The Cleaven Dyke and Beech trees

A week later and I’ve just been on a foray to lowland Perthshire, via the Hermitage to draw beeches. The Cleaven Dyke is a 2 km long cursus, a five and a half thousand year old monument to something, who knows what. It runs through the middle of a scots pine plantation and a swathe of trees have been cut back about 20 metres on each side, giving a great sense of the straight line it cuts through the landscape. It’s not far from Meikleour and is well used by dog walkers and runners. There are paths and forestry tracks across or through it and the A93 cuts off the south-eastern end with a stream of tarmac and traffic but it still feels remarkably complete. An article in British Archaeology (see http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba44/ba44feat.html) talks about it as a sacred river. Who knows? There is certainly the feeling of processing as you walk along it (I went north-west to south-east, which seemed right somehow, walking the other way was just retracing my steps). But I felt very much on land, not water. It must have been an unusual experience to walk in straight line in the far past. We are used to walking on gridlines in city streets but ancient paths and ways were not straight, they meandered with the landscape, following contours, cutting through gaps in the hills and avoiding fast-running rivers and soggy bottoms.
I wonder what stories have been told about it. It is still conspicuous now and it must always have been seen as something worth speculating about. The guidebooks/internet say that until recently it was thought to be Roman. They were well know for their obsession with straight lines, making them a good bet as its builders. They knew what they were doing, the Romans when they built their roads and walls, a good way of asserting power on the landscape and thereby on the people who lived there. But there will be other stories to tell about it. Why is it the cleaven dyke? Who or what cleaved it?
I drew a couple of beeches. Even if they are not in their natural range up here they certainly seem to thrive and have no problem setting seed. They are everywhere, and rocks and slopes are great for forcing them into strange contortions, or just elegant buttresses to keep them upright.