Archaeology at Heathrow T5

Download an animation showing how the cursus might have been built in sections (requires QuickTime).

Monument construction

Sometime between c. 3,600 and 3,300 BC, the small monuments and informal routeway between them were buried by the Stanwell Cursus. This remarkable monument ran in an almost straight line for 3 kilometres from the River Colne in the northwest to the edge of the Taplow gravel terrace beneath Stanwell in the southeast. It consisted of two parallel ditches, the earth from which was used to build a single central bank.

The monument appears to have been set out very precisely so that it linked together and buried the earlier important locations such as the burnt flint pits. It was built as a series of sections, each c. 150 to 200 metres long, and each section could have been built by four people working for 16 to 20 weeks. It is likely that each section of the cursus was built by a particular family group associated with the earlier location or monument that lay beneath the cursus. The construction of the cursus fulfilled many roles. But perhaps its most important legacy was that it affirmed through the construction of a communal project and through communal labour the pre-eminence of a community consisting of component families.

The architectural impact of such a monument would have been immense, but the social implications would have been even more far-reaching. The Stanwell cursus now served as a stage for the leaders of the community to process along and undertake ceremonies at the places along its course which still remained sacred to the family groups. Underlying these ceremonies was a need to negotiate and agree access to land and resources in an increasingly cleared landscape. Thus the community had made itself and set itself upon a new course of social interaction that required the construction of two more cursus monuments (refered to as the C2 and C3 cursus).