Cromlech Uncovered
Finding Manuland II
Amazing. Another sign. I set off for Cassels.
Maybe this crazy idea that I’d had the evening before about iterating a journey across Europe from Maing-sounding place to Maing-sounding place could work.
I emailed my boss back in eastern Ukraine: I would be taking a little longer to return to Dnipro than expected – I only had a few months left before retirement anyhow. I didn’t feel bad about doing this to my boss.
I thought: I’ll take a week, instead of two days to drive back to Ukraine. By the time I got back to Dnipro, I would know if this was a viable methodology for a travel book.
My French manager was relaxed about my delayed return to my diplomatic posting. Although even at that moment four months before the full-scale invasion I vaguely expected an imminent Russian invasion - President Biden had just warned publicly about it - my then boss, like so many, did not rate the prospect much. He and I had already spoken about the issue - his view, like so many, was that Russia would never be mad enough to invade Ukraine.
Cassels
As I was driving towards Cassels, I noticed two strange phenomena which interested me immediately… Wait! Before I tell you about the rest of my journey back to Dnipro, it’s worth explaining why exactly that mound outside Maing meant something to me.
Prehistory
In May 2021 a five-thousand-year-old burial mound was torn apart by housing developers in a posh suburb of the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. News of this cultural vandalism found a global audience. Ukraine’s chief mound guardian told The New York Times:
“It’s genocidal. Erasing our culture like that. Violates our national security. Our children’s children have a right to touch our country’s cultural patrimony.”
Residents blocked a road to protest at the sacrilegious act.
After the kurgan - as such mounds are known in Ukraine - was removed, a much older stone circle was, unexpectedly, discovered underneath.
At that time, I was a diplomat posted to Dnipro. Russia was at war with Ukraine. I took a professional interest in any national security issues in Dnipro. My bosses in Vienna noticed articles about the protests around the removal of the barrow in the New York Times and in the Times of London. When I consciously crossed the Sura River to visit the stone cromlech for the first time to investigate, something about it really affected me.
For one thing, visiting there reminded me of my childhood in Ireland. My parents and I had often gone on Sunday afternoon excursions to see Newgrange, Knowth and Emain Macha, three of the most famous burial mounds in Europe. Over most of the continent, and especially at home in Ireland, many such barrows had been destroyed millennia ago. Those that remained were overlooked, until the last few years. In Europe’s legends these tumuli feature prominently. Woden, after whom Wednesday is named, sacrificed himself beside three kurgans in Uppsala Sweden “upon the cosmicash tree in order to learn the secret runes”.
In Welsh literature, sitting on top of a mound was one of the two means of entering the Otherworld. In ancient Irish tales, the defeated occupants of Ireland (who worshipped the Goddess Danu) were bequeathed the right to live in the earth-mounds (síd) outside settlements, where, later in folklore, they became known as fairies, and ban shees (literally: “women of the síd”). In Arthurian legends the giant herdsman sits on a tumulus and directs the hero to strange castles where his mettle is tested.
The Oxford English Dictionary even mined this nugget of frankincense (manna) from an English explorer’s Indian travel journal from 1818:
“We passed several tumuli from ten to forty feet in length... They are called Mane and are erected over the graves of [Tibetan Buddhist] Lamas.”
In Ukraine the physical presence of these Mane is felt in almost every community. Ukraine still had one-hundred thousand such sepulchral mounds. For my first six years travelling through the smallest villages in eastern Ukraine, I hadn’t noticed any of them. Once I discovered their existence, they began to pop up everywhere, like magical trolls do in Norse folklore.
Whenever I would be in a small village my eye would be drawn to any potential kurgans. I would weigh the various items of evidence in favour or against such prominent mounds being natural or human made.
Such tumuli, though, are inherently hard to spot, not least because those who constructed them often did so by gently shaping, sculpting and modifying natural landforms. In many of my professional conversations with village leaders, I eventually got into the habit of asking them, “do you have any kurgans in your community?” Their faces would frequently immediately light up – they didn’t expect such questions from a Western diplomat!
I soon realised that speaking of these tumuli opened rich seams of interesting information that I would jot down for my reports of the meetings for my managers in Vienna.
They would tell me about how many of the tumuli were protected. That would spark some chat about their community tourism development strategies which inevitably involved promoting Ukraine’s unique pre-Christian archaeology.
Learning about how housing developers had destroyed one of these core parts of local and national identity disturbed me. The injustice of it, as well as the cultural illiteracy, and the misuse of power grated. It reminded me of how in Ireland political vandals had built a motorway very close to Newgrange. They had destroyed many ancient sites along the way. Such sepulchral forms in our landscape themselves are precious reminders of our unnecessarily mysterious past. They should be preserved so that future generations can see, visit, touch and interpret them.
I agreed wholeheartedly with Ukraine’s chief mound guardian on this point. Back then though, I had no idea of the true meaning of these mounds or of the significance of the Yamnaya people who had built them to our contemporary lives and identities…
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