneti, from Brittany, had been trading with southern England for some time before they arrived as invaders along the Wessex coast – probably, it is thought, from Bridport to Southampton Water. They set to work to build new hill forts and modernise the existing ones with the daunting system of ramparts and valleys such as we still see at Maiden Castle. These new-style defences were designed for the sling-stone warfare in which the Veniti excelled, but unfortunately for them the Romans legions which marched against them fought by other, and more successful, rules. The Belgae, who came a little later than the Veneti, were more extensive traders. They invaded the Hampshire and Lower Thames areas, however, and for some time Wessex seems to have had a very limited part in the British export trade which Strabo described in the first century AD as being principally of corn, cattle, gold, silver and iron, also hides, slaves and clever hunting dogs.

A Bronze Age and a Durotrigian burial were among the relics unearthed in a dozen of the Conway Drive and Rectory Road plots during the building of bungalows in the 1960s.

These Iron Age settlers had cattle (about the size of the Aberdeen Angus), pigs and goats, large flocks of sheep, small horses about the size of an Exmoor pony, and many types of dog. They grew barley rather than wheat, and dried the grain before storing it in pits. They cultivated small squarish fields, using – in our own area – a light ox-drawn plough which did little more than scratch the soil, for the use of the heavier Belgic plough which could turn a furrow does not seem to have come to Wessex until later.

Before the end of the pre-Christian era, the various groups of Iron Age dwellers had coalesced to form a few major tribes. The Durotriges were the tribe which inhabited Dorset and its fringes. It was still essentially a peasant economy, but the different tribes minted their own separate coinages, and their members lived in farms and settlements. Evidence of two such farming settlements has been found in Conway Drive and Knighton Lane. As the prehistoric period came to an end, something recognisably, if still remotely, like village life had arrived in Broadmayne.