Medieval oil lantern how to#

Stone Age solsticeīy the time Stonehenge was built, we’d been burning our fingers on flames for millenia. Made of over 4,000 trees and stretching for two and a half miles, it’s thought that they were deliberately burned in a kind of one-off festival. At Avebury, one of the places in our care, archaeologists have recently found evidence of two huge wooden monuments built over 5,000 years ago. Some researchers think that that early cave art may have been ‘animated’ by the flickering of flames – and light would have been used as a storytelling device. The extra calories that we got from cooked food were crucial to the development of our big, energy-burning brains.įires were important for cooking and keeping warm, but they must have been important as a source of light too.

Medieval oil lantern how to#

From there, we learned how to use flints to spark our own fires from scratch.Īnimals and plants caught in wildfires would have been ‘cooked’, making them more nutritious and easier to digest. Wildfires might have been kept burning by people with wood and animal dung. And the land scorched by the fire would have be easier to forage. When fires broke out in lightning storms, people might have organised themselves to catch animals fleeing from the flames. Our ancestors would have known about the power of fire long before they learned how to harness it.

It had a profound effect on how our species developed. It’s likely that the discovery was made independently by people all over the world.

Humans discovered how to control fire at least 120,000 years ago. You can book your tickets now at our sites cross the country. There’ll be unique trails at the sites, each one inspired by stories from the past. Throughout December this year we’re opening up some of our places and filling them with magical illuminations to light up the dark. In this blog we’re shining a light on this centuries-old struggle to overcome darkness. Fires, small candles, lamps and moonlight were all we had at our disposal to lengthen our days. We can read, cook, do housework (and watch English Heritage videos on YouTube) into the wee small hours of even the darkest nights.įor most of our history, all that was an unthinkable luxury. The NHS estimates that 1 in 15 people get Seasonal Affective Disorder in the UK – a kind of depression brought on by a lack of natural light.īut at least we can light up our houses at the flick of a switch. If you work indoors, you may sneak a slither of sunlight at lunchtime if you’re lucky, but that’s your lot. You wake up in the dark and get home in the dark. Forget the cold – the worst thing about winter is the dark.