I often think how lucky we are at St Mary’s to be so close to the World Heritage Site centred around Avebury. There are so many world-famous prehistoric monuments within a few miles of the school. From the Neolithic and Bronze Age we have Silbury Hill, the West Kennet Long Barrow and Windmill Hill (less visited, perhaps, but highly important for its archaeological finds) to name but three, and from the Iron Age we have the Oldbury Hill Fort, which looks out over the town of Calne itself. I personally love my dog walks from West Kennet to Avebury and back, along the path of the Neolithic “Avenue” between the two sites, and of course our girls also take advantage of this fantastic resource for study and outdoor adventure.
One of the things that frustrates and intrigues about prehistory is how little we can know for sure about it and the people who lived during it. In his book Britain BC, Francis Pryor re-imagines what the ceremonies might have involved when Neolithic people were constructing and using a causewayed enclosure of the Windmill Hill type (though Pryor’s example is actually at Etton in the western fenland of East Anglia). He believes that these sites were not forts or dwelling places, but instead were constructed specifically for the purposes of rites of passage – among them death and burial, but not by any means only that.
What really struck me about Pryor’s analysis was the parallel he draws between the rites of passage that would have applied in the Neolithic period and those of today. As he says, we still have many of them, from marriage to taking the driving test and, most intriguingly for me, the sitting of exams. Although the stages of modern rites of passage may have become blurred, Pryor analyses any such process in three stages. First, comes separation, in which when sitting exams “the applicant is removed (or removes him or herself) from friends and the community to revise and mentally prepare for the ordeal ahead”. This is followed by liminality, from the Latin limen, or boundary. As Pryor says, “Liminality here means actually sitting the exam and that ghastly period afterwards, the state of limbo before the results are declared”, when “one can slip back, or move forward”. The third stage is reincorporation, when one is welcomed back into the community, hopefully after exam success.
All of these stages would have characterised the ceremonies at Etton (or Windmill Hill) in the same way that they are currently a reality for our girls at this time of the year. It’s a fascinating thought as we move into the period where the idea of moving on to the next stage becomes a reality for our leavers. I hope that they’ll see the summer differently now that they know they’ll be in the liminality stage of the process!
Towards the end of each school year I make a point of seeing each of our UVI girls and one of the things we always talk about is what they see as being the highlights of their time with us, as we reflect on the many challenges that they have faced and the successes they have achieved. There may sometimes be things that they wish they had done differently (itself a part of the whole learning experience) but I am always struck by how they take with them great memories of their time at the school.
As we approach the final stage of the Sixth Form’s rite of passage on Founders’ Day, we will be celebrating all our leavers and everything they have experienced and contributed while with us. Although they are leaving, they will always be Calne girls to us – permanently reincorporated into the school community!
