Wooden stave built buckets and rope lay there as one would expect in a well. Other wooden goods, mainly from alder and oak included tubs, bowls and scoops. There were butchered bones from lambs, kids, cattle, oxen, pigs and red and roe deer, plus bones of dogs and ponies and a juvenile human tooth. Pottery from cooking, turves, charcoal, dung, bits of flint and antler, wicker baskets all went in and some useful items that didn’t seem like rubbish, perhaps as thanks to the forces in the earth or water, amber and shale jewellery, pins, awls, needles. The buckets and skulls enabled the shaft to be dated to 3,100 to 3,650 years ago, but one bucket and charcoal at the bottom seemed to date it a thousand years earlier. The meat menu showed farming was going on, as did the seeds found. Three crops seeds were (emmer) wheat, (six rowed) barley and flax. The flax was Linum usitatissimum, the agricultural cultivar from Europe and not its wild precursors. (Linum giving rise to words like linen and linseed.) Fibres in cordage seemed to be more from hemp though than flax.

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This was a deserted, open, featureless site. Thousands of years earlier mesolithic peoples held it in some regard planting a row of Totem poles less than a mile away, and centuries later neolithic people started building a circular monument nearby. Today the well, the deepest prehistoric man made shaft in England, is largely forgotten, and is just a dip in the ground, marked on the map as the Wilsford Shaft. The A303 runs past it. The mesolithic totem poles are marked in a car park and mistaken by some as mini roundabouts. The circular monument that came many years later and which the car park now serves, though it wasn’t really a henge and at first there weren’t any stones, is a little better known today as Stonehenge.

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The causewayed enclosure at Windmill Hill near Avebury (3,800-3,300 BC) is even older than the Wilsford shaft. No flax seed was found here BUT clear impressions of it were found on the pottery.

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Flax has been around in the Woodford valley and Wiltshire for a very long time.

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Kerry O'Connor

October 2021