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The most important feature of the whole monument is, however, the alignment of the Gussage Cursus which lines up perfectly with the movement of the sun at the mid-winter solstice. The North-Eastern end of this monument terminates just below the ridge on Bottlebrush Down. Observers standing here and looking back along the course of the Cursus, which would have presumably been kept clear of vegetation, could watch the mid-winter sun set directly behind the silhouetted long barrow on Gussage Hill (see image 1).
This spectacular skyline effect would have been lost had the terminal been placed on top of the ridge. A favoured observer could watch the setting sun disappear behind the long barrow and be linked directly to the ancestors and to the Cursus itself creating a monumental avenue of the dead. The ancestors associated with the movement of heavenly bodies would become immortal and part of nature itself. Further symbolic meaning is manifest in the position of the Cursus along the spring line where annual flooding events were partly enclosed within the monument. By linking their ancestors with the forces of nature, and the movements of the heavenly bodies through one grand structure, certain individuals were trying to gain control, or appear to have control, over life itself.
Undoubtedly restricting access to the North, the Cursus may have marked the upward limit of settlement at that period. Certainly the great concentration of contemporary settlement debris comes from the South in the Bournemouth basin area of the coastal plain. It is not until later in the Neolithic, presumably when the Cursus has fallen into disrepair, that significant expansion takes place on the high ground to the North. But even in disrepair, as we shall see, the Cursus continued to exert a magnetic influence over the way the ritual landscape was organised for a further 2000 years – an astonishingly long time when measured in human lifetimes.
| Midwinter sunset over the long barrow at the terminus of the Dorset Cursus, Gussage Down. © Martin Green. |
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