Category: Landscape Archaeology

The Story of Boltby Scar

Boltby Church, Yorkshire Moors

Boltby is a very important ancient site IMO. A gold “hair braid”, was found there, linking it to the Amesbury Archer, buried with two similar hair braids. This also provides a link to the founding of Stonehenge, which helps set a potential scene for a possible “zeitgeist”, of the day.

Guide: Parliamentary-walls and the Northern Enclosures

Ingleton Visit 3/13 (il16)

Between the mid-18th and late-19th centuries the British Parliament passed almost 5,000 local “Inclosure Acts.” Each Act authorised a team of appointed commissioners to survey one specific township or parish, divide its open-field strips, common pastures, and “wastes” into new, privately owned parcels, and lay out straight roads and boundary walls or hedges. The commissioners issued a legal award map and schedule that became the new title deeds.

Dryburn Henge, Cumbria

Dry Burn enclosure - Satellite

Dryburn Henge lies on Alston Moor in Cumbria, within the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It occupies a strategic nodal point on the high moor, roughly at NY 760 430, where routes across the Pennine watershed converge. The surrounding terrain is underlain by Carboniferous Great Scar Limestone and interbedded Yoredale shales, with scattered fluvioglacial gravels in valley bottoms.

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.

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.

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.”

Bishopdale

Bishopdale lies within the northern limb of the Askrigg Block, its underlying bedrock dominated by Carboniferous limestones with intermittent shales and sandstones of the Yoredale Series. The Great Scar Limestone, a thick, massive unit formed around 330 million years ago in a shallow tropical sea, underpins the dale’s steeper scarps and cliff lines, while the thinner-bedded limestones and intervening mudstones of the Yoredale Group create the characteristic terraced flanks on which many of Bishopdale’s field systems are laid out

Castle Dykes Henge, Thoralby – North Yorkshire

With kind permission of YAAMAPPING

Castle dykes it is a small class one henge, 90m across, perched on the high ground up in the North Yorkshire dales. The bank survives up to 1.5 m high in places, and the ditch up to 3 m deep. Early 20th-century reports (1908) noted its intact form, and recent LiDAR-based surveys have confirmed its classic henge profile with minimal later disturbance.

Guide: Spoil Heaps

Ochre mine in the Lion Cavern in Eswatini southern Africa - Credit - Jörg Linstädter

These are artificial hills made from the unwanted rock, shale and tailings that come up with coal, metal ore, stone or clay when it is being mined or quarried. Because extractive industry is both deep and long-lived, single collieries or pits can generate tens of millions of cubic metres of spoil; pushed out by locomotive, conveyor or tippler wagon and dumped in successive layers, the piles quickly become a distinctive landform.

Guide: Hillfort Mounds of Europe

Trelleborg airphoto

Guide: Common Features of Iron Age Hillforts This article attempts to serve as a guide for many of the features of the hillforts found in Britain, in Read more Guide: Iron-Age minting: Ceramic Pellet-mould trays This article explores the most tangible evidence we possess for indigenous minting north of the Humber: the smashed ceramic “pellet-mould” …

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