Mesolithic White Tor? (Part 2) – Dolerite’s Role in Cudlip Becoming Special

This blog is #3 in the ‘Landscape & Mammary’ series, focusing on exploring the Cudlip landscape and its dairying history.

White Tor in Cudlip is highly unusual in that it is topped with a rare and very old tor enclosure, thought to date from the early Neolithic, approximately 6000 BCE. In Part 1 of this blog, I used the work of Davies (2010) on tor enclosures of the south-west, to start examining if, even before this Neolithic structure was built, Mesolithic people had been using White Tor as a pre-cursor to it becoming monumentalised. Minimally researched until recently, there will soon be some better insights into the stone age history of White Tor when the results of the Dartmoor Tor Enclosures Project (DATES) are published (Basell & Bray, 2022).

Tor cairns, possibly Neolithic, on White Tor. Author’s own image.

My particular interest in this place started by reading the work of Harold Fox (2012) and his research on transhumance on Dartmoor. This sparked a desire to understand more about Cudlip and Smeardon, in which the place name evidence records links to medieval butter making. In putting a microscope to dairying at Cudlip, I realised I needed to first understand this place before agriculture, so that I could better appreciate the role of White Tor and Cudlip in the birth of pastoralism and its consequent cultural and social implications.

The jagged, toppled and segmented tor-scape of White Tor. Author’s own image.

In the first part of this blog, using the work of Davies (2010), I looked at the reasons why White Tor may have become special to our early Neolithic forebears in relation to the suite of topographic advantages this place has. Tors provided rocky vantage points, poking up above ceaseless forest. Dartmoor has many tors but the ones around the edge were particularly useful in that they had the best views out across the expanse of lowland. White Tor, on the western edge of Dartmoor, isn’t the highest tor, but its particularly clitter-covered top probably meant it was freer of trees than many others.

Dolerite block stacks on White Tor. Author’s own image.

However, there is another factor that I think has been under-appreciated with respect to why White Tor developed into a major early-Neolithic site; its dolerite geology.

This second blog on Mesolithic White Tor will therefore focus on dolerite as a stone, why it started being valued and used by Mesolithic people, and the characteristics of other known sites of Mesolithic and Neolithic dolerite quarrying and tool making. Could dolerite, as well as it’s lofty, rocky heights, explain why White Tor, above other Dartmoor Tors, became a pre-eminent early-Neolithic destination?

What is Dolerite?

Dolerite is a medium grained igneous rock, dark in colour, and occurring in combination with different quantities of quartz, plagioclase feldspar and pyroxene (Collingwood, 2022, p67). Depending on its composition and how much it is metamorphosed, dolerite can be grey or green or blue. Dolerites in general, often known by the term ‘greenstones’, were very popular in the late-Mesolithic and the Neolithic, being used in monuments and polished stone tools, including Stonehenge.

The dolerite of White Tor. Collingwood (2022, p67) describes it as having an appearance like mouldy citrus skin, which I think this photo nicely illustrates. Author’s own image.

On the western edge of Dartmoor, next to the granite batholith, there is a zone of dolerite. Unlike most of Dartmoor, here the tors are made of this different geology, these being: Great Combe Tor, Little Combe Tor, Boulters Tor, Cox Tor, Longtimber Tor, the lower terrace of the Sourton Tors as well as White Tor. For these tors, Collingwood (ibid) states that “the metamorphosed local dolerite is sometimes called ‘greenstone’ due to the hint of green on unweathered surfaces”.

Polished Stone Tools

Hard igneous rocks with fine and medium-fine grains were favoured for making polished stone tools, with many being of basalt, gabbro or dolerite geology (Szakmany, 2004; Floyd, 2009). The fact that many of these items were traded great distances and without having signs of use, suggests that some stones, with prized geologies, had a symbolic not functional value. Particularly popular were ‘greenstone axes’, named, obviously, for their greenish colour.

Greenstone Neolithic polished axe. The Portable Antiquities Scheme, Adam Daubney. Wikimedia Commons.

Whilst various geologies can give a green tinge, most greenstone axes are made of dolerite (Floyd, 2009). Greenstone axes are recorded in many places across the British Isles (see Jones et al, 2013) and NW Europe (e.g. Carlson, 2007), particularly in the Neolithic. However, it is now known that such polished tools were being manufactured as early as 9-10 Ka BCE, and that there was a deliberate seeking out of rocks with unusual properties that were enhanced by polishing (Topping, 2022).

Nyland (2021), in a study of greenstones from Norway, has looked deeply into what the extraction, making and possessing of these objects might have meant to Mesolithic people. By examining quarry sources and 80 polished stone adzes, she concluded that it was the source of the stone for the tools that was important, rather than their colour. In other words, the green or greenish blue colour of dolerite may or may not have been significant to Mesolithic people, but it was the colour that signified it came from a particular place.

Whether the source, production and associated relations were what made the adzes socially important, their green colour expressed this. If people wanted to evoke shared values or a sense of belonging, or adherence to particular social identities, they needed a green adze.
Nyland, 2021, p89

Recognising White Tor’s Geological Qualities

Until recently, White Tor has had little serious archaeological attention. Victorian excavations provided some finds and insights, but from a time before modern techniques. Recent investigation by the DATES project will soon correct this, but at the time of writing, this work is awaiting publication (Basell & Bray, 2022).

The top of White Tor includes a number of jutting pinnacles, surrounded by an abundance of large blocks, further liberally strewn with smaller clitter. Author’s own image.

The most recent detailed examination of White Tor was by Davies (2010) who looked at the tor-enclosures of the south-west. Davies appears to have visited a few of the Cornish sites in his study but his thesis was largely desk-based. The work synthesised evidence for, and leading up to, the construction of tor enclosures. It provided new insights into these poorly understood early Neolithic structures by contextualising information on them, particularly in relation to topography and geology.

In his thesis Davies recognises that White Tor is made of dolerite but does not discuss this as a potential greenstone axe source. In fact, of the thirteen tor-enclosures considered in the thesis, White Tor is the only one that is found on, not near, dolerite. Davies’ interpretation states that “none of the Dartmoor tor enclosures are near recognised potential greenstone axe quarries”. I am unsure where this leaves White Tor. Does is mean that the greenstone of the White Tor area has been considered but ruled out as a potential greenstone axe source or does it mean it is not recognised because it hasn’t been researched?

In the absence of being able to find information ruling out White Tor as a greenstone axe source, I am therefore asking, if White Tor is made of dolerite/greenstone, AND since it is a major early Neolithic site, then is it possible the White Tor was an important Mesolithic and Neolithic greenstone extraction site?

Mesolithic Dolerite Extraction

According to Darvill and Wainwight (2014), Mesolithic people may not have to put much effort into quarrying dolerite:

Dolerite stone on White Tor with fresher and older surfaces. I am not an expert so I am making no claim as to whether this is natural or human made, or how old the surfaces are. I merely share this photos to record features that I thought were illustrative. Author’s own image.

“quarrying per se is not necessary for extracting dolerite as natural columnar blocks spall from exposed carns [rocks] ready to be carried away”
(Darvill and Wainright, 2014b, p122)

A wedge gap in a dolerite stone on White Tor. I am not an expert so I am making no claim as to whether this is caused by human extraction. I merely share this photos to record features that I thought were illustrative. Author’s own image.

This being the case, White Tor, if it was used for its dolerite, might leave minimal evidence of stone working. Other methods of extraction included breaking pieces off with hammerstones and the setting of fires to heat and therefore break the rock (Topping, 2022).

Respecting the Rock; Revering the Rock

As more is learnt about Mesolithic stone extraction it is becoming clear that care and ritual went alongside the taking and working of stone. For example, ‘finished’ stones might be deliberately placed into settings such as fissures, knapping debris might be purposefully placed into pits, and rock art added to quarry sites (Topping, 2022). It has also become evident that both the source site and the extraction process were important.

Ethnographies suggests ancient people associated rocks with deities. What deity would you have inhabit this rock? Author’s own image.

Topping (ibid), using 168 ethnographic studies, discovered a number of commonalities that reveal relevant insights about how Mesolithic people might have viewed and valued stone:

“they are located at prominent or distinctive landforms (peaks, cliffs, boulders) and comprise deposits that are visually different in scale, texture, or colouration from the surrounding landscape. These characteristics set them apart from the norm, and many myths start by explaining the character of the landform and the reasons why these deposits are different. A second characteristic is that the resulting narrative often forges a direct link between the stone source and the community’s existing foundation myths and cultural narratives.”
(Topping, 2022)

Topping, using these ethnographies, demonstrates how deities, often female ones, are attached to rock formations and that beliefs and creation myths (linked to fecundity) are developed around these rock deities. The very making and polishing of stone tools is thought to release these entities that inhabit the rock – “spirits and deities thus act as makers and guardians of distinctive raw materials” (Topping, 2022)

This perching rock seems to have a head with a beak. Might a bird deity reside in this one? Author’s own image.

Nyland’s study of Norweigan greenstones (2021) deduces that polished stone tools were important in embodying the authenticity of the place that they came from. She cites research from psychology, philosophy and sociology that shows, in contemporary, as well as historic contexts, that people desire ‘charismatic’ objects which transfer some of their ‘essence’ to the person owning or wearing the item. She sees this as important in understanding why Mesolithic people placed so much emphasis on the source of the stone for their tools. Implicit in such an interpretation is that extraction sites must have held potent ontological meanings that became socially represented in their lithics.

Given these spiritual understandings of Mesolithic stone extraction, it can be appreciated how, the very act of working stone (thought to be a male-only activity), would need to be accompanied by actions such as requesting permission, appeasement, and perhaps, asking for help finding the best stone (Topping, 2022). This would explain why activity seems to focus around springs, around pits filled with stone waste and bones, and in offering back finished tools to the tor.

A number of springs emanate close to White Tor summit. This is the largest one on the west flank. It is hard to see on the photo be it emerges from underneath a constructed terrace. Whilst the rocks are raggedy, there is a sense of them framing the spring source. Author’s own image.

“What exactly different kinds of stone meant to prehistoric people is unclear, but we can be certain that perceptions were different to those common today. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder (AD 23-79) for example talks of stone in terms of its magic power, supposed healing properties, and even gender, all of which provide interesting new ways of thinking about the meaning of stone.”
(Darvill and Wainright, 2014, p22).

Carn Menyn – An Analogous Site?

Carn Menyn is a rocky tor composed of dolerite and meta-mudstones in the Preseli Hills of Wales; the region thought to supply Stonehenge with its well-known bluestones (Bevins et al, 2021). If one was to look at photos of Carn Menyn and White Tor, one would be hard pressed to tell the two places apart; they look like twins. Both are tors of similar geology, with dark pillars, sprawling stones and clitters of rocks. Their silhouettes are all but identical.

Carn Gyfwry and Carn Menyn behind A couple of the rocky tors on the Preselis, by Jeremy Bolwell. Wikimedia Commons.

What is noteworthy about Carn Menyn is that it shows evidence of quarrying dating back to as early as the 8^th millennia BCE. Quarrying dates for the dolerite specifically were from an early Neolithic date in the 4^th millennia BCE but, as the authors point out, quarrying is not necessary for obtaining dolerite as often it naturally breaks into usable blocks.

White Tor summit profile, uncannily similar to Carn Menyn. Author’s own image.

These radiocarbon dates make Carn Menyn one of the earliest stone extraction sites in Britain. Other places now revealing evidence of late Mesolithic extraction include: Burnetland Hill (Scottish borders), the Isles of Arran and Rhum, Fin Cop (Derbyshire), Mynydd Rhiw (Lleyn Peninsula), Bardsey Island, and Monvoy (County Waterford, Ireland) (Topping, 2022).

View from Carn Menyn in the Preseli Hills eastwards towards Foel Drigarn and Y Frenni. Tony Holkham. Wikimedia Commons.

I wonder, given the qualities of White Tor, whether it too will one day be proven to be an important Mesolithic stone extraction site? Given how special dolerites were, might White Tor have been locally/regionally important because of its rocks?

Carn Menyn bluestones. By Ceridwen. Wikimedia Commons

As well as it’s uncanny similarity in looks to White Tor, I have a final reason to be intrigued by the parallels of this Welsh upland place to my muse of White Tor, with its dairy history. Apparently, the name Carn Menyn means Butter Rock!

A White Tor outcrop that looks like a giant foot and toes. Might a rock like this have been ritualistically anointed with oil, or later, in an agricultural age, butter? Author’s own image.

Topping (2022), in talking about the Una people of New Guinea, describes them as ritually anointing boulders with pig fat as a way of feeding ancestors and deities. Perhaps ‘Butter Rock’ was a place of good pasture, but another tantalising interpretation might be that its name holds a legacy of anointing the stones with butter; after all, anointing with oil is a practice with its own deep ritual history.

“the name refers to butter, perhaps butter-making or rich land that produced good butter”
(Darvill and Wainright, 2014b, p121)

This coincidence of White Tor and Carn Menyn: a) both being made of dolerite, b) both being important in the Neolithic and, depending on the findings of the DATES project, possibly the Mesolithic as well and c) both being connected to butter, feels like it has significance.

Mesolithic White Tor? : A Conclusion

Mesolithic activity is increasingly recognised as being antecedent at Early Neolithic sites. Archaeologists now talk in terms of a continuity in the way Mesolithic places morphed into locations regarded as special by agricultural Neolithic people. Many such Mesolithic sites occur in places where woodland was less dense, or where there were full breaks in forest cover. This applies to locations like the tors of the south-west, and those across the British Isles. It also applies to the famous Salisbury Plain; an environment now understood to have had low tree cover many millennia ago.

We have seen in both this blog and in Part 1, that Mesolithic people would have valued a site like White Tor because: it broke free from the incessant trees; its location, on the perimeter of the upland, gave exceptional vantage across lowland; its edge position enabled accessibility, probably aided by movements along river corridors; and its particularly stone strewn summit probably meant it was even more free of trees than some of its neighbours.

Huge horizontal slabs that seem to invite access over them, into the inner sanctum of the tor-enclosure. Author’s own image.

Treeless marginal tors were truly liminal places. They were places in transition between forest and sky, upland and lowland, light and shade and many other opposing qualities. These multiple liminalities made a place like White Tor spiritually and culturally prized, and therefore almost certainly a place Mesolithic assembly; one that became central to ancestral identity and creation myths.

The White Tor early Neolithic tor enclosure. This photograph, of just a small section of its myriad rocks, gives a sense of the scale of monumentalising and hence regard, prehistoric people had for this place. Author’s own image.

The very rock of this place – its dolerite – has also been shown to be esteemed. Dolerite, often termed ‘greenstone’, is a frequently used lithic, in objects such as polished tools and megaliths. White Tor’s dolerite geology has previously gone under the radar in interpretations of the tor’s archaeological history.

Given what is known about dolerite extraction by Mesolithic people in other places, in particular the Preseli Hills, it seems that the greenstone dolerite of White Tor needs to be considered in interpretations of its history. White Tor’s dolerite may well be a significant factor in what drew people here, and how they used the site in the millennia before the tor-enclosure was constructed, probably around 6000 BCE.

To Mesolithic people, the very stones themselves may have possessed deities and been part of the creation myths of the people that used this place. Any stone tools they made here would have been revered and held, in their essence, these charismatic spiritual properties.

I am full of anticipation to read the results of the Dartmoor Tor Enclosures Project and what it might show, not just about the Neolithic at White Tor, but also any precursory Mesolithic activity. What evidence might the tor be holding that will allow a glimpse into a possible pre-agricultural past?

In the absence of concrete evidence, research-informed imagination can help reconstruct this place. In doing this I imagine White Tor becoming a favoured place on the summer hunting circuits, where casual visits changed into groups using it for assembling. I imagine worship, ritual, and politics taking place here, accompanied by fires and large feasts on auroch, a kind of large prehistoric cattle. I imagine talking, shouting, chanting and singing, echoing off the stones. I imagine seasonal shelters, half hut and half tent, dotted around the tor top. Perhaps posts were erected here, carved with symbols to signify belief or maybe represent features of the landscape. I don’t want to, but I fear I might have to imagine men only, occupying the hill top, working with and worshipping the stones, perhaps anointing them with precious oil – a form of fatty veneration. And I imagine, on more than one occasion, a boozed up celebratory hunter-forager, tripping drunkenly over the dolerite clitter, and hopefully doing no more damage than wounding stone age pride.

The Landscape and Mammary Approach

For the Landscape and Mammary series, I am working with Sarah Boreham. Sarah uses a creative embodied processes of movement and sound as a tool for research and self-development. She works with ecological embodied phenomenology as a methodology to understand the hidden voices and movements of marginalised individuals, groups and species. She brings her ‘Eco Sound Movement’ approach which uses a multi-modal method including: dance/movement; improvisation; sound/song; film/photography; creative writing: and composition/decomposition.

I approach the subject differently. I come from an academic science background. I draw on landscape, archaeological, historical literature and place-names to develop my understandings. I spend time within landscapes to develop my experiential conceptions and complement this with an obsessive love of map and aerial imagery data.

Between Sarah’s embodied and creative approach and my natural and social sciences approach there is a place where we can help inform and be informed by each other’s way of experiencing, researching and discovering.

References

Basell, L. and Bray, L., 2022. Dartmoor Tor Enclosures Survey: ‘DATES’. Dartmoor Magazine. Issue 146, pp23-24.

Bevins, R.E., Pearce, N.J. and Ixer, R.A., 2021. Revisiting the provenance of the Stonehenge bluestones: Refining the provenance of the Group 2 non-spotted dolerites using rare earth element geochemistry. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 38, p.103083.

Carlsson, T., 2007. Axe production and axe relations. On The Road: Studies in honour of Lars Larsson, pp

Collingwood, J., 2022. Geology of Dartmoor. Tavicinity Publishing.

Darvill, T. and Wainwright, G., 2014. Stonehenge and Preseli. Exploring the Meaning of the bluestones. Current Archaeology, (287), pp.18-25.

Darvill, T. and Wainwright, G., 2014b. Beyond Stonehenge: Carn Menyn Quarry and the origin and date of bluestone extraction in the Preseli Hills of south-west Wales. Antiquity, 88 (342), pp.1099-1114.

Davies, S., 2010. The Early Neolithic Tor Enclosures of Southwest Britain. PhD Thesis, University of Birmingham.

Floyd, P.A. 2009. Aspects of the Petrology and Geochemistry of Greenstones: with special reference to SW England and Wales. Internet Archaeology. Issue 26.

Jones, A.M., Lawson-Jones, A., Quinnell, H., Tyacke, A., Hill, G., Tapper, B. and Taylor, R., 2013. Landscapes of Stone: Contextualizing Greenstone Working and Lithics from Clodgy Moor, West Penwith, Cornwall. Archaeological Journal, 170 (1), pp.2-29.

Nyland, A.J., 2021. Acknowledged authenticity. Or did the origin of rock matter in the Mesolithic?. Archaeological Dialogues, 28 (1), pp.77-94.

Ray, K. and Thomas, J., 2018. Neolithic Britain: The Transformation of Social Worlds. Oxford University Press.

Szakmány, G. 2004. Volcanic rocks as possible raw material for Neolithic stone artefacts in Europe – an overview. Slovak Geol. Mag., 10 (1-2), pp 81 95.

Topping, P. (2022). Quarrying clues: exploring the symbolism of Neolithic stone extraction. Current Archaeology, Jan 30, 2022. [there is no author named on this article, but since it is entirely about Topping’s work, I made a decision to cite him in relation to this item].