Selsley Toots

 
The Toots long barrow

The other day I was driving up towards Stroud on the high road across Selsley Common when there was the most extraordinary downpour. I couldn't see where I was going even with the wipers on full pelt, but there was something strangely exhilarating about it too. And it went on and on and on, relentlessly, until the road was running like a stream. I decided to pull off the road on the edge of Selsley Common and wait for it to pass. And once it had eased off a bit I got out of the car with the camera stuffed up my jumper and had a squelch across the common, having intended for some time to visit its subtle but distinctive landmark – a long barrow known as The Toots.

I got completely soaked but I did manage to capture some attractive cloudscapes as the storm passed over.

 Toots on the horizon

Why does a long barrow attract a name like The Toots? It's got nothing to do with either smoking marijuana or farting, though no doubt both those things have been done there at various times over the centuries. Nor is the name a corruption of 'Tits', as is sometimes suggested by those who can't look at a tumulus without thinking of giant goddess boobies. But it's a name you often see associated with burial mounds in high places, and often those with a road or track running close by. Among many examples are barrows called the Fairy Toot and Wimble Toot, both in Somerset, and Toot Hill at Healing in Lincolnshire which has a likely barrow on the top. The name also sometimes occurs in relation to beacon hills and hilltop camps and castles, such as Toot Hill in Macclesfield Forest, Cheshire.

There isn't any definite etymology for the name but it's clear from the sheer number of them that are readily found across the country that 'Toot-hills' meant something significant at one time. Perhaps the most compelling suggestion is that the name comes from the Saxon word "teotan", to look out – a word which evolved into the Middle English "tote", to watch, or to look out. In short, most Toots have a view.

The view west from The Toots long barrow, over the village of King's Stanley, to the sandy silvery expanse of the River Severn and its great horseshoe bend, and the Forest of Dean on the far side.

That's certainly the case with The Toots barrow on Selsley Common. The barrow sits just on the crest of the Cotswold ridge with a magnificent panorama across the west, where the River Severn meanders like a silver serpent through its green valley with the Forest of Dean beyond. You can see the horseshoe bend in the Severn which stands out on every map of the UK, and also the sandy banks to the south west where it turns from a river into a tidal estuary. To the north, green rolling Cotswold tumps delight the eye as far as it can see.

I ought to know a thing or two about Toot-hills, because I was practically born on one. I spent the first years of my life in an old house on the Mythe just north of Tewkesbury, a round hill graced by a tumulus, known as the Mythe Toot. It fulfilled many of the criteria for Toot status: an obvious look-out point, a man-made tump on top of a natural hill with an old road (the A38) running right next to it – and the house was haunted – though not in an unpleasant way. But I have no more idea than anybody else what significance Toot-hills had to our ancestors.

If their purpose was as a lookout point though, that would make some sense. There are many other sacred places and landscape 'points' visible from The Toots, including some on the other side of the Severn where there were temples and shrines, not to mention a huge range of potential beacon hills. It's reasonable to assume that you would also be able to see the nearby Nympsfield Long Barrow and Hetty Pegler's Tump if it weren't for the woodlands that have grown up around them in recent centuries. With The Toots itself visible as a bump on the skyline from all around, it could be seen as a sighting point for a ley-line, as per Alfred Watkins' system of "old straight tracks". When I say ley-lines, I mean the straight-line alignments of physical features in the landscape, rather than earth energy lines (which to me usually appear to be spiralled more often than straight).

The Worcestershire antiquarian Jabez Allies, writing in 1852, was also intrigued by Toot-hills: "Although the Anglo-Saxons may have used such hills as 'lookout stations,' still many of them may have been of ancient British origin and derivation; and the fact that all the above-mentioned hills or places in Worcestershire [i.e. toot-hills] are either close to, or near upon the sides of roads, appears to favour the opinion that they were sacred to the Celtic Teutates, who was the guide over the hills and track-ways. Bryant says, Theuth, Thoth, Taut, Taautes, are the same title diversified, and belong to the chief god of Egypt."

I'm not sure I can quite get with the idea, now popular among new age questors, that the names of British sacred sites are derived from those of Egyptian gods, and/or that Egyptian priests came over here to share their secrets with the ancient Britons. I'm not completely closed-minded to the idea, but it always feels to me as if the British landscape and group-soul has a wondrous enough mystery system of its own, if you care to delve into it, without needing to be bolstered with bolt-on theories from more readily accessible traditions. The god name 'Teutates' sounds a bit classical to me and not very Celtic, though if it's derived from a simpler form such as 'Taut', or the Brythonic 'Dú Taith', then fair enough. But I must admit the idea of these hills being named after a specific god doesn't ring true for me either, for reasons I can't put my finger on. The word Toot seems more directly functional somehow.

Toots long barrow, looking north along Selsley Common. The dip visible across the barrow here is, unfortunately, a scar left by meddling Victorian twerps.

What can I tell you about The Toots long barrow then? Er ... not that much. It's never really been excavated, other than having a few gouges taken out of it by amateur antiquarians of a previous era, who neither recorded their activities nor made good the damage afterwards, stupid buggers.

The barrow gets a one-line mention in L.V. Grinsell's The Ancient Burial-Mounds of England: "This is one of the longest examples on the Cotswolds, being about 210 feet long," he says. That's it. It may be one of the longest long barrows, but thanks to the twerps of yore digging a big slice out of the middle, it actually looks more like two shorter barrows joined end to end. It has a nice atmosphere but not an overwhelmingly 'buzzy' one; it's more of a passive giver and taker of subtle forces, slowly breathing them. It doesn't have an obvious entrance either on inner or outer levels, but invites your consciousness to go spiralling in.

It does exert a certain magnetic pull over people wandering on the common. The place is thrumming with dog walkers even in the vilest weather, and at more clement moments it's a popular place for flying kites and other airborne toys. It's very possible that many of the people who feel compelled to go and stand on top of The Toots don't even realise it's a long barrow, as it has no distinguishing features: no visible stones or chambers. But stand on it they do, as if drawn to it by something unconscious. And perhaps that's as much as you need to know about its power and purpose.

Quarry remnants on Selsley Common, echoing distant hills

Sources:
Allies, Jabez, On the Ancient British, Roman and Saxon Antiquities and Folk-lore of Worcestershire,  2nd edition, 1852. (Good info on Toot-hills)
Darvill, Timothy, Long Barrows of the Cotswolds (Tempus, 2004)
Drayton, Penny, 'Toot Hills', from Mercian Mysteries No.21, November 1994; available online here.
Grinsell, L.V., The Ancient Burial-Mounds of England (Methuen, 1936)

Crickley Level, Crippets Tump

Larches are most fitting small red hills
That rise like swollen antheaps likeably
And modest before big things like near Malvern
Or Cotswold's farther early Italian 

Blue arrangement; unassuming as the 

Cowslips, celandines, buglewort and daisies 

That trinket out the green swerves like a child's game 

O never so careless or lavish as here, 

I thought, You beauty! I must rise soon one dawn time 

And ride to see the first beam strike on you 

Of gold or ruddy recognisance over 

Crickley level or Bredon sloping down. 

I must play tunes like Burns, or sing like David, 

A saying out of what the hill leaves unexprest 

The tale or song that lives in it, and is sole, 

A round red thing, green upright things of flame 

It is May, and the conceited cuckoo toots and whoos his name. 

(Ivor Gurney)

Crickley Hill is one of the most dramatic sites on the Cotswold ridge, overlooking the Severn Valley with a view which takes in the tower of Gloucester cathedral and the Malvern Hills beyond. On clear days you can gaze as far as the Black Mountains of Wales. Much of the Cotswold ridge undulates gracefully and is flat and level on top, hosting wide smooth fields of corn and ribbons of ancient coppiced woods, and Crickley Hill blends so seamlessly with its neighbour Shurdington Hill that you can walk from one to the other without noticing. On its other side however it has a steep, spectacular scarp plunging down into a green valley, and this is what made it so attractive as a site of human settlement, going back into the stone age. 

Along the spine of the hill on its western edge is a long grove of very old beech trees, many over 200 years old and exquisitely gnarled, their ancient roots rummaging the mossy lines of tumbled drystone walls and forming natural hollows and stoups which collect rainwater in deep canopied shade. The thick carpet of leafmould creates silence underfoot but all the noise is overhead in the rushing of the wind through the boughs. The beeches grow in dense dark clusters but some of the open parts of the hilltop are also lined with beech trees along some of the steepest slopes, and these were probably planted in previous centuries to help reduce erosion of the crumbly limestone edge. 

Crickley's most obvious feature is its iron age fort whose ramparts dominate the hillscape, but there are more subtle traces of a fortified village and ritual site from much earlier times. On the western edge, overlooking the beautiful valley, a small neolithic shrine was built which originally took the form of a paved circle. It later acquired a small building, which was approached by a fenced path and was found to have had fires lit outside it. After some 400 years it was replaced by a cairn and a small stone circle, paved with cobblestones on the inside with a slab in the centre, which bore traces of burning. The pattern of trampling around the circle shows that it was circumambulated in a clockwise direction. Finally, in the bronze age, the whole shrine was covered with a long low mound resembling a long barrow. The stone circle is still there, but you might be disappointed if you go looking for it. Having been found by archaeologists investigating the long mound, it was decided to re-bury it for its own good. Although the surface remains may be limited, the deep sanctity of this place is not difficult to appreciate. 

The village of Shurdington and the dark mound of Churchdown Hill, seen from Crickley Hill

You don't have to go far to find an actual long barrow either, or a tump as they are called in Gloucestershire. The sweeping slope across the hilltop to Shurdington Hill is crowned by a large neolithic barrow, 189 feet long and 20 feet high, oriented east-west, and now topped by a cluster of coniferous trees. While the trees may have invaded the ancient remains below the ground, they have at least protected it from ploughing, as evidenced by the fate of a round barrow a short distance away in the same field. The round barrow is almost entirely ploughed out and its site can now be located only with a good map and a keen inner sense. 

The Cotswold area is well known for its proliferation of long barrows and they represent some of the oldest architectural structures in Europe. The Crippets long barrow is around 4000 years old. At the eastern end is a semi-circular indentation which could very easily be mistaken for a horned false-entrance of the type seen on other local barrows such as Belas Knap. Unfortunately it's not; it's the scar left behind by 18th century treasure-seekers, who ripped away a large chunk of the barrow some time around the 1770s. Needless to say the results of this clumsy pillaging were not formally recorded, the only contemporary source reporting that a cromlech was found inside containing a single skeleton (subsequently lost) and a metal helmet which was so rusted that it dissolved to dust on contact with the air. Quite how you manage to lose a human skeleton is not entirely clear; perhaps somebody in one of the old farmhouses in the area will get a surprise one day while clearing out the loft. 

The rusted metal helmet does raise an intriguing question though. The people who built the barrow, in the late stone age, were not in possession of iron or the skills to work it. The metal helmet couldn't have belonged to them. So how did it end up interred within their burial chamber? 

The most likely explanation is that it belonged to a later Anglo-Saxon burial. As strange as it may sound, the Anglo-Saxons often re-used neolithic burial mounds for their own high profile interrments. This seems to have been done for the most respectful of reasons, as an attempt to continue a tradition or to connect with the ancestors – a desire to lay their own illustrious dead in an established sacred place alongside those who had occupied and cherished the same land centuries earlier. 

To the eyes of vision, the Crippets barrow might show itself as a centre of inner activity, for the Cotswold faeries are considered to inhabit all hollow hills, natural or man-made. You might, in vision, stand on the crest of Crickley's undulation under a horned moon and look towards Crippets on the horizon, see the pulse of saturated colour in the faery light of the barrow, orange and purple and carmine streaming into the aura of the night sky. If you're very lucky, you might catch the tumbling shimmers of their music on a passing breeze. 

This article first appeared on the Miles Cross blog.

References: Timothy Darvill, Long Barrows of the Cotswolds (Tempus Publishing, 2004).

Map Ref for Crickley Hill: SO928161 / Landranger OS map 163 

Map Ref for Crippets Long Barrow: SO934173 / Landranger OS map 163