Holme I (Seahenge) and Holme II: ritual responses to climate change in Early Bronze Age Britain - GeoJournal
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Holme I and II were contemporary, adjacent Early Bronze Age (EBA) oak-timber enclosures exposed intertidally at Holme-next-the-sea, Norfolk, England, in 1998. Holme I enclosed a central upturned tree-stump, its function and intent unknown. Holme II is thought a mortuary structure. Both are proposed here best explained as independent ritual responses to reverse a period of severe climate deterioration recorded before 2049 BC when their timbers were felled. Holme I is thought erected on the summer-solstice, when the cuckoo traditionally stopped singing, departing to the ‘Otherworld’. It replicated the cuckoo’s supposed overwintering quarters: a tree-hole or the ‘bowers of the Otherworld’ represented by the tree-stump, remembered in folklore as ‘penning-the-cuckoo’ where a cuckoo is confined to keep singing and maintain summer. The cuckoo symbolised male-fertility being associated with several Indo-European goddesses of fertility that deified Venus - one previously identified in EBA Britain. Some mortal consorts of these goddesses appear to have been ritually sacrificed at Samhain. Holme II may be an enclosure for the body of one such ‘sacral king’. These hypotheses are considered, using abductive reasoning, as ‘inferences to the best explanations’ from the available evidence. They are supported with environmental data, astronomic and biological evidence, regional folklore, toponymy, and an ethnographic analogy with indigenous Late Iron Age practices that indirect evidence indicates were undertaken in EBA Britain. Cultural and religious continuity is supported by textual sources, the material record and ancient DNA (aDNA) studies.

Holme I and II were contemporary, adjacent Early Bronze Age (EBA) oak-timber enclosures exposed intertidally at Holme-next-the-sea, Norfolk, England, in 1998. Holme I enclosed a central upturned tree-stump, its function and intent unknown. Holme II is thought a mortuary structure. Both are proposed here best explained as independent ritual responses to reverse a period of severe climate deterioration recorded before 2049 BC when their timbers were felled.

Holme I is thought erected on the summer-solstice, when the cuckoo traditionally stopped singing, departing to the ‘Otherworld’. It replicated the cuckoo’s supposed overwintering quarters: a tree-hole or the ‘bowers of the Otherworld’ represented by the tree-stump, remembered in folklore as ‘penning-the-cuckoo’ where a cuckoo is confined to keep singing and maintain summer.

The cuckoo symbolised male-fertility being associated with several Indo-European goddesses of fertility that deified Venus - one previously identified in EBA Britain.

Some mortal consorts of these goddesses appear to have been ritually sacrificed at Samhain.

Holme II may be an enclosure for the body of one such ‘sacral king’.

The inaugural components of Holme I were aligned with sunrise on the summer solstice when Venus remained visible symbolising a hieros gamos with the Sun and creating a period of ‘ritual-time’ when the inaugural components were erected. It was also the date when the cuckoo, symbolising fertility, traditionally stopped singing, returned to the Otherworld and the summer went with it. The monument’s form appears to imitate two supposed winter dwellings of the cuckoo remembered in folklore: a hollow tree or ‘the bowers of the Otherworld’ represented by the upturned oak-stump at its centre.

Holme II was probably erected in the autumn of the same year. A sacred enclosure to contain the body of a warrior, a champion of a local goddess of fertility and sovereignty, associated with the cuckoo and the planet, Venus. He has similarities with the Late Iron Age sacral kings of Ireland and those in northern Britain who were titled ‘cuckoo’. The champion was deemed to have failed in his cosmic responsibility to maintain the fertility of the land and its peoples sacrificed to the goddess, in the hope that she would end the cold spell. He was probably sacrificed at Samhain, his bier orientated with sunrise on that date when Venus was still visible.