Explain to the students that Bronze Age people also constructed many monuments in Britain with over 1,300 still to be seen across the country.

Almost all of the monuments that Bronze Age people built were mostly made of stone (although there could well have been long decayed structures of wood or decorations of cloth associated with them as well). One such monument can be seen today at Merrivale in Devon.

Resource 6 is a detailed description from the website Legendary Dartmoor, which includes helpful maps that can help explain the site without visiting.

Divide the students into groups of three or four and then ask each group to examine Resource 6. These are the stone monuments at Merrivale. Encourage discussion and speculation. What can they identify and describe?

At Merrivale there are:

• Two rows of double standing stones parallel to each other about 260 meters long and one meter wide between the lines of stones down the centre;
• A stone circle;
• A single large standing stone four meters high;
• In the middle of one stone row is a cist (pronounced kist) a stone lined burial chamber;
• Just to the south of the two stone avenues there is another much larger cist with a stone lid or capstone.  In the 1870s a local farmer removed the middle section of the capstone to make a gate post!

Tell the students that archaeologists and historians don't really know what the exact purpose of the monuments at Merrivale were. What is obvious however is that this site was of great importance because constructing it by hand and then maintaining it would have involved the work of large numbers of people over many years.

Before moving on, ask the students to think about what other things might have been constructed originally at Merrivale but have since disappeared entirely because they were made organic material such as wood or cloth that has decayed. Today we only see the harder and more resistant grey rock.

Would Bronze Age people have built buildings of wood as well as constructing the stone monuments and if so what for?  Perhaps they may have made colourful banners of cloth to hang above the stone monuments and blow in the wind?

One theory is that Merrivale may have been a place where Bronze Age people gathered together at times during the year for important ceremonies, to observe the skies and to bury the highest ranking people in their communities. The stone rows and stone circle have undergone detailed metrical and astronomical analysis and one possibility is that the stone rows were deliberately aligned to point towards particular constellations in the night sk,y or the movement of the sun and moon at particular dates and times in the year such as the summer solstice on June 21^st.

Other explanations have also been proposed – what do the students think?