Latest Fieldnotes

I have now managed to take a picture of this barely visible site. It is north of the hillfort in a barrow cemetery of mixed types. The long barrow is very denuded by ploughing and can only be seen in certain light conditions. Grinsell thought it “a doubtful long barrow” English Heritage have done a geophysical survey and found ditches and a bank consistent with a long barrow.

Another ploughed round barrow north east of Little Bredy. Grinsell gives it the number 18 and said it was 30 feet across by 7 feet high, I very much doubt its that high now. There are other barrows in the vicinity and more will appear as I see them.

This single round barrow sits on top of Creech Barrow Hill. To the south east is Stone Hill Down long barrow.
The name incidentally means hill in three different languages :
Creech = cruic = celtic
Barrow = beorh = saxon
Hill = hille = norse.
Pendle hill in Lancashire is similar and there are others with names for hill in multiple languages or dialects.

There appear to be three bowl barrows and a long barrow here. I could only see two and one of those had recently been heavily ploughed. The long barrow is below the ridge of the hill and could not be seen from the road.

This is a nice set of five bowl and one very large pond barrow. The round barrows increase in size as you move east along the footpath. Three of them are in the field to the south of the wood. The barrow in the wood is to the immediate north of the pond barrow and appears to mirror it. This is the same as the pond barrow at Came Woods, is this a local thing or does this occur elsewhere?
To the immediate south of these barrows are another set of four which includes a double bowl barrow.
The pond barrow is 65 feet in diameter and 1 1/2 feet deep. The biggest bowl barrow is 30 feet across and 10 feet tall.

This group of barrows are to the east of the Poor Lot group. The Broad stone is just below them in the valley. Despite the name there appear to be five or six barrows in the group and are sited on the false crest of a hill. They vary in size and appear to be in reasonable condition, this area abounds with barrows of all kinds.
Below the ridge can be seen the bank of a pond barrow close to the A35.

I didn’t expect to find this stone and the official guidance is confusing. What you will find is an irregular parallelogram set into the base of the left-hand pillar before the doors of the town hall in High Street and set within an inscribed ring. Couldn’t see it as in anyways bluish myself. The local museum lies not many yards away, slighly nearer Inverness Castle than the stone (a lovely museum with several examples of Pictish Symbol Stones, alas a little late to go on TMA).

This is the fourth time I tried looking for this panel. Somehow I always ended up arriving late in the day and with fading light levels and plenty of discouragement from the people in the house next door, I never managed to locate it.

This time I beat my way into the wildly overgrown disused graveyard with my tripod and began inspecting the fallen gravestone, mostly barely squared off rocks. After half an hour searching the small clearing I was just about to give up. Wading through the waist-high thorn bushes, my feet kept hitting larger and larger stones, one stone in particular had a large flat triangular face and more hacking revealed a faint arc formed by dirt resting in a groove.

Five minutes of jungle clearing later, the full face and some nice deep cup marks could be seen. With a little side flash, a rather wonderful panel appeared on the camera screen.

Fetteresso is the site of a Bronze Age cairn near Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Numerous sepulchral urns have been recovered from the tomb. Evidence of a prehistoric cursus also has been discovered on the site from aerial photography. The site has a further burial discovery from the Early Middle Ages, and has moreover been developed by a Late Middle Ages monument, Fetteresso Castle.

AREA PREHISTORY The local area contains considerable Neolithic and Bronze Age history including standing stones at Kempstone Hill, Raedykes and locations further north along the Causey Mounth. Bronze Age finds have been also been made at Cantlayhills, (Society) Ury and Spurryhillock It is not unlikely that the Elsick Mounth ancient trackway leading north was an early connection between this locus and the important Mesolithic and Neolithic settlements (Balbridie, Ardlair, Bucharn) along the southern Deeside. The Elsick Mounth was certainly a major route between these north-south destinations during conflicts between the Romans and Caladonians in the first century AD. (Hogan)

SITE DETAILS Fetteresso has yielded a number of urns from its Bronze Age cairn, but whether they were principally for cinerary or food vessels is not clear. (Proceedings) A sizable flat granitic stone overlay the pit itself (RCAHMS) One of the most ornate finds is a cordoned urn found in the top of a glacial mound: “inverted; decorated on its upper cordon with horizontal lines and large triangles; the inner rim also evinced decoration. The contents of this cordoned urn contained elements of cremated bone, but no ashes. A stone pavement was discovered near the cairn, on which, from the residue of ashes, it has been suggested that bodies had been burnt.

In the year 2000 an aerial photograph revealed a cropmark of a possible ring-ditch not far from the Bronze Age cist (Air photography). The cursus clearly lay between two concentric arcs that run along the apex of a low lying ridge on a shelf at an altitude of 55 metres. (Greig) Neolithic cursi in Britain may have been used for ceremonial competitions.

Nearby the Bronze Age cairn has been discovered a later (probably Iron Age) tomb which has long been called Malcolm’s Mount, after the presumed burial of Malcolm I; although this find is clearly an ancient site, its provenance is disputed regarding the relationship to Malcolm.

ENVIRONMENT Situated near the perennial clear flowing Carron Water with its freshwater fishery and at the southern edge of the primeval Fetteresso Forest, this site’s appeal to prehistoric peoples is transparent. It is also proximate to the North Sea coastline and natural harbour at Stonehaven, for exploitation of marine resources and sea access; moreover, the slight buffering distance from the coast inhibits unwanted aspects of sea influence including saline mist and some of the ever-present local haar. Fetteresso is at an unusual position immediately south of the Highland Boundary Fault. As such it is within the fertile soils south of the Fault, but near to the coveted granitic stones north of the Fault.

REFERENCES
* Society for the Benefit of the Sons and Daughters of the Clergy (1845) ‘’The New Statistical Account of Scotland’’, W. Blackwood and Sons publisher
* C. Michael Hogan (2007) ‘’Elsick Mounth’’, The Megalithic Portal https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=18037
* Proceedings of the Society.of Antiquaries.of Scotland. vi, 88; ‘’Scotland before the Scots’’, 108
* RCAHMS, Royal Commission of Archaeological and Historical Monuments of Scotland website (2007)
* Air Photography (2000) Aerial reconnaissance AAS/00/08/CT/73-80, flown 16 June, 2000
* M. Greig, (2000 ) ‘’Sites recorded during summer aerial reconnaissance, Aberdeenshire’’,Discovery Excav Scot, 1, 2000, 7

There are images of this included in the entry for the Dorset Cursus (north to Martin’s down) but I think it deserves an entry of its own. I can understand why its used as there is nothing to see of the cursus end, having been totally ploughed out.
I have asked the question before as to whether this is a bank barrow, although marked as two long barrows on O.S. maps. I thought the similarity between this and Long Bredy bank barrow could give it the classification of bank barrow.
Having done some further reading / internet searching it seems I am not alone in considering it so. R.C.H.M.E. do list it as separate barrows, it is listed as Pentridge 21 and 22 but do question the separateness of the two. They also include it as a bank barrow in their Monument Class Descriptions listing.
Grinsell denotes it as Pentridge IIa/b, possibly hedging his bets. R. Loveday in “Inscribed across the land” includes it in his list of bank barrows. He gives the dimensions as 149m. in length and 20m in width. He does say that it was lengthened, as were both Maiden Castle (twice) and Long Bredy.

The last time I came here it was high summer with T-shirts, so seeing as I was in the vicinity I thought I’d pop in. The best thing about a winter visit is the big stone is not covered by the tree next to it. The big stone is almost half buried inside the church yard and its true size is only apparent on the outside. If this was a stone circle and I believe it was, then the Christianizers didn’t do a good job (see Grey Yauds stone circle – you cant ‘cause it’s completely gone).

Even though I had seen Kammer’s picture of the chamber (with dad for scale) I was still surprised at how dinky it was, also those dastardly black crap bags are still there obviously the local farmer hasn’t got an artists eye, or just doesn’t appreciate where he lives. If you don’t mind a bit of rough ground there are two places to park. The cairn is still fairly big and the chamber capstone looks really precarious propped up on a pile of stones thats squiffy to say the least, I wouldn’t be getting into it for a minute never mind a whole night even if it did make me a poet, the dolmen on Tal y fan boasts similar and is much roomier. A climb up the hill right next to the cairn is worth it with great views out to the coast.

One of three Maen Llwyds in the area, the other two are further east. I liked this one, if only to sit next to it and watch the curtains twitching. There can’t be many standing stones you can see from the living room, I think I’ll move here.

Only a short walk from the car, follow the footpath through a farm, once your in a field the stone is in the next door field, but a fence must be jumped. The stone leans to the south-west and is maybe three feet tall, it isn’t on top of the hill or it would have terrific views, only the western horizon is visible.

The rock shelter/cave is located in a low (3m) broken limestone scarp, some 300m in length, overlooking Bonsall Moor and the hill of Blake Low to the south.
Known by CAPRA as DS01 the scarp and shelter are overgrown and difficult to spot from any distance and other smaller shelters can be misleading.
In Rodney Castleden’s ‘Neolithic Britain: New Stone Age Sites of England, Scotland and Wales‘ he mentions that large rocks in front of the shelter were placed there to form an enclosed platform in front of the opening...not sure whether I got this bit or not...it’s rocky ground and looked natural to me.
A number of flint tools have been recovered from the area in and around the shelter. Being such a small hole I’m guessing the place was used as a hunting shelter, rather than for habitation, somewhere to make tools outta the wind and rain

A huge barrow in the grounds of Punchestown race-course, it’s close on 30 metres in diameter. The central mound is quite low but may have been taller in the past as the ditch and bank are of such a large size, the top of the bank being close on 3 metres above the bottom of the ditch in places in the northern arc of the barrow.
Punchestown race-course is popular with dog-walkers and access is through the gate-style at the entrance, opposite the field with the race-course standing stone. I arrived here late in the January evening and there were quite a few people about, but none in the vicinity of this forgotten monument. This could be a showcase part of the grounds with a little bit of tidying, but like so much of our ancient heritage, is now willfully neglected and overgrown.

Two cairns sit on this little visited stretch of Moorland that covers the high ground to the west of the Fowey River. Both have been dug into and now resemble overgrown mounds, the southern most one being covered in Gorse bushes.
I would not recommend making a special trip to see these..not with so much else to see on the moor.

The hotel entrance is directly opposite the bus terminus in Bugibba – cross the road, avoiding the timeshare touts, and head for the tennis courts. From the hotel lobby, head to the rear left (coffee bar) and take the first door to the outside. Go to your right – and the temple is half surrounded by a 1970s accommodation block for the hotel.

An information board proclaims:

Bugibba Temple, which is preserved in the grounds of the hotel, belongs to the same category of prehistoric monuments as Tarxien and Hagar Qim in Malta, and Ggantija in Gozo. These imposing sanctuaries, erected for the worship of a deity which has so far defied a generally acceptable definition, constitute the oustanding achievement of the Maltese Copper Age, its Megalithic architecture. Their development lasted more than a thousand years and spanned almost the whole of the third millennium before Christ.
The features which have survived here are the main entrance roofed over by a single block of stone weighing several tons, some of the upright blocks forming the left front wall, the semi-circular chamber inside the entrance to the left and a thick rubble wall the incongriguity of which speaks for its Bronze Age date when the temple had long fallen into disuse. Two exceptional blocks, now to be seen at the National Museum of Archaeology in Vallette were decorated with relief carvings of spirals, and aptly enough for a temple so near the coast, stylised fishes.

”preserved” – not sure that’s the word I would choose. Random wiring, half destroyed and totally unsafe no doubt, for nocturnal illuminations, fastened to the bottom of the megaliths, and general detritus from hotel guests hiding under boulders .... at least the carvings have been removed and saved.

This temple was already badly damaged when the Corradino Lines, part of the harbour fortifications were built in the 1870s. Excavations were carried out by Vassallo around this time, and again in by Ashby and Peet (1913) but the WWII bombing of this area is though to have destroyed the remains which included a 6 apse structure similar to the central temple at nearby Tarxien.

To the north of Blacknoll hill, I could see two small round barrows covered with gorse and bracken. To the northwest the large bell barrow Old Knowle and its smaller neighbour can be seen on the summit of their hill.

There are two rather low small round barrows close to the O.S. trig marker on the brow of this hill. From here Blacknoll hill can be seen to the north.

A medium sized bowl barrow north of Whitcombe Vale and Blacknoll. There are a scattering of barrows in this area which may be a large cemetery. Some are on high ground and others are on the flats in between.

Six bowl barrows on top of a hill on the Dorset heathland. The largest of the barrows, the most westerly has an O.S. trig point on it. The most easterly is of a similar size and the two in between are smaller. All are in reasonable condition, it looks like a recent fire has burnt off the gorse and bracken which usually covers these barrows. There are some single outlying barrows very close to the set of four, lower and to the west. The four barrows are in the shadow of Winfrith nuclear reactor.

If you plan to visit the Hypogeum, please check out availability long before you travel. I was fortunate to be there in very low season, so next day booking was possible, but at peak times it can be fully booked for over a month in advance. Tickets are €9.32 for adults – there’s probably a child reduction but I wouldn’t really recommend this place to youngsters unless they are really interested.

The building has numerous steps and low passages to negotiate, and is therefore unsuitable for the less mobile, or for anyone who suffers from claustrophobia or is afraid of the dark.

The group I joined were waiting in the entrance hall for our guide, and several times people came in without pre-booking – including a group of lads carrying a small Father Christmas who’d obviously had a couple at lunchtime – and were turned away. The entrance has comfy bench seats and toilets if needed.

There is absolutely no photography allowed and in fact you have to leave all your possessions in a locker – the guide has the key so everything is safe during the tour.

The first part is a visit to an exhibition of finds – most are of course in the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta, but a few remain here, including a copy of the sleeping lady which you are encouraged to touch. Audio commentary is provided on hand held devices and is available in 5 languages. Then there’s a film to watch about the discovery and excavation of the site, before you can enter the hypogeum itself.

Our guide – Joanne – offered as the whole group was English speaking, to dispense with the hand helds and do it “properly” for us – and happily the group accepted her offer.

The area around Paola experinced massive development in the late 1800s to house dock workers, and the discovery of the hypogeum was reported to the authorities in 1902, but, from the construction of foundations and supports for the new builds, must have been known about for years before. In fact, the area around Hal Saflieni had an ancient name meaning “of the caves”, so the site may have been known about long before that.

The hypogeum was excavated by Fr. Magri initially, with the middle level being opened to the public in 1908, and then T Zammit worked on the upper level after the purchase of the houses built on top of the site (the houses being eventualy demolished in the 1990s). However, it was closed to the public in 1991 as the damage caused by high visitor numbers had been realised, and reopened on 7 July 2000 – with climate control and regulated light levels. The lighting in particular dictates the visitor experience – it’s timed to go with the audio commentary and only the features being described are illuminated. So you have to keep up!

A door from the AV room leads to the upper level; here there is a massive entrance trilithon and side burial chambers. Zammit estimated, by counting the number of patellas amongst the ochre painted bones found, that there were around 7,000 bodies interred here. The path through to the middle level was closed for excavation work, so we all trooped back to the rear of the entrance lobby and down a dimly lit modern spiral staircase.

The middle level has the most interesting features whilst the lower level cannot be visited, just observed from above.

Our guide showed us a section of wall with pick holes in it; no metal tools have been found, so it’s suggested that animal horns were used to create enough of a gap to insert a piece of wood, which when soaked with water would expand, forcing open the natural faults and fissures – with flint, obsidian and stone tools used to complete the rock quarrying. Then we moved through to the oracle chamber with its ochre spiral painted ceiling; the guide encouraged one of the party to speak into the oracle hole, but deemed his tone not deep enough for the full resonant effect.

We passed through another ochre painted chamber – this time with spirals within hexagons – to the trilithon looking down into the lower level and onwards to the “holy of holies”. The lower level has 7 steps leading down to it – but then a 2m drop! There are side chambers at the level of the last step, and the group discussed whether these might have been accessed using a plank as a bridge between them.

The votive or “snake pit” adjacent to the second ochre painted room is thought to be the location where the Sleeping Lady was found. This small (only 12cm long) terracota statuette is the pride of the collection at the National Museum of Archaeology with its exceptional level of craftmanship; the curvaceous female figure is reclining on a couch and is often referred to as the sleeping goddess of fertility. As finds in the pit were discovered whole rather than broken, we discussed the possibility that the pit had been filled with water or perhaps straw to prevent damage to items placed or even thrown in.

The “holy of holies” chamber has a facade that possibly mimics the roof structure of Maltese temples, and has a side chamber of it, a niche (possibly for a statue) and libation holes. This chamber would have significant amounts of natural light from a shaft which runs right down through the hypogeum around the summer solstice.

Then we retraced our steps to look at the main hall, with its trilithon windows through to niches and smaller chambers beyond, and to the holy of holies. The chamber was originally painted with red ochre and some of the pigment is still visible.

Then round past the area where builders confessed to breaking through in 1902, with arches to support the houses above visible, and back to the spiral staircase up and out as the light faded behind us.

A fascinating place! I would have loved to have spent more time in each part, but the light levels are strictly controlled, and as I mentioned, timed to coincide with the audio tour, so it wasn’t an option.

The temples are open 9:00 – 17:00 and entry is €2.33 for adults; there’s a small exhibition of items that have been removed from the site to preserve them and placed in the entranceway, and a selection of books and souvenirs to purchase. There are also public toilets. A new visitors’ centre is expected on the plot to the east of the temples, and excavations have been carried out, but planning difficulties have held up the actual building work.

There are usually guided tours available in English several times a day – unfortunately the guide had called in sick the day I visited, so I was reliant on my notes and the offer by the staff to answer any questions I might have. Much of the carved stone from Tarxien was been moved to the National Museum of Archaeology in 1956, when restoration and reconstruction were also carried out, and the items on display are replicas – but this by no means detracts from the site.

There are actually 4 temple structures on this site.

To the east, furthest away from the entrance, is the oldest, smallest, and least well preserved temple, from the Ggantija phase (3600 – 3000BCE). The stones are low lying, and only the western section of what is believed to have been a 5 apse temple survives. Area 10 on the model.

There are 3 main components – the south, central and east temples. Of these, south and east are older, from the early Tarxien phase 3000 – 2500 BCE, with the central temple having been built at a later date between these two.

Taking a walk round from the main entrance to the site, there are numerous small boulders, possibly used to roll megaliths into place, scattered over the ground to the left, and then a well, before you face the trilithon entrance to the south temple. To the right here you can see the remains of a possible niche (ref 1), with libation holes and a stone bowl in front of it.

The path around the whole site has been improved and the tethering holes just outside the entrance to the south temple (ref 2) now have a perspex covering so you can view them through the path.

The main doorway has been heavily restored with rubble covered concrete; the first apse to the right (ref 3) has the huge statue of a skirted women and the altar with plug stone which contained animal bones and horns, and flint knives. To the left (ref 4) are many spiral carved stones and those decorated with animal friezes; the Mariners’ Stones which stood here have now been moved into the entrance building for protection – they show ship graffiti but the debate is still out on whether this is late Neolithic (believed by Diane Wooler who studied them in 1957 and supported by T Zammit’s notes) or from the Bronze Age (Evans, Trump and various others). A model found in 4 pieces in the northern most room of this temple lead Carlo Ceschi to draw a possible facade for the temple in 1936 (see links).

Moving through to the central temple, there’s a huge stone bowl in area 5 and the walls here show fire damage. The oculus stone was originally in area 6, guarding the entrance to the 2nd pair of apses; there’s a hearth in the centre of this area, and turning to the right, area 7, there’s the bulls and sow chamber, now with a roof to protect the relief carvings.

Just before you leave the central temple, to the right, you can see a round boulder, used possibly for transportation or positioning, under one of the megaliths. Then there’s a set of stairs, which may have led to an upper floor (area 8).

The east, and least decorated, temple, is thought to have been significantly altered for the building of the central temple, and was also reconstructed extensively by Zammit in 1919 – and suffered collapses as recently as 1999.

I had the site almost to myself for the best part of an hour, but then some more tourists appeared, and we started chatting. With only few info boards and no official guide that day, I found myself taking a small tour group round to point out the main features!