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moss M
moss Jul 24, 2009 06:58:02
Replying to Moth

Moth wrote:
Definitely an interesting debate, and you've touched (back) onto a crucial point for TMA:

thesweetcheat wrote:
...a cairn on top that has at least a fair likelihood of being prehistoric (no matter how altered) could be considered to be a "sacred hill"?
The difficulty for whether they're appropriate for TMA is how do we judge/who judges that likelihood? Personally I'd say there needs to be some form of documented evidence that there was summat prehistoric there before/underneath/whatever. Otherwise we just get too many speculative sites cluttering up TMA.

love

Moth

Perhaps the line can be drawn between neolithic and bronze age, a B/A cairn/barrow cannot necessarily be said to be on high ground for 'sacred' reasons but rather for territorial imperatives.. meaning that the headman or a particular family is 'honoured' in such a manner, plus of course lots of other barrows are in cemeteries or follow the course of old trackways, they are not on sacred land. Similar to the fact that an avenue leading away from a river to a circle, is the 'welcoming mat' to people who travel by river, the drama of say Stonehenge appearing on the skyline is a theatre spectacle, mixed in with the ritual belief. The fine line of seeing landscape, hills or rocky crags,(thinking of JCs gorsedds here) as 'sacred' can maybe only be seen in the earlier stone age, because of the way the monuments are focussed on a particular sacred hill....

and to return to walker cairns, this from Magic, ..

'The monument is a bowl barrow located at the summit of Kinderlow in the
western gritstone moorlands of Derbyshire. It includes a steep-sided
sub-circular mound measuring 17.5m by 15m and standing c.2m high. A gritstone kerb is visible in the edges of the mound and there is a modern walker's cairn on the summit. The monument has not been excavated and so cannot be precisely dated, but its form and hilltop location assign it to the Bronze Age. The walker's cairn is excluded from the scheduling although the ground underneath is included.'

So does it mean that building walker cairns on scheduled barrows/land is illegal?

T thesweetcheat
thesweetcheat Jul 24, 2009 20:06:31
Replying to moss

moss wrote:
Moth wrote:
Definitely an interesting debate, and you've touched (back) onto a crucial point for TMA:

thesweetcheat wrote:
...a cairn on top that has at least a fair likelihood of being prehistoric (no matter how altered) could be considered to be a "sacred hill"?
The difficulty for whether they're appropriate for TMA is how do we judge/who judges that likelihood? Personally I'd say there needs to be some form of documented evidence that there was summat prehistoric there before/underneath/whatever. Otherwise we just get too many speculative sites cluttering up TMA.

love

Moth

Perhaps the line can be drawn between neolithic and bronze age, a B/A cairn/barrow cannot necessarily be said to be on high ground for 'sacred' reasons but rather for territorial imperatives.. meaning that the headman or a particular family is 'honoured' in such a manner, plus of course lots of other barrows are in cemeteries or follow the course of old trackways, they are not on sacred land. Similar to the fact that an avenue leading away from a river to a circle, is the 'welcoming mat' to people who travel by river, the drama of say Stonehenge appearing on the skyline is a theatre spectacle, mixed in with the ritual belief. The fine line of seeing landscape, hills or rocky crags,(thinking of JCs gorsedds here) as 'sacred' can maybe only be seen in the earlier stone age, because of the way the monuments are focussed on a particular sacred hill....

and to return to walker cairns, this from Magic, ..

'The monument is a bowl barrow located at the summit of Kinderlow in the
western gritstone moorlands of Derbyshire. It includes a steep-sided
sub-circular mound measuring 17.5m by 15m and standing c.2m high. A gritstone kerb is visible in the edges of the mound and there is a modern walker's cairn on the summit. The monument has not been excavated and so cannot be precisely dated, but its form and hilltop location assign it to the Bronze Age. The walker's cairn is excluded from the scheduling although the ground underneath is included.'

So does it mean that building walker cairns on scheduled barrows/land is illegal?

This is a difficult one - I agree with Moth that there should have been "summat" to warrant inclusion - the question is how much of the "summat" still needs to be there? An example near me is Churchdown Hill between Gloucester and Cheltenham - it has no prehistoric remains on it now, but did have at some point in the relatively recent past. However, it's included on TMA as a "sacred hill". Compare with nearby May Hill - this is a obvious hill that can be easily seen from many directions, in Herefordshire, Wales, The Malverns, The Cotswolds, etc etc. Again it has no prehistoric remains on it (at least none have been found) yet it would have been just as much of a visible viewpoint from many sacred sites during the pre-Roman periods as it is now. May Hill is not on TMA, and I would be loathe to add it, yet it is as likely to be "sacred" as any other hill. If a cairn sits on top of a hill that was obviously part of a prehistoric landscape, and that cairn is constructed out of material that was used in a prehistoric structure, I would say it deserves to be on TMA more than a "sacred hill" with no discernable remains at all. But definitely a grey area!

Moss' question about walkers' cairns is interesting. I don't think that this makes them illegal as such, unless they are created out of an actual scheduled monument. However, there's an irony here - if the walkers' cairn itself is not able to be included in the scheduling, then the more of the original material that is robbed from its original position to enlarge the cairn, the less material there is that would be capable of scheduling!

Ah, don't you just love heritage?