Swaledale occupies the long, sinuous valley carved by the River Swale on its 45-kilometre descent from Nine Standards Rigg (662 m) on the Pennine watershed to Richmond in lower Teesdale. The dale narrows between rough gritstone scarps near Keld, broadens to a patchwork of hay-meadows around Muker and Gunnerside, then opens into a tree-fringed flood-plain west of Reeth before the river cuts through the Carboniferous escarpment to meet the Vale of Mowbray.
Millbarrow once stood on a low chalk spur 2 km north‑west of Avebury, just above the spring‑line where the Kennet valley opens onto the Marlborough Downs (NGR SU 0943 7221). From its east–west‑aligned crest the ground falls gently south to Windmill Hill and east into the Kennet valley, giving the mound clear sight of the Avebury monument complex, and easy access to water and pasture.
Sitting on the south‑east shoulder of Windmill Hill (grid ref. SU 086 070), 140 ft (43 m) above the Kennet valley, the Horslip long barrow commands the same chalk ridge that carries the famous Early‑Neolithic causewayed enclosure 400 m upslope.
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.
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.
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.
Jun 27
A gazetteer of probable prehistoric mounds, cairns and boundary earthworks in Coverdale. It is not complete and is still being researched.
Jun 15
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.”
Jun 10
A barrow is a mound of earth and/or stones raised over a grave or group of graves. Used from the Neolithic through to the Iron Age (roughly 4000 BCE to 500 CE), barrows were often constructed to honour elite individuals, such as tribal leaders, warriors, or chieftains. They are frequently found singly or in cemeteries known as barrow fields.
Flats Hill mound is approximately 30 meters in diameter and stands about 3.6 meters high. It has never been excavated, although a dry stone wall seems to have been started, and then stopped, partly over its top. It has been suggested as, and is listed as a probable barrow, with a presumably wide date, likely to be in the Bronze Age or Iron Age date range.
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