Janet Gough studied History and History of Art at Cambridge. She was awarded an OBE for services to heritage in the New Year’s Honours 2017 and advised Royal Mail on its Christmas Cathedral stamps for 2024. This talk explores evidence for religion and ritual among Britain’s first farming communities. Focusing on the Neolithic period, it examines monuments such as long barrows and stone circles as places of belief, memory, and communal gathering, embedded within carefully structured landscapes. The lecture considers how people in prehistory were motivated to invest huge resources into the construction of monuments which persisted in use and memory for many centuries and survive within our Christian landscapes today.

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Chana James, our host for this talk, will begin by exploring St Mary’s Itchen Stoke in Hampshire, a church only 15 minutes away from Jane Austen’s house.

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Find out more about this church here: https://www.visitchurches.org.uk/visit/our-churches/st-marys-church-itchen-stoketest