WHAT THE NEOLITHIC PEOPLE MAY HAVE DONE FOR US

The Vale of Glamorgan is rich in Neolithic remains. I have lived here for 30 years now and am always stumbling across something new. Unfortunately, these days sites are destroyed with increasing frequency. Especially minor artefacts of which people do not appreciate the significance.

The Neolithic people lived here for some three thousand years - from about 5000 BC to about 2000 BC. We think of them as 'stone-age' - primitive folk who lived in animal skins and went around butchering each other. This is because we think that humans have developed technology at an even rate, starting from primitive beginnings and inventing new things every year.

Not so. All the evidence points in the other direction: that civilisations develop technology which subsequently dies with the civilisation itself, and so technology develops saw-tooth fashion. Just look at Ancient Egypt, for example, and how their technology has been lost to us. So it appears to have been with the Neolithic people. Stonehenge may appear just a pile of old stones, but a closer look shows how elaborate the site really is.

Even if you discount the purpose of Stonehenge - whether it was an astronomical calendar or whatever - there can be no doubt that it was actually built very carefully and precisely. The circumferences of the circles and the areas of the stone circles are in precise ratios to each other. The areas for example give ratios of 1:2:15:50 - something unlikely to have happened by chance.

I have always pictured the Neolithic people, not as 'cavemen' but as sophisticated and intelligent people living communally in insulated and well-designed houses. From the sites they have left behind it appears that their civilisation loved order, precision, straight lines and regular curves. So I see clean well-kept houses, with mannerly children, good herbal knowledge, a fair number of elderly people.

This, of course, is speculation, but my interest in these folk was triggered one day when I was looking at an Ordnance Survey map of the western Vale. My children were then at primary school in the village of Colwinston. It was a church school and the parish extended to two neighbouring villages, Llysworney and Llandow. It occurred to me from looking at the map that both Colwinston church and Llysworney church were equidistant from Llandow church. So I measured the distances and found it was so. Odd, I thought.

Even odder when I drew a triangle through these churches on the map and found I had an arrow head that pointed to a prominent coastal point. When I drew a shaft to the arrow this aligned with another church at Llanharan. But what was even more significant was that the distances between Llanharan and Colwinston and Llanharan and Llysworney were both exactly 10 kilometres.

All these churches are medieval and we know that medieval churches were frequently built on ancient sites, so it seemed likely that these churches marked Neolithic remains.

Next I noticed that if I drew a line exactly east-west through the Llandow church site it aligned with the Neolithic Tinkinswood Burial Cairn, a giant stone structure, reputed to have the largest capstone in Britain. What was more on this line also lay two other churches. But was really significant was that these sites were equally spaced along this exact east-west line and that the distance between Llandow and Tinkinswood was exactly 15 kilometres.

From these early findings my research developed bit by bit. I found that these Neolithic sites tended to be built at regular distances and on straight lines of a pre-selected length and anchored to prominent geographical points. You can trace these lines today.

To define the ends of the line the builders would, it seems, draw a circle and place other sites on its perimeter, so that by defining the circle you can find the exact point where the line ends. As some of the lines end in river estuaries for instance this is extremely useful.

Some of these 'marking' sites have been lost. One disappeared a few years ago beneath the extended M4. I fear another one - marked today only by a patch of gorse but still marked on the map as an 'earthwork' - may be 'tidied-up' by the council. Other sites could be moved. But it is not the physicality of the site that is important, it is its position.

The Neolithic people did not measure in kilometres of course, but the fact that their distances can be measured in kilometres suggests they were using a measure whose base is identical to the kilometre. This has to be the circumference of the earth.

I believe that measure was the pole. The Imperial pole of 198 inches is equivalent to 5.03 metres. However, if we suppose that the Neolithic pole was slightly shorter - at 5 metres exactly then we find an exact correspondence. Thus 10 kilometres becomes 2000 poles and 15 kilometres becomes 3,000 poles.

Could the Neolithic people have measured the earth? That indeed is a question for debate. I believe they could have done so. Interestingly enough the 'hump' in the middle of the Bristol Channel caused by the curvature of the earth is (depending on where exactly you measure) about a pole in height. Again we are speculating but it is not beyond possibility to measure the circumference of the earth by reflecting sunlight from one side of the Channel to the other.

Of course to do this you need mathematics; even more importantly you need to be able to write. Could therefore writing have been invented here in the Vale of Glamorgan (among other places) some six thousand years ago?