Bretons and Britons: exploring prehistoric Britain’s French connection

The fact that Britain and Brittany have similar names is more than coincidental. The two places have enmeshed histories, as Barry Cunliffe discusses in his latest book, Bretons and Britons. Chris Catling reports on the periods in prehistory when the people of the two cultures facing each other across the Channel were particularly close.

Around the turn of the 5th-4th millennia BC, farmers arrived in Britain and Ireland from the near Continent, bringing domesticated animals and cultivated cereals (see CA 333). The most prolific flow came from the Pas-de-Calais region and southern Belgium – the same route taken by many of today’s migrants, and an obvious one given that the chalk cliffs on either side of the Channel are inter-visible on calm and clear days.

But the western sea routes also played a part in this early Neolithic migration from around 4300 BC. The main evidence for this western migration consists of a particular type of burial monument – the passage grave – found in various forms in the western parts of the British Isles and Ireland,

below The estuary of the River Léguer at low tide. Like much of the coast of Brittany, these waters have been a rich food resource from prehistory to the present day because of their large tidal range. Mesolithic people collected molluscs, crustaceans, and fish, and the seaweed has been used to fertilise the soil since the Neolithic period. image: © Barry Cunliffe — The estuary of the River Léguer at low tide. Like much of the coast of Brittany, these waters have been a rich food resource from prehistory to the present day because of their large tidal range. Mesolithic people collected molluscs, crustaceans, and fish, and the seaweed has been used to fertilise the soil since the Neolithic period. Image: © Barry Cunliffe.

the construction of which seems to have been inspired by similar monuments in what is now Brittany, as well as further south, along the Atlantic coast to modern Spain and Portugal. Though they vary in detail, passage graves were built to be accessible and to allow new burials to be added or for rituals to be performed in the presence of the dead. They were places of collective burial, where ancestors could be revered, rather than the closed tombs of individuals that later became the norm.

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