This is on a tangent but in the big upland pasture where I'm working is an exposed bed of peat. About two feet beneath the present ground level is a bed of sticks and roots. Beneath that is another two or three feet of peat. The altitude is about 1700 feet and my basecamp is nearby. One of the bits of wood I've pulled out - Scotch pine - shows a fairly distinct axe mark where it's been severed from the trunk.

So much for the ring barking and brush burning theories !

Also found a third Black Stone - same site as previously. And TomBo is right - drystonewalling is alive in Weardale. ESA. It's not up to the standard of Alston Moor's but it's not far behind ...

During Quartermaine & Claris's 1986 survey of the Langdale axe factories they looked at the south scree on the Pike of Sickle. By measuring the rock density and proportion of worked to unworked materials and then working on a principle derived from practicle experiments that each roughout weighing 1kg would produce waste flakes of between 6 & 10kg they concluded that between 45,000 and 75,000 axes were produced from this area alone. Taking into account other factories around Cumbria, the production figures are huge.
This is an industrial process and would have required a huge workforce.
Of course no two axes are identical as each axe was quarried prepared flaked & polished by hand.
There are axes that appear to have non-functional purposes such as the beautiful polished Jadite axes. Richard Bradley has identified that the axes from the most inaccessible peaks held the highest value.

We have to get away from the modern concept of an axe, the term is misleading, some axes were huge and used as ploughs, others were tiny
A modern analogy could be a Sword or a knife.
We use knives in our daily activities but large knives & swords can have a deep significance depending on it's function.
Some Swords and knives produced in certain areas carry a deep significance such as Toledo steel for swords or Sheffield or Solginen steel for knives.
Look at the role of the sword in our mythologies. Excalibur and the lady of the lake has echoes in prehistory with the deposition of swords in water just as axes have been found ritually deposited in water

bit more on axes here
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/user/328/weblog/0/16451