- PRE FLIGHT -

WELCOME to Pastscapes Virtual Tours. This Pre Flight check gets you ready for your amazing journey into the past. It requires no passport or awful inoculations, just an open mind, a little bit of time and QuickTime from Apple. So here's what to expect...

PREPARING FOR YOUR JOURNEY

Your tour can last as long as you wish it to, depending on how much you want to experience or learn. The journey is 18 pages in duration with links to other site's articles, maps, other Pastscapes articles, photographs and computer generated images, QuickTime VR's (QTVR) and animations. The one thing you may need to know is how to use QTVR. If you do, then click on How to use QTVR in the sidebar before proceeding with the Test Drive.

TEST DRIVE

(If you feel you don't need a test drive just scroll to the bottom of this page)

As mentioned above, your tour can be as long as you want it to be. You can just read what you want to read and if you want to read anymore just skip forward to the next page by clicking on the image at the top. This will transport you to the next vista. You can always stop the tour half way and come back to it at a later date.

With 'The Berth' tour, the pages are set up so they start with a view of the site as it is Today and an article relating to it. The next page will be about the same view in 300BC and then in 540 AD. You then move on to another view of Today and start the process again. As well as images, each page is full of information regarding the site and that particular period in time. It's also full of colour coded, underlined links, as mentioned above, and we'll now take a test drive through an excerpt of 'The Berth' tour to experience them. The following page is from the first vista as seen in 300 BC and the text is a amalgamation of extracts from page 4 and page 8 of the tour...

Green links will open an off-site page  Blue links take you to another article

Red links take you to an image, animation or QuickTime VR

The images on this page will take about 30 seconds to download with a 56k modem

Click HERE to open map

As you can see, it looked a little different back 'then'. Of course, we've had to take some educated guesses as to how it might have looked. There's no certainty as to when it was built for a start. The archaeology of 1962/63 placed it as mid Iron Age, but that's anywhere between 400 and 100 BC: a large span of time. So we plumped for 300 BC and decided to show it just after its construction; before the sandstone walls would have turned green with moss!

Before the area was drained, the Berth would have stood in a marsh or a mere (lake)... or both, depending on the time of year. North Shropshire has many meres, mosses and mounds like this one, created when the glaciers receded after the last Ice Age. The ancient Britons then took nature's hill forts and added ramparts to them made of stone held together with wood posts  for better defence. The Berth is very unusual in that it isn't actually on a hill as such, not in the traditional sense of the word and not like the other 50 or so hill forts in Shropshire.

This site is, in fact, two camps joined by a causeway (QTVR) It's still unknown as to what the smaller, Outer Camp was. Was it the original camp, a burial or religious site or an animal enclosure?  We just don't know. It's almost the shape of a Bronze Age burial 'Pond Burrow' tumuli. It's hardly a 'hill fort' as its inner enclosure is almost flat, but then again, the Berth is hardly a hill fort, more of a 'mound fort'. Let's hope we find out one day. Of course, in its life the Berth will have changed its look, so there would have been a great difference between the way it looked in the 3rd. Century BC and the way it looked towards the end of its life in the 6th. Century AD(?) as you'll see later.

Holy moley!

It would certainly follow all current knowledge to say the Berth could have been a religious site.  (If you open the last link, just press 'Cancel' when you're asked for a username and password and the page will open). There was nothing more sacred to the ancient Britons than water. The amount of votive offerings found in rivers and lakes are testament to this. To spend the time they did making these offerings - which could be anything from carved wood to an ornate bronze shield - the wet stuff must have been very important. It may have been their connections to the "Other World" and the afterlife. To be surrounded by it, as on the Berth, must have been like being in heaven to them... literally! They wouldn't have seen this site the way we do. We may appreciate its beauty, but they saw and experienced far more. Just walking across the causeway may have been something special to them. They probably had a respect (or fear) for the marsh or mere that we can never understand. As pointed out by Brian Bates in his book The Real Middle Earth:

"To these people of the real Middle-earth, the landscape took on a whole new meaning. Elvish spirits populated the trees, streams and stones, dwarves forged magical weapons, giants menaced from the mountains, and fire-breathing dragons slumbered under hills..."

(Of course, he's referring to many other peoples besides the Celts, but the general meaning still applies).

It seems from the archaeological evidence that most hill forts had a religious shrine. These varied in style from region to region but probably all had a similar function. The QTVR will take you to our reconstruction of one with its accompanying Druid. Here they would pray to their gods and sacrifice animals... yes, and humans. Maybe this is what the Iron Age dagger and knife found at The Berth were used for?  (A recent discovery at Humber estuary in the east of England found a hill fort whose sole purpose seems to have been as a ritual killing site). 

The Outer Camp (QTVR) could also have been of some religious significance, either as a place of worship or as a burial ground. In this QTVR image we've placed our virtual camera on top of a gatehouse, but there is no evidence one way or the other for the existence of one. As we've already said, it's almost the shape of a Bronze Age burial 'Pond Burrow' tumuli and this is made very clear by looking around our virtual panorama. It's hardly a 'hill fort' as its inner enclosure is almost flat. There are six Bronze Age burial rings* in the  Baschurch environs so this isn't out of the questions. Let's hope we find out one day!

* For locals interested, the rings all lie on the Baschurch to Ruyton XI Town's road (map). The first is situated in the field on the right just after the crossroad and the '40 mph' sign as you head towards Ruyton. The other five are grouped together and lie further west, but I haven't discovered which field as yet.

THE REAL THING!

There, that wasn't too painful, was it? Now you're ready for the real thing.  So strap in, clear your mind and be prepare for an incredible journey. Let the countdown begin...

5, 4, 3, 2, 1...............................click Here!

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