Being born and raised in Bury St Edmunds one cannot fail to notice the traces left behind by our ancestors. Though it is the early medieval era per se that has due prominence in the town thanks to the wonderful central features of the great Abbey and Norman tower it is known that this area of East Anglia was particularly attractive to stone age man who first came to the region some 400-500,000 years ago, when the region was in the grip of intermittent ice ages. With numerous rivers and valleys, light soils and an abundance of flint East Anglia became a major centre of prehistoric ritualistic activity.
It is against this backdrop that we can now take a closer more recent look at the East Anglian and Suffolk landscape and attempt to decode some of the ancestral enigmas left behind, paying particular attention to seven key locations and of the sacred town of Bury St Edmunds which they enclose. These are fully explored in the book and include:
A region described as 'one of the most archaeologically exciting in Suffolk' (Scarfe, 1972) and is described as being in a prime position for controlling the Peddars Way. It is also the site of a possible long mound (Lawson, Martin and Priddy, 1981) estimated to be 60 metres in length which is also adjoined with a tumuli. Only one other is known to exist in the whole of Suffolk, in a total of approximately 1,500 square miles. There is also recorded on an old OS map on the very site itself ‘sarsen stone - hewn’, which as you will discover is believed to have been a stone dedicated to Odin.
A group of ancient tumuli situated so as to give them a particular level of 'additional interest' (English Heritage, 1999) and which I believe is where all three major ancient trackways known to exist in East Anglia - the Icknield Way (the oldest road in Britain), Peddars Way and the Puddingstone Track (whose origins date as far back as 8000 B.C.) converge. The only location I have discovered where this occurs in the whole of East Anglia!
Puddingstones attracted a great deal of symbolic attention by our ancestors, becoming known as 'mother stones' - 'from whence grew all the stones found in the fields' (Pennick & Lord, 1976) and were venerated as sacred to the mother goddess. Referred to also as breeding-stones and growing-stones (Rudge, 1949) these can be often be found in the foundations of walls, indeed the very term 'foundation stone' relates to this practice. The 'Conglomerate Track' as Rudge called it, now commonly referred to as the Puddingstone Track, is over 200 miles in length and dotted along its course with stones, some small enough to be lifted, others up to 6 feet in length. The Puddingstone Track is believed to have been laid down by the Tardenoisian element of the Mesolithic culture, meaning that its origins were laid down as many as 8,500 years ago and is explored further in the book.
A large, unusual and extremely ancient woodland, which also includes an earthwork was discovered on a map of 1729 as extending down to a stream, a rare feature in ancient woods of the time and which is also on an ancient ‘solar line’ described by Herbert Hudson in his Suffolk Archaeological Institute paper Ancient Sun Alignments (1932) as being possibly ‘perhaps the finest example in Great Britain’. It is believed to date to shortly after 2000 BC. Such locations, located systematically so that they would create and conform to great astronomic alignments set out across the landscape forming a network of solar lines were largely orientated to the rising or setting sun at Midsummer solstice.
An ancient woodland which it is believed once contained a large ovoid granite boulder which now rests on a village green. Uncommon and ‘roughly cubic’ in its appearance it is believed to have once marked the centre of the terrestrial zodiac of Bury St. Edmunds. This ancient Woodland also supports a diverse array of ground flora, including a number of quite rare species such as Wood Millet, Pendulous Sedge and Wood Anemone and rests within the highest point in Suffolk.
