Venutius

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Kirkhaugh Cairns – Cumbria

Kirkhaugh cairn gold ornament

This mound is 22ft. in diam. and about 3ft high. It has been built upon a natural knoll which makes the barrow look larger than it is. Excavation showed that the mound has an earthy core with a rubble capping.

What might Stonehenge Mean? Dartmoor and Carnac add to the Picture

Dartmoor Stone Rows

Stonehenge has always been enigmatic, due to its use of those definitive morticed trilithons, all of which where squared of, more like the structures of the Maltese temples and other stone structures closer to Africa, as opposed to those of the rest of Britain and most of the wider North-west European ritual landscape.

Megalithic Stone Monuments in France May Be Europe’s Oldest

Carnac

The recent University of Gothenburg–led excavations at Le Plasker, and their startling radiocarbon dates of 4600–4300 BC for the Carnac alignments, deserve both applause for methodological rigor and a measured dose of critical scrutiny before we rewrite Neolithic Europe’s storybook.

Oval Barrow east of Ulshaw Bridge

Ulshaw Bridge Mound - Yvonne Luke - Long Cairns of the Yorkshire Dales

This unexcavated and undated barrow matches many of other Late Neolithic / Early Bronze-Age round barrows (c. 2400–1500 BC) dotted along the flanks of the Yorkshire Dales.

Cleave Dyke Defensive System

The Cleave dyke system is several Dykes which combine to create a boundary of between 9 and 18 kilometres running north south to the west of Thirsk.

Black Dike – Coverdale

Black Dike - 1m LiDAR

Black Dike is the diminutive counterpart to the great Tor Dike, rising from its western arm and climbing to the watershed between Great and Little Whernside. Beginning at roughly SD 988 756—where Tor Dike cleaves the limestone scarp—the Black Dike pursues a steep, sinuous course uphill for nearly 0.6 km, finally spilling onto the ridge crest at about 675 m above sea level

Tor Dyke

Tor Dyke appears to have been attributed to Venutius which dates it of the period AD 52 – 70. The presence of a legionary size marching camp a few miles to the southwest at Malham certainly indicates an active role in the Roman advance of AD 70. However, given the lack of published research so far a clear picture has yet to emerge.

Prehistoric mounds, cairns and boundary earthworks in Coverdale

Cairn atop Little Whernside

A gazetteer of probable prehistoric mounds, cairns and boundary earthworks in Coverdale. It is not complete and is still being researched.

Hillforts: Defence or Ritual? – Part 1

View to Yeavering Bell

Over the last five years Iron-Age specialists have been re-examining what British hillforts were really for. The question is no longer just “fortress or farm?” but whether many of them were built first and foremost as places of gathering, display and ritual.

Guide: Piles of Stones (OS Maps)

Pile of stones below Yoadcastle

On every late-Victorian and early-20th-century OS sheet the surveyors marked any conspicuous heap of stones they could not instantly classify as a tumulus, beacon, trig-point or boundary stone with the catch-all term “Pile of Stones.”

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