ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the potential elements of an historical phenomenology of the experience of space, and make use of them to provide an interpretation of megalithic architecture in the British Isles. Two particular groups of megalithic monuments which fall demonstrably at the start of the Neolithic sequence very effectively demonstrate the role of architecture in the Neolithic landscape. The first of these is the menhirs, or upright monoliths of Brittany. The second group of monuments are more central to the concerns of this chapter. By examining several of the areas in which insular traditions of megalithic architecture grew up in the earlier third millennium be it may prove possible to isolate some particular trends within this process. The ritual practices enacted within the more complex megalithic tombs can be considered as temporal sequences of the bringing into association of artefacts, symbols and human bodies within an enclosed and spatially graded area.
