Megalithic architectural elements

Forecourts were probably the venue for ritual practices connected with the burial and commemoration of the dead in the past societies that built these types of tombs.

Excavation within some forecourts has recovered animal bone, pottery and evidence of burning suggesting that they served as locations for votive offerings or feasting dedicated to the dead.

European dolmens, especially hunebed and dyss burials, often provide examples of the use of kerbs in megalithic architecture but they were also added to other kinds of chamber tomb.

Excavation of barrows without stone rings such as Fussell's Lodge in Wiltshire suggests that, in these examples, timber or turf was used to define a kerb instead.

In the British Isles, the enclosing nature of kerbs has been suggested to be analogous to later Neolithic and Bronze Age stone and timber circles and henges which also demonstrate an attempt to demarcate a distinct, round area for ritual or funerary purposes.

Common examples include the walls of chamber tombs and other megalithic monuments, and the vertical elements of the trilithons at Stonehenge.

In the latter case, orthostats are large thin slabs of gypsum neatly and carefully formed, for use as a wall-facing secured by metal fixings and carrying reliefs, which were then painted.