Escaping the mad parade

Walking from Farndale up towards Rudland Rigg, we followed the track up the side of Monket Bank. The track climbs up through the old jet workings and quarries along the moor edge.

In the 14th century this route was known as Monckgate and linked Bransdale with Farndale. The track was used as a Church or Corpse Road with coffins being carried over the rigg to Cockan Kirk in Bransdale.

The road across the rigg is now known as Westside Road, in the past, it was known as Waingate, running from Kirkbymoorside Market Place in the south to Battersby Bank in the north.

We cut out across the moor towards Ousegill Head and the Three Howes. Flint tools had been found by the gamekeepers for a number of years so in September 1973 Raymond Hayes and others excavated the area. His small excavation yielded over 800 flints from an area of 3.50 x 3.0m. The site was interpreted as ‘A temporary camping site in a forest clearing, probably being occupied by hunters following red deer or other game.’

Whilst at the Three Howes we saw a Red Kite being harassed by an anxious Curlew. Once the Kite had rid itself of its tormentor it flew directly over us, a joyful moment, this was my first sighting of a Kite on the moors.

We walked back across the old peat workings and rejoined the track, moving on to the waymarker at Cockam Cross and then onto our final goal, the Cammon Stone.

The Cammon Stone is a prehistoric standing stone that sits just beside the main track. The stone is about a metre and a half tall and leans towards the west. I have been visiting this stone on and off for at least two decades, my perception is that the lean of the stone has increased over the years but I may be wrong, I hope I am. The southern views from the stone look down along Bransdale, the axis of the stone is also aligned in this direction, which is probably no coincidence.

There are a number of faded letters carved onto the western face of the stone, in the past, antiquarians had speculated as to whether these letters were Phoenician in origin. They are actually Hebrew and spell out the word halleluiah. They are thought to be the work of the Reverend W Strickland, Vicar of Ingleby. Strickland is thought to be responsible for carving a number of inscriptions in this area.

There is a second stone, a large flat slab. No one knows whether this slab ever stood upright. There is no obvious weathering patterns to indicate that it might have been upstanding but I guess that question could only ever be answered by an archaeological investigation.

We picked our way along a track that ran from the moortop into Farndale and joined the daleside road at Spout House. If you are a fan of stone walls and troughs, you will love this road, it has massive walls with stone-lined gutters and numerous multiple carved stone troughs. The stonemasons and wallers were once kept busy in this area.

Also on this road is the Duffin Stone, a massive boulder that has tumbled down from the escarpment side and is embedded into the verge of the narrow lane. The stone bears the scars of contact with many vehicles.

Etymology

Waingate – OE Waen Way – Waggon Road

Monket – The ‘Mun(e)k(e)’ spellings suggest ‘monks’, but in the absence of monastic associations one might suspect an earlier ‘Mened-cet’ (Welsh Mynydd-coed) – ‘forest hill’. Here one might compare ‘Monket House’ in north-east Yorkshire.

Cammon Stone – Cam Maen – Bank Stone.

Rudland – OE hrycg ON hyrggr ‘ridge’.

Sources

Old Roads & Pannierways in North East Yorkshire. R. H. Hayes.1988. The North York Moors National Park.

Yorkshire Archaeological Journal. Vol.67. 1995. The Yorkshire Archaeological Society.

The Consise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names. Eilert Ekwall. 1974. Oxford.

Flint

Late Neolithic / Early Bronze Age arrowheads on display at Pannett Park Museum, Whitby.

The Smell of Water Part 3: Danby Rigg

H

Beacon Moor Scraper

A few years ago I found this lovely flint tool on the field margin a few yards away from the Bronze Age burial mound at the top of Patterson’s Bank.

Baysdale

Ernaldsti, the ancient route runs through Westerdale joining the ridge route at Ralphs Cross.

Heading west into Baysdale, the track helps keep the bracken at bay.

A large slab of rock sits buried in the bracken below the track. I have stopped here many times, it is a perfect place to sit and gaze across to the hidden valley of the Great Hograh Beck.

The slab has a single cup mark at its centre, it is difficult to say whether or not it is prehistoric in origin, there are also carved initials on the stone.  In the 1960s Rowland Close reported a prehistoric carved stone at the head of the Great Hograh Beck valley on Holiday Hill.

On returning to the path I find a single grey flint.

The repairs of the field walls echo the prehistoric walling of the surrounding moor tops.

The fields have been abandoned, the farmhouse and barn derelict.

Baysdale YN [Basdale c 1200 YCh 564]. ‘Valley with a Cow-shed’ (ON bass).

The hillside sheep scrapes are filled with tiny yellow flowers, my friend Barry has identified them as climbing corydalis (Ceratocapnos clavicular).

On the moor top I stop for a chat with the keeper. He tells me that he has just returned from a week in Ibiza with the lads.

Roadside litter – a short memory

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Ekwall does not mention Hograh, perhaps his definition below gives a clue to the etymology.

OE hoh ‘heel; projecting ridge of land’, dial. hoe, heugh ‘crag, cliff, precipice, a height ending abruptly’. In pl. ns. the meaning varies from ‘steep ridge’ to ‘slight rise’. The OE inflexion was hoh, gen. hos, dat. ho plur. hos, gen. ho, dat. hom. Later were formed gen.  hoges, dat. hoge, plur. hoas, hogas &c.

An alternative etymology by Margaret Gelling

hangra OE ‘sloping wood’. This term is well evidenced in the boundary surveys of charters but is not otherwise recorded in OE. It is usually translated ‘wood on a steep slope’, which is the sense in which hanger is recorded in the 18th century..

Sources

Prehistoric Rock Art in the North York Moors. Paul M Brown & Graeme Chappell. 2005

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names. Eilert Ekwall. 1959

Place-Names in the Landscape. Margaret Gelling. 1984

Kildale Moor

A Bronze Age cremation cemetery, enclosed by a bank of earth and stones surviving as an earthwork on the highest point of Kildale Moor. The cemetery measures 15m by 16.5m internally with an maximum wall height of 0.4m. The centre has been mutilated by excavation in 1941 and the wall in the east has been cut through by an excavation trench now refilled. The feature is partially visible on air photographs and was mapped as part of the North York Moors NMP. It is not possible to determine the latest evidence for the feature due to dense vegetation cover on the 2009 vertical photography. Pastscape

Predators are prey

Remnants

A lone conifer thrives until the next burning

Signing the land

 A broken ring buried in the heather

Intervisible

 

A Southern Excursion

Excursion – A movement of something along a path or through an angle

Avebury

This is an amazing collection of monuments, all of them excessive in size. There is a colossal earthwork enclosure with four entrances; the largest stone circle in western Europe surrounding the remains of the fifth and seventh biggest rings; and the remnants of two Coves, a holed stone and two avenues. Aubrey Burl. 1995

Even the most Gothic of poetry could not evoke the impact that this colossus has upon any mind sensitive to the lingerings of prehistory…As long ago as 1289 the earthwork was called Waleditch, Old English weala-dic, ‘the dyke of the Britons’. Aubrey Burl. 2000

Avebury Postcard. Reconstruction by Alan Sorrell. Dept. of the Environment 1958

The monument we see today was excavated and reconstructed by Alexander Keiller during the late 1930’s.  A number of the stones, including the one pictured above, were reassembled using the remaining fragments.

I once took a holiday in Avebury, staying in the Keiller Room at the Red Lion pub allowed me to spend a couple of chilly November evenings and frosty mornings walking alone amongst the stones. I recently returned, sadly the Red Lion no longer takes guests.

The stones and the surrounding landscape have informed the work of Barbara Hepworth, John Piper, Paul Nash and many other artists.

The church, unlike the pub, sits outside of the henge. When siting the original church, it must have seemed futile to try and christianise a pagan monument of such magnitude. The Saxon baptismal font is thought to depict a bishop trampling on a pair of dragons.

Many of the stones were thrown down and buried by christians during the fourteenth century.  The stones were once again attacked during the mid-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many stones were smashed for buildings.

Herepath, the power of the name compelled me to walk along it to the Ridgeway.

At home, on the North York moors, my eyes are often cast downwards onto the margins of the path looking for flints. Here the track is made of flint, I felt quite overwhelmed.

I had set myself the challenge of finding a single, specific, stone amongst the sarsen drifts (Grey Wethers) of Fyfield Down.  Julian Cope calls this area The Mother’s Jam.

Polissoir – A block of coarse stone, sometimes as an earthfast boulder or natural outcrop, used for grinding and polishing stone tools.

The bowl and grooves of the sarsen polissoir are as smooth as marble. A potential polissoir has been found built into the fabric of the nearby West Kennet Long Barrow with another incorporated into the Stone Circle at Avebury.

Singing at Delling’s Door.

The Ridgeway, one notable landscape Archaeologist believes that it may have first been established as a trackway at the end of the last ice age.

Heading south along the Ridgeway, the summit of Silbury Hill reveals itself.

Silbury Hill is the largest man made mound in Europe.

The Barrow Cemetery on Overton Hill is crossed by the remains of a Roman Road.

 The Sanctuary is located where the Ridgeway meets the modern A4. The monument consisted of two concentric rings of standing stones, it was destroyed in the 18th century ‘to gain a little dirty profit’ (Wm. Stukeley 1724). Concrete posts mark the locations of the stones

The stones of the West Kennet Avenue led me back to Avebury.

Sources

A Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain Ireland & Brittany. Aubrey Burl. 1995

The Stone Circles of Britain Ireland & Brittany. Aubrey Burl. 2000

Flints

A lovely little blade found on a molehill at Saltergate

A possible microlith also found on a molehill at Saltergate

The unctuous sweat of the sun

Following a large moorland fire in 2003, my friend Graeme Chappell and I took a walk across Fylingdales Moor to look for unrecorded prehistoric carved rocks. The fire had burned so intensely that, in a number of areas, much of the peat had been removed revealing the prehistoric land surface below. During our visit we found the three items in the photograph below.  A small worked flint, a fragment of medieval Scarborough ware pottery and an amber pebble. The pebble was found within a previously unrecorded prehistoric ring cairn.

The pebble is a beautiful object to hold and roll around in the hand, it is one of my favorite finds.

Baltic amber, transported by glacial action, can be found on British beaches but how the pebble found its way into a prehistoric ring cairn 260m above sea level is not known.  We know that in prehistory both amber and jet were much used, amber beads have been excavated from Upper Paleolithic sites in Germany which have been dated to 15,000 BCE. Baltic amber has been traded and distributed throughout Europe from the Neolithic period to the present day.

It is possible that the pebble was deposited on the moor by glacial action. It is also possible that someone may have deliberately placed the pebble within the monument. Given that our ancestors placed a value on amber I would like to think that the latter possibility was the more likely, a small offering placed within a funerary monument as an act of protection or remembrance.

Both jet and amber are known to have been attributed magical powers in more recent times – mainly, it is thought, because of their electrostatic properties. Rub them, and they develop a static charge. Jet and amber were used for amulets by the Romans and Vikings, and were widely employed in the Middle Ages and down to the recent past for healing, divination or for turning away evil spirits.

Alison Sheridan. British Archaeology Magazine. May 2003

http://www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba70/feat3.shtml

I’d definitely recommend Graeme Chappell and Paul Browns wonderful book about the Prehistoric Rock Art of the North Yorkshire Moors.