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.
Category: Landscape Archaeology
Aug 04
Guide: Parliamentary-walls and the Northern Enclosures
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
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.
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
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.
Jun 10
Guide: Hillfort Mounds of Europe
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” …


