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Tyne and Wear

Tyne And Wear

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No, I'm in Newcastle-on-Tyne city centre !

Here's the instructions for Knarsdale:

Find Slaggyford village (the slag is Bronze Age copper, incidentally) and take the road to the west and up the hill. Carry on over the brow of the hill without deviation and pass through an open gateway with a cattle grid. This is signed as Knarr Farm with the picture of a sheep - I think. The road descends and there's a fork immediately after another gateway. Take the left branch and the farm is before you. Park just short of the house on the roadside (without blocking it). It's called Far House and is clearly shown on the OS.

By the time you've left the car and reached the farmyard the dogs will have roused the farmer - but he's ok. As you reach the farmyard gate, going in, look straight across the yard and there's a little gate and a ginnel leading beside one of the barns - in the same direction, roughly, as you're walking. Go down the ginnel, there's another gate at the end, and you enter a meadow. Look right across the field and there's a gateway through. The stone is just before and to the left of that gateway. There's a single strand of low barbed wire fence to step over on the way across and these directions are a couple of years old, so the gates may have changed since then. A rough location is NY662515.

To get to other stones, pass through the gateway, turn left, and follow the wall up, toward the fell. Keep going until you spot a weird standing stone. You'll find the northern face of that rock covered in very eroded, and uncounted, micro-cups. Two other stones about it are micro-cupmarked, on just one face, and there are at least two other similar ones in that same field, but lower down and near the bounding wall. If you walk near due west, from the standing stone, you'll find a tiny standing stone twenty or thirty yards away. This too has cupmarks. And if you look carefully, in the same direction, you'll find the 'quarry' where these quartz-veined rocks have been taken from. There's a stone there that has been prised out - but it is noticeably without any cupmarks.

And that's enough to start with, I think. There are a couple of others that are easy to find by following the wall up the back of the Knar, they're on the right hand side. The Knar is down the other fork of the metalled road, and where I used to live twenty years ago. The copper mine is easy to find from there too, but there's only an empty cist beside the mineshaft - the carved stones are all up a height (between 300-350m. and usually looking NW).

Phew.