Introduction

John Ruskin's Romantic view of the world compelled him to look beyond the scientific reality of landscape and see in it, additionally, symbols of his Christian beliefs. ‘The simplest forms of Nature are strangely animated by the sense of the Divine’, he wrote in the third volume of Modern Painters (1899, 72). This is a paper about symbolic meanings which have been ‘read’ into the landscape in the past; but, unlike Ruskin, it concentrates not on a single ideology, but on a single area of landscape, the superficially uninteresting valley of the River Witham in Lincolnshire. The topic is a difficult one. Documentary history tells us very little of such matters, whilst archaeological evidence has to be used with great care. The concept that there might be a symbolic meaning in landscape, that it has been exploited ritualistically, has been more fully developed in prehistoric studies and attempts to discuss such ideas in medieval archaeology are rare. Even so, certain small-scale studies have attempted the task (Everson 1993; Everson and Williamson 1998), and it is inconceivable that such meanings were not perceived in the medieval period, as they still are today. In recent years there has been an upsurge in interest in ritual uses and meanings in the prehistoric landscape (e.g. Tilley 1994; 1996), and in the symbolic value accorded to monuments placed within it (Bradley 1993; Bradley 1998a). Even more relevant to our purposes here, Richard Bradley's earlier book The Passage of Arms (1998b) explored the multifarious meanings of votive deposits within the diverse landscapes of Western Europe. Studies such as these have shown that functional explanations need be neither the first, nor the only ones, applied to the material remains of past cultures. In the case of monumental structures in particular, the prehistorian agrees with more modern architectural critics that built structures deliberately set out to embody a symbolic meaning within their contemporary environment, often in addition to having a functional role. Indeed, such embodiments of larger meanings, in addition to the purely functional, might be an integral part of the definition of a monument.

This study focuses on the central part of the Witham valley in Lincolnshire, an area which is rightly famous for its spectacular finds of votive metalwork from the river (Fig. 17.1) (Davey 1971; Davey 1973; White 1979a; 1979b; 1979c; Fitzpatrick 1984).