Copper & Henges

On a sunny Lammas morning I decided to take a drive over to Middleton Tyas. I parked up at the lovely church of St. Michael and All Angels.

‘The majestic N arcade has six bays with round piers (except for one octagonal one), scallop captials, square abaci, and single-step arches, i.e. must date from before 1150.‘ N. Pevsner

The lepers window and priests door have been blocked, I love this beautiful irregular walling.

A fragment of a Saxon Cross and a carved spiral an an exterior wall stone hint at a much older church being here prior to the arrival of the Normans.

One the church wall stones is copper-stained, The presence of veins of copper in the local rocks is something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while.

Records show that copper has been mined in this area since at least the 15th century and continued until the 18th century. Yields were generally low but copper concentrations from Middleton Tyas ores were found to be up to 65% pure, making them some of the highest grade ores in Europe.

The fields around the church are dotted with earthworks know as shaft mounds. These were vertical shafts sunk to the level of the copper veins, these shafts are also known as bell pits.

In the woods beneath the church are the ruins of a mine pump house and workshops. There are a number of sites in this area where veins of copper have been found. We know that copper was used extensively by our ancestors, so I suppose the question is, were these sites exploited during prehistory?

Fieldwork at the Iron Age royal site of Stanwick revealed evidence of copper working. Excavations at Melsonby and Scotch Corner have also revealed evidence of copper smelting in the Roman Period. ‘Excavations in 2015 at Scotch Corner suggest that its Flavian inhabitants were engaged in metalworking, perhaps exploiting copper from nearby Middleton Tyas: if so, the odds that this source were already being exploited in the pre-Roman period must be considerably shortened.’ C. Hazelgrove Et al.

A later excavations, as part of the A1 widening scheme, of the Iron Age settlement at Scotch Corner discovered hundreds of fragments of moulds known as pellet moulds. These moulds were used to manufacture small metal balls, the balls were then used as blanks for coin production. Analysis of the moulds showed evidence of gold, silver and copper. Pits have also been discovered at Scotch Corner that may indicate that the inhabitants were prospecting for copper locally. There was also evidence of copper processing in the same area.

There has been no physical evidence found of prehistoric copper working at Middleton Tyas but mining is a destructive process, later workings may have destroyed any evidence of previous workings.

What we do know is that there was definitely evidence of prehistoric activity in this area dating as far back as the end of the last Ice Age. There is plenty of evidence to show that this area was occupied during the Neolithic and Bronze ages, a prehistoric burial mound, known as Five Hills, sits in woodland on the northern edge of the village.

In 2016 a newly discovered henge was spotted on a LIDAR survey. The henge is located on the outskirts of the village of Moulton just 2km to the south of Middleton Tyas.

Moving further south, a wealth of prehistoric monuments have been found. A large cursus monument was discovered at Scorton, 6km south of Middleton Tyas, most traces of it have now been lost to gravel extraction. The monument was comprised of two double ditches 32m apart, 1m deep and from 2 to 3m wide, it ran for over 1.5km across the landscape, later work has suggested that the Cursus may have been even longer. Another possible cursus, a palisaded enclosure, a timber circle, a chambered cairn and a henge are just some of the prehistoric monuments that have been found around Catterick, just 7km from Middleton Tyas.

The Catterick henge is of particular interest to me, on excavation it was found that the monument lacked an outer ditch and the oval bank of the monument was constructed using river cobbles from the nearby River Swale. What I find fascinating is the only other henge on mainland Britain that shares this construction method is Mayburgh henge, which is located beside the River Eamont on the outskirts of Penrith and less than half a kilometre from the modern A66. So, what we have is 2 henges close to rivers, located at either end of a trans-pennine route that is still in use today. Both The A1 and the A66 have a number henges located on or very close to their routes, the A1 corridor through North Yorkshire has at least 8. This implies that these two modern roads, a major north-south route and a major east-west route probably have their origins in prehistory.

The trans-pennine route would also have provided access to the Irish Sea, there are prehistoric monuments in Ireland that share similarities in construction and style with the henges at Mayburgh and Catterick. Perhaps this indicates connections with communities in Ireland. Access to the west coast could also provide a potential route for Cornish or Breton Tin to travel eastwards across the Pennines, allowing North Yorkshire metalworkers to manufacture Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin.

Sources

The Buildings of England. Yorkshire: The North Riding. Nikolaus Pevsner. 1966. Penguin Books.

Cartimandua’s Capital/ The late Iron Age royal site at Stanwick. Colin Haselgrove Et al. CBA Research Report 175. 2016

Catterick Racecourse, N. Yorkshire, The reuse and adaptation of a monument from prehistoric to Anglian times. C. Moloney et Al. Archaeological Services (WYAS) Publications 4. 2003

Living Between the Monuments: The prehistory of the Dishforth to Barton A1 Motorway Improvements. G Speed. 2021. Northern Archaeological Associates.

Lidar Image

The Penrith henges: a survey by the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England. P Topping. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 58, 1992

Bronze images – Early Man in North-East Yorkshire. Frank Elgee. 1930. J Bellows

Asda, Aldi & an Ironstone Mine

I took a walk over to Skelton to have a look at the remains of the Longacres Ironstone Mine located on the edge of the Hollybush Industrial Estate. I followed the waterlogged track over the fields towards the retail park.

Most of the field is covered in small trees and brambles. There’s a large earth bank running across the field, the result of the levelling of the site to build the retail park. The occassional chunk of concrete pokes through the undergrowth but on the whole nature is doing a decent job of reclaiming the site. A small pond containing bulrushes has formed at the foot of the bank.

Between Asda and Aldi a track leads up the bank into a small wood.

The arched concrete roof of the mine’s explosive store is just visible from the bank top. The building is buried into the bank, with no obvious access from above I followed the path down into the wood.

A pair of large gateposts marking , the entrance to a tiny litter-strewn concrete-walled dell, day-glow pink graffiti marks the territory of the ‘Skelton Possy‘.

The overhanging foliage has been cut-back to allow access, tall curving concrete walls lead to a blockhouse, The bank and walls deaden the sounds of the nearby retail park. It has the air of a strange brutalist hermitage.

On the top field, the mine buildings have been cleared, the area is now used as a rough cycle track and hangout for local kids. The path at the bottom end of the field follows the embankment of the old railway branch line.

In an adjacent field the mine shaft is capped with an oval stone and brick wall, there are remains of campfires around its base. A nearby former engine bed provides a viewing platform.

The mine operated from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. More information can be found here

Kilton

A remnant from the age of iron

Kilton Ironstone Mine

1870 – 1876 Kilton Ironstone Mine Company

1894 – 1916 Walker, Maynard & Company

1916 – 1963 Dorman Long & Company

Source – Catalogue of Cleveland Ironstone Mines. Peter Tuffs. Industrial Archaeology of Cleveland. 1996

23

Markse Road, Ox Close, Wilton Bank, Pithills, Hob Hill, Four Lanes End, Village Wood, Beacon Moor, Errington Wood, Marske Quarry, Falkland Walk, Quarry Lane, Plummer’s Bank,

The edgelands are slowly dissolving

A dream job

Were the Hobs driven out by the ironstone miners or do they survive in the abandoned galleries beneath the Anglian burial ground?

When it snows, the children of Saltburn invade the golf course to sledge the banks. The greenkeepers don’t like the snow.

The path ends at the road, the road has no pavement, we are forced to walk in the gutters.

An aerial ropeway once spanned the low valley.

The rain arrives

 I collect a few flint fragments from the field margin including a small worked tool.

The terrier and I explore the woods and sandstone quarry. We disturb some deer, the terrier’s eyesight is not so good, he decides not to give chase. A pair of charcoal kilns lie in the quarry bottom waiting for spring to arrive

The quarry is much older than the ironstone workings futher down the slope. Sandstone from the quarry was used in local buildings and walls. The weathered quarry walls contain a number of niches.

Wet through and cold we head home along Quarry Lane.

Upleatham [Upelider DB, Uplithum c1150 Whitby, 1272 Ipm]. ‘Upper slopes.’ Cf. KIRKLEATHAM. U- is higher than Kirkleatham. Uplider DB seems to be a Scandanavianized form, ON Upphlioir.  The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names. Eilert Ekwall 1974

soundtrack 

 

Dorman Long Handbook 1924

Dorman Long 1924 handbook

Slapewath Spa

In 1841 Dr. Augustus Bozzi Granville published a three volume series of books titled The Spas of England and Principle Sea Bathing Places. They are beautiful books, describing Granville’s tour through England and documenting life at the end of the Regency Era.

Granville was a fascinating character who led a full and colourful life.  ‘It has been the experience of few to see in their youth Napoleon Bonaparte in Milan, or as a medical student to witness the early experiments in electricity by Volta in Pavia, or to hear in Malaga the distant boom of the guns at the battle of Trafalgar, or as a postgraduate doctor in Paris to be present at Laennec’s invention of the stethoscope. Yet all of these events, and much else, occurred in the colourful life of Augustus Bozzi Granville, who was born 200 years ago in 1783. He is not now remembered for any major medicoscientific discovery, but during the ninety years of his eventful life his quicksilver personality had an impact on many fields..’  Alex Sakula.  His interest in spas stemmed from his desire, as a medical doctor, to improve public sanitation, he was a great advocate of sea bathing and spas as a means of restoring health.

Granville’s tour of our region begins with a visit to the spas at Croft and Dinsdale. He then travels to Stockton and comments on the rise of the new town of Middlebrough and its four thousand inhabitants. Granville is full of praise for Middlesbrough but does not hold back in criticising Stockton and its people.. ‘squalid and ill-dressed, discontented and not well-looking.’ Granville’s low opinion of the citizens of Stockton may have been coloured by the political and social upheavals that were happening at the time, he writes ‘The people at Stockton must have been inclined to the dolce far niente when they turned chartists, shortly before the time of my visit, and set about grumbling in good earnest, wandering in groups, the very picture of indolence and wretchedness.’

Granville leaves Stockton and its grumbling Chartists and travels to Guisborough. He describes the journey from Stockton to Guisborough as one of the richest treats in England to the lover of landscapes. The purpose of his journey is to visit the spa on the road to Slapewath.

After a drive of a mile and a half on the south-east road from Guisborough, skirting the lesser Cleveland hills, my friendly companion and I entered a narrow carriage-way, which presently plunged abruptly into a thick and intricate wood. Following here a very tortuous path, hardly wide enough for a two-wheel carriage, and keeping along the brink of a murmuring beck on an alum-shale-rock bed, noisy and turbulent, we reached at length a most romantic and rocky nook, enlarged from what nature had made it by former alum-miners, but most solitary and retired.

At a spot where the torrent sweeps along a projecting mass of slatey rock, by the side of which it has   scooped out its own shallow channel, and under impending portions of the rocks which hang over   from the opposite bank, a stream of the most beautiful and transparent water is seen to spout immediately from the shale strata, and being conducted through a stone pipe, issues conveniently for the use of the drinkers. The taste is slightly sulphuretted, as is its smell; but this removed (and nothing is so easy) the water tastes as sapid as pure spring water. Perhaps after a little while, and on reflection, one can fancy the presence of a little of the bitterness of muriate of lime, but such a taste is very faint indeed.

The stream flows at the rate of thirty pints in a minute; its temperature was 50°, while that of the air was 63°. It is probable that while the alum-works (now wholly abandoned) were rife in this secluded spot, which can boast of having been the place where alum was first manufactured in England in Elizabeth’s time, the workmen may have noticed this water; but its introduction to public attention was due to the Rev. James Wilcocks, as I before observed, and is of as recent a date as 1822. Since then, it has acquired a certain degree of local celebrity. A rude bath-room for using the water, either as a cold or a hot bath, has been erected under the rock, and during fine weather a woman attends from Guisborough to supply the wants of the visitors.

The approach to, and situation of, this spring, are the most romantic I ever beheld in England. Its vicinity, also, to Redcar, as well as Whitby on the coast, besides a multitude of country-seats of great importance by which it is surrounded, invest the place with much additional interest. It will not, however, become very readily a fashionable Spa, there being many difficulties to overcome for that purpose, many wants to be supplied, and improvements to be suggested. Around the spring the fractured shaly-rock is covered with aluminous efflorescence.

John Walker Ord visited the spa site in 1844. Ord’s comments reflect the changing times, where Granville belittles the Chartists, Ord slates the ‘pseudo-Christians, perhaps he was attacking the moral sensibilities of the Nonconformist and Dissenter movements, both of whom were active in the 1840’s.

Ord’s description of the Bath house.

We regret to state that this house, with the bath rooms, is quite untenanted; and to the disgrace of the proprietary, the whole building is permitted to run to ruin. When we consider the exceeding beauty and seclusion of the place, the medicinal value of the spring, and the great advantage to the town of such a pleasant and much-frequented promenade, we consider it our duty in this work to enter our protect against the gothic and barbarous spirit which can permit the present state of things to remain. The interference of spiritual cant and hypocrisy, so prevalent with pseudo-Christians, has, we believe, had the effect of closing the place on Sunday; but those who know how intimately physical health and morals are connected should beware how they meddle with the innocent recreations of the artisan, peasant and working man. It is not through healthy robust exercise that the mind becomes corrupt and criminal!

Granville and Ord’s descriptions of Spa Wood are wonderful as first-hand accounts of the spa site but more importantly they unwittingly capture a period of transition and great social upheaval. Middlesbrough had just been founded and iron ore had yet to be discovered in the Cleveland Hills. Stockton had lost its status as the principle port on the River Tees. Politically, the Chartist Movement was gathering pace and a new religious zeal threatened the authority of the established Church. The two decades that followed Granville’s visit would probably be the most important in the history of the development of modern Teesside.

OS Map surveyed 1853

OS Map surveyed 1893. Ironstone was discovered in the Eston Hills in 1850. There are at least 10 ironstone mines operating within a three mile radius of Slapewath.

Many of the industrial remains of Spa Wood and the surrounding area are documented on the excellent Hidden Teesside Website

Articles on Chartism on Teesside from the wonderful People’s Republic of Teesside Blog

References

Augustus Bozzi Granville (1783-1872): London physician-accoucher and Italian patriot. Alex Sakula. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine Vol.76 October 1983

The Spas of England and Principle Sea-Bathing Places. Vol. 1  A.B. Granville 1841

The History and Antiquities of Cleveland: Comprising the Wapentake of East and West Langbargh, North Riding, County York. John Walker Ord. Pub. 184

Winding Engine

A Stone Circle, Hob’s Heap & the Coal Mines of Harland Moor Pt 2.

Chris and I left the stone circle on Harland Moor and headed north across the open moorland onto Rudland Rigg. We’d noticed that the ground was disturbed on the lower moor with numerous small pits but as we moved up onto the higher moor we began to notice large mounds running across the moor.

The mounds are the remains of the Rudland Colliery. Coal mining was carried out across the moors  for more than three centuries. There were small collieries exploiting thin seams extending from Crathorne in the Tees valley to Whitby on the coast. The moorland coal is found in thin seams between five and nine inches thick in the Middle Jurassic formations. The coal is poor in quality but is suitable for burning in limekilns and for domestic use. The production of lime was a seasonal activity so the mining was done by small groups of men who also had small holdings or worked in other industries during the winter months.

Cobble Hall Limekilns

The coal was initially mined by digging small pits and extracting the deposits that were close to the surface, as can be seen in the area around the stone circle. Once shallower deposits had been exhausted, deeper shafts giving access to underground interconnecting galleries were sunk. With no means of ventilation and the difficulty of moving materials through the galleries, a series of shafts were sunk with a pillar of no less that one yard left between shafts to support the roof. These shafts are commonly known as Bell Pits.

The coal was removed from the pit by a hand operated windlass or a horse powered winch known as a Gin.

The Rudland colliery is comprised of 270 pits running in lines across the moor, other collieries in the immediate area were the Upper Rudland (140 pits), Harland Head (60 pits), and Swinakel (19 pits).

Unlike the other extractive industries of the moors such as Jet, ironstone mining  and alum production, coal mining on the moors was only of local importance. It was however an important part of the local economy. The Lime was needed to improve the fertility of the soils especially the acidic soils of the northern dales.

Source

The North York Moors Coalfield M.C. Gill. 2010

The Cleveland Dyke

The Cleveland Dyke is a band of igneous rock that was injected, whilst molten, into the local rocks during the Tertiary period of geological time (approx 60 million years ago). The dyke originated in a large magma chamber beneath the Island of Mull on the west coast of Scotland and has been estimated to have taken between 1-5 days to travel to North Yorkshire.

Looking from Cliff Rigg Quarry to the Langbaurgh Ridge. The old quarry sites along the ridge can be seen between the trees. I have often wondered whether the people who lived in this area during prehistory used the Langbaurgh Ridge as a routeway from the River Tees to the moorlands. Bronze Age burials have been found in Ingleby Barwick close to the outcrop of the dyke. There are many prehistoric sites around the outcroppings on the North York Moors, particularly on Fylingdales Moor.

The dyke is mainly buried beneath glacial deposits but  outcrops at a number of locations across Cleveland and the North York Moors. Where ever the dyke outcrops it has generally been quarried away. The rock, a basaltic andesite  but popularly known as whinstone, it is a very hard rock and was ideal for road building both as a hardcore and to make setts and blocks for surfacing.

During the late 1800’s Leeds Corporation operated the quarries at Cliff Rigg just outside Great Ayton. The Middlesbrough to Whitby railway runs just beneath the quarry so it was possible to extract the stone and ship it by rail to Leeds.

Ironstone was also mined at Cliff Rigg and the surrounding area.