Stone Monuments and Female Power
Women were probably valued much more in the distant past (5000BC) than we ever give credit for.. As a man, one has to be careful writing about such stuff as football and cricket success for women and the women’s England rugby team, soon embarking on a home rugby World Cup.
Why do I raise the topic?
In my recent observations of Mesolithic stones in Orkney, Lake District, Brittany, Basque Country, and not least Stonehenge and Avebury it has become increasingly clear that apart from the land, water, spirituality, there is a whole topic of female fertility to be understood.
Fertility, not simply in the context of ‘caveman’….but thousands of tons of earth being moved and great stone Dolmens, mounds, circles…whatever name you use, hundreds of people, including the stronger men, built passage tombs representing female reproductive anatomy.
Coming into this world from the womb in the age of stone was dangerous, and infant mortality must have been high. It must have been akin to a minor miracle if mother and child survived, unless they appreciated birth and death so much that they practically applied themselves more than we ever imagine. I do not discount this, as I find out much about Mesolithic teamwork, for example.
I would not like to say that all passage tombs you see reflect this circle of life starting at the womb, but for me, it looks like the case. The anatomy of a woman is therefore represented as the starting point of life and the place the body should go back to (passage tombs) for some sort of continuity or rebirth. The Menhir or certain standing stones represent the male phallus.
In this recent visit to Avebury circle, it is easy to be served up theories that various stones represent male and female parts in the fertility cycle. This might be the case that certain stones represented different meanings; indeed, each stone might have its own identity in a clan structure. Certainly, the entrance or marker stones aligned with other hills on the horizon need further exploration.
There is then the Silbury Hill in the Avebury landscape. Again, you could hypothesise that the hill is the representation of the pregnant woman. We simply don’t know how the Stone Age society, presumably, with its shaman-style figures, wrapped up fertility on the land with the astronomy of the sun, moon, and stars. If you consider that Swinside in the English Lake District, along with Stonehenge, clearly has astronomical alignments with the winter solstice, it is clear that fertility with sun, crops, water…agriculture and looking after animals were all bound up in a Mesolithic stone age.
My broad conclusion is that in an age when language was undoubtedly developing, you would have had stories told. These stories had a background of natural upheaval caused by weather… wind, fire and most importantly water and fertility. The dark skies provided the celestial carpet to view, with the sun and moon acting as clocks for the seasons and festivals. Women were not the strongest physically, but the process of birth was seen as so important that it left the passage tombs like Gravins in Brittany or West Kennet at Avebury. Great stones and hundreds, if not thousands, of tons of earth were moved to give a lasting record of death, which is more likely starting with birth…therefore rebirth.
Women were expected to do everything that men did, but in addition, the process of giving birth meant in many respects, they deserved to be remembered in great stone monuments and lay the basis of the culture of clan and societal survival. We have no written record of the role of women in Mesolithic society, but we do have clues in the stones, mounds erected.
David Jackson
18.08.2025
