2 - Locating the Cleulow Cross: Materiality, Place and Landscape

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Landscape now, and in the past, is both a cognitive construct and physical place used to express beliefs through practices (Darvill 1999, 109). Faith and identity can sometimes be expressed physically through monuments, structures and boundaries or sometimes expressed cognitively as placenames and folklore (Semple 2011, 742–63). Often the material practices and the significances attached to places are closely entwined. Material evidence, combined with written sources, can provide insights into how past groups and individuals engaged with, and experienced, their surroundings. Ingold (1993, 152–74) has demonstrated that the landscape is a constant work in progress, used by subsequent generations to express their thoughts and beliefs, often assimilating earlier practices and associations. Consequently, to understand landscape from Ingold's dwelling perspective requires archaeologists to consider the past in the past (Bradley 2002).

In early medieval studies, this approach has been most widely applied to consider the mortuary arena. Discussions have sought to understand how early medieval communities viewed and potentially controlled their environments through movement and sensory engagement with the landscape, and investing meaning in place through memory-making practices associated with the burial and commemoration of the dead (e.g. Semple 2003, 72–91; Brookes 2007, 143–53; Williams 2006; Devlin 2007; Reynolds 2009; Williams et al. 2010, 1–24). Within this literature, studies have explored the distribution and topographic situations of early medieval stone sculpture only on occasion and for specific monuments (e.g. Sidebottom 2000, 213–35; Carver 2005, 13–36; Griffiths 2006, 143–62; Turner 2006; Gondek 2010, 318–33; Williams 2011, 13–32).

This study builds on this work, as well as on the cautious and critical application of approaches to monuments in the landscape developed in British prehistory (Barrett 1994; Tilley 1994; 2012; for discussion see Williams et al. 2010). This study applies these approaches to Cheshire's corpus of stone monuments for the first time. Moreover, it provides an in-depth exploration of early medieval stone sculpture's role in creating, or augmenting existing, landscapes by investigating immediate landscape settings and relationships with the broader topography and associated archaeology. The case study for this approach will be a striking early medieval stone cross-shaft seemingly positioned in its original location: the Cleulow Cross (Wincle), located in the far east of Cheshire.