Wayland’s Smithy, Ashbury, UK

Wayland’s Smithy is a Stone Age long barrow, built c. 3600 BC, standing among a grove of beech trees on the ancient Ridgeway near Ashbury — a little over a mile from the Uffington White Horse and its hillfort. Named after Wayland (Weland), the Saxon god of alchemy and metal-working, it is one of the finest and most atmospheric Neolithic chambered tombs in Britain.

Archaeology has revealed two phases of building. The first, around 3590–3550 BC, was a timber-chambered mortuary structure in which some fourteen people were interred; then, between about 3460 and 3400 BC, a far larger stone barrow was raised over the top. It is these atmospheric ruins that survive today — a trapezoidal earthen mound faced with a kerb of sarsen stones, its burial chambers arranged in a cruciform plan, and four great sarsens standing guard like gateposts at the entrance (originally six, two now lost). It belongs to the Severn-Cotswold group of tombs, and its restored form is the result of the excavations of 1919 and 1962–63.

The site takes its name from a Germanic legend carried here by the pagan Saxons, who settled the land some four thousand years after the barrow was raised. It was recorded as ‘Welandes Smithy’ in a charter of the 10th century. According to the enduring folk tale, a traveller whose horse had cast a shoe need only leave the animal and a silver coin upon the capstone, withdraw a while, and return to find the horse re-shod by the invisible smith. Sir Walter Scott wove the legend into his novel Kenilworth in 1821.

The position is everything: the barrow sits directly upon the Ridgeway, said to be the oldest road in Europe, in a landscape thick with sacred sites — the White Horse, Uffington Castle, and the wider ceremonial country of the Downs. Some students of the site, such as John North, have even traced alignments to the stars, linking it to Deneb in the constellation of Cygnus, the swan, revered in Northern mythology. Fittingly for such a charged place upon the old track, the surrounding fields are among the most frequent canvases for the crop circles that appear across this part of Wiltshire and Oxfordshire each summer.