The website of Ancient Origins has a report of excavations at Anchor Church Field which lies to the east of the evocative remains of the medieval abbey at Crowland ( Croyland ) in south Lincolnshire. The abbey was the shrine of the Mercian warrior prince turned hermit St Guthlac who died in 714. An important early life written by one Felix in the period 730-40 survives of the Saint and it is an important source not just for the life of Guthlac but for the conditions in the Fens in that period. The already tonsured Guthlac was seeking a remote place of solitude:
“ There is in the midland regions of Britain a most terrible fen of immense size, which begins at the banks of the river Gronta [now the Cam] not far from the little fort which is called Gronte [Cambridge]; now in fens, now in flashes, sometimes in black oozes swirling with mist, but also with many islands and groves, and interrupted by the braiding of meandering streams … up to the sea … … When [Guthlac] was questioning the nearest inhabitants as to their experience of this solitude … a certain … Tatwine declared that he knew another island in the more remote and hidden parts of this desert (heremi); many had tried to live there but had rejected it because of the unknown monsters of the desert and the divers kinds of terrors. Guthlac, the man of blessed memory, heard this and besought his informant to show him the place. … It is called Crugland [‘Barrowland’, now Crowland], an island sited in the middle of the fen … no settler had been able to dwell there before … because of the fantastic demons living there. Here Guthlac, the man of God … began to dwell alone among the shady groves of the solitude … He loved the remoteness of the place which God had given him… . There was in the said island a barrow … which greedy visitors to the solitude had dug and excavated in order to find treasure there; in the side of this there appeared to be a kind of tank; in which Guthlac … began to live, building a shanty over it.”
From Felix’s Life of St Guthlac cited by Oliver Rackham in History of the Countryside.
Recent excavations have revealed in Anchor Church Field the foundations of what appears to have been a substantial medieval hermitage ( ‘anchor’ ) and place of pilgrimage but that underlying this are the remains of not only a Bronze Age barrow but also a large henge. The theory now being advanced is that the 26 year old St Guthlac and the two servants he brought with him reoccupied the area of the long abandoned henge, possibly also along with his sister St Pega - who is commemorated at nearby Peakirk.
This is a very interesting addition to our understanding of Crowland both in terms of the time of St Guthlac and also his subsequent commemoration. It is in some ways reminiscent of the relationship between the abbey at Glastonbury and St Michael’s chapel on the Tor and with the Holy Thorn on Wearyall Hill, or that of Lichfield Cathedral and St Chad’s church, inked by St Chad’s Pool.
The illustrated article from Ancient Origins with links, can be seen at Saint Guthlac’s Realm: Massive Stone Age Henge Discovered in Lincolnshire
There is another, in some ways more detailed, account from Newsweek which can be read at Archaeologists discover massive prehistoric henge in 'rare' find
I realise I ought to remedy a failing on my part and read the complete text of Felix’s Life of St Guthlac rather than just sharing in the better known citations from the work.
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