From local workshops came the spectacular metalwork with which the elite decorated their bodies - armlets, pins and brooches, carved mirrors and, not least,the heavy gear without which no self-respecting British warrior would step into his war-chariot; sword hilts and horned helmets figured with curling patterns like unfurlin ferns or the astonishing stylised bronze horses, endearingly melancholy in expression like so many Eeyores resigned to a bad day in battle.
These ancient tribal cultures were not just warring, but trading with each other. It used to be thought that these finely wrought works of art had been brought by a great celtic migration, travelling from central and northern Europe around 500BC and awakening the sleepily primitive natives of the islands to a higher state of culture. But we now know that this sophisticated culture of warriors, druid-priests and artists developed spontaneously within Britain itself, importing - and also exporting - within trade zones that divided the island longitudinally: western Scotland and Wales south all the way to Brittany; southeastern England with northern Gaul and the Low Countries. So this was, in all imprtant ways, an indigenous british culture, which had evolved in contact with, rather than having been conquered or settled by, continental Europe. Iron Age Britain, after all, had grown up on sites that had been occupied for thousands of years. Although the stone henges and burial barrows that marked the landscape had been built at least a millennium before, it seems likely that ritual practices still took place on these ancient sites.