Latest Fieldnotes

There are five barrows on this site. The most substantial is a medium sized bowl barrow in the middle of the group to east of what remains of Deverel barrow.
Adjacent to it is a small, low saucer barrow, which may well have been ploughed in the past. Also close by are two small bowl barrows, just around the corner, up a farm track.
This site is not the most spectacular I’ve seen, but it’s archaeological importance cannot be underestimated. It, along with the now destroyed Rimbury barrow, show a significant cultural difference in the finds, from earlier local burials.

The grid reference for this site seems a bit inaccurate. I found the 2 smaller stones, each 45 – 50 cm high and 3 paces apart, at GPS reading SK 28255 71378 with the larger stone, 115 cm high, 100 paces away at SK 28225 71454.

There are lots of stones in this area and it is tempting to believe that many others have also been erected. When standing at the larger stone another possible alignment suggests itself looking east to a stone 45 paces away at SK 28265 71450 and a third stone another 20 paces further at SK 28281 71446. The former is leaning over a bit with its top 75 cm from the ground and the latter is 60 cm high.

This is just around the corner, north-west, from the Valley of Stones. It is a hillside valley with what look like square celtic / Iron age type fields. Cutting through the field boundaries, down the centre of the valley is a well defined trackway. This looks to me as if it leads to and from an enclosure marked on O.S. maps and Magic.

Quite a long walk to get to these barrows. It’s a mixed set of various types, including one very low saucer shaped barrow, which looks like it’s been heavily ploughed in the past. All but one of the barrows have signs of clumsy excavation i.e big holes dug into the crowns of them. Two of the bowl shaped barrows have chunks of stone on their flanks, which could be their former contents.
On the plus side the views of Abbotsbury swannery, Chapel hill, the Chesil beach and Portland are well worth the effort of getting here. Abbotsbury castle hillfort is only about half a mile away.
Dotted around the edges of the escarpment these sit on are former quarry diggings, the hillside is made up of lime stone cliffs, which may well have been used in the building of nearby Abbotsbury.

Three lovely stones in a really remote location – it must have been great to rediscover them!

GPS reading SK 28250 70868. The best directions I can suggest are to start at the wall junction at SK 2783 7072 and walk in a straight line towards the very obvious mast on Puddingpie Hill – in dry conditions in February it took me 500 paces until the stones suddenly appeared in a grassy/reedy area just beyond a small patch of heather.

When I visited in February I thought I could make out a level platform about 6 paces across with 6 very low stones visible on the rim. The area is covered by a mixture of grass and heather and the whole thing is very unconvincing!

I found what appears to be a ring of rubble under the heather at SK 28527 67706 on my GPS. I think Stubob’s photo and description of a much more obvious site refer to what John Barnatt (1990) calls Beeley Moor South (Beeley Moor South 1).

Yes, sorting out the ringcairns here is a very confusing business. I found a site clearly matching the diagram and description of Beeley Moor South (Beeley Moor South 1) in John Barnatt’s 1990 “The Henges, Stone Circles and Ringcairns of the Peak District” at SK 28537 67694 on my GPS. I think Stubob’s photo and fieldnotes refer to Beeley North (South 2).

This must be about the oddest place I’ve seen a barrow, the photo doesn’t show how truly steep the hill it sits atop is. If I’m feeling particularly insane one day I may walk up there and see the seaward barrow, I’m willing to bet the view is worth it.
The barrow itself is quite a large bell barrow, which looks like a pimple on an elephant on this great round hill.

Very easy to find, once you’ve been to the castle and well worth a look for the distant views of it alone. The barrows themselves are all bowl types of various sizes. The common is split in two by a road, the castle is visible from the western side, the eastern half of the Purbeck hills can be seen in it’s entirety from the barrows of the east side of the common.
One of the east side round barrows has obviously been excavated in the past, it has a large cleft in the top of it. Of the six barrows I could see, they appear to be in a row from west to east, parallel to the Purbeck hills to the north of them.

Well this piece of Rock-art can now be found in UCC in Cork as part of an exhibition of Rock-art and Ogham.
It was orginally found in Mothel in Waterford and according to Fourwinds is the only piece of Rock-art found in the county.

The hillfort at Lordenshaws is a real gem. It has the easiest access of any of the sites in the Northumberland National Park. The fort is only 400m or so from an area set aside for car parking along a good road.

The climb to the fort is in no way strenuous. Lordenshaws is surrounded by a wealth of archaeological remains and not far from the fort itself lie some spectacular examples of rock art.

There are ancient trackways, burial carirns and earthworks and, by arrangement with the Duke of Northumberland and the tenant farmer, you are free to wander around them in an agreed access area.

Lordenshaws is a roughly circular fort and has two entrances facing East and West. The outermost defensive ditch has a diameter of around 140m and is one of the best preserved features of the site.

In the South and South East this ditch has been disturbed by later development but to the North the ditch has a very steep V shaped profile and is up to 2.5m deep and up to 9m wide.

Inside this is a less well preserved inner ditch with a broader, more shallow profile. This inner ditch, in places, also manages a width of 9m but never gets any deeper than 1.3m. In the South East the outer ditch actually crosses the inner ditch suggesting the inner ditch was not associated with later phases of the fort.

If any form of rampart ever existed between the inner and outer ditches then there is no sign of it. There are signs of a short irregular bank, around 0.5m high in the middle of the inner ditch close to the Western entrance to the fort. It is possible that this is the remains of a rampart but it appears only in this one spot. The defences may never have entirely enclosed the fort as there is a natural outcrop to the South East which seems never to have been disturbed by the ditches.

The entrances to the fort simply cut through these defences. The Western entranceway is the least well preserved but the Eastern entrance is 3m wide and there are some facing stones visible. Where this entrance cuts through the second defensive mound there are some prominent stones still standing 0.8m high.

The innermost part of the site, the inhabited area, has a diameter of roughly 70m and is on two levels as the site is crossed from East to West by a natural scarp.

The usual way into the fort is from the Western entrance as this is the way a visitor would normally walk up from the National Park car park. From the West entrance the path takes you into the Southern half of the fort. Along the South facing edge of the fort there are four small circular features. I say ‘features’ as they seem too small to be huts. They vary in diameter and, in one, the stonework has been exposed.

Further into the fort is a very prominent hut. The interior of this has been cleared at some point and the stonework is visible. This hut has a diameter of 5.3m and the walls are around 1m high. There is no obvious entrance to this hut as the walls are continuous.

In the Northern half of the hillfort are the circles of two huts. It is possible that more existed but the ground here is very disturbed.

Standing outside the Western entrance to the fort you can see a large rectangular enclosure. It is enclosed by an earth and boulder wall which still manages a height of around a metre in places. The enclosure must have been constructed late in the life of the fort as it cuts into the defences. The enclosure shows prominent lines of medieval ridge and furrow plough marks and was recorded as a ‘cornfield’ in 1825.

There is other evidence of later development at the fort, especially in the South East. Here the defences have been overbuilt with an extension to the inhabited centre of the fort. There are circular features here but they are not prominent.

There is, also, a notable defensive outwork about 30m to the South and South West of the fort. It consists of an earth bank roughly 7m wide the outer profile standing up to 1.8m high. There is an outer ditch associated with the outwork but this is not easy to see. There is a gap in the earthwork which leads to the Western entrance to the hillfort yet does not exactly line up with it. It seems to accommodate the line of a trackway which runs North East from the existing road and turns East after passing to the North of the main cup marked rock on the site.

There have been no properly recorded excavations at Lordenshaws. A detailed survey of the hillfort and its surroundings was undertaken in late 1990 by RCHME.

Without doubt a wealth of information lies in wait at Lordenshaws. As I have said access to the site is relatively easy, though choosing when to visit can be important too. In the summer, for example, when the bracken and ferns are at their tallest, some of the lower lying ground features around the fort may be harder to pick out. For me the topography is best revealed by a light covering of snow. Later in the day a low angle of sunlight helps reveal the more subtle rock carvings.

The National Park car park is also a good base for walking in the Simonsides.

www.gefrin.com

The photo I was able to take of this much messed about with long barrow had to be taken long distance from Ackling dyke as there is no obvious public access I could see to this site.

Another visit to this place, this time minus the sheep, so I felt it was o.k. to walk on it. The large bell barrow at first dominates the site, it has a large cleft in it’s top, and has clearly been excavated. The real stars of this cemetery are for me the four huge disc barrows (there are actually five, one is now obscured by a nearby wood), two of which must be two hundred feet or so across. The best view I had of the central, largest one was from the top of the big bell barrow. Only from this extra height can a shortarse like me get a full view of the size of this thing.It has two small mounds on it, one central and the other close to the eastern ditch. The outer bank now stands about two feet high with the inner ditch being about twice as deep.
Just to see one of these close up is unusual in Dorset but there are four to see here, one of which has clearly had it’s ditch cut through by the bank of the Ackling dyke. This is the rarest one as it is not round, but oval in shape , it also has twin mounds. The romans were obviously no respecters of ancient burial sites. A smaller example, perhaps seventy five feet across, has three small mounds within the banks.
Another of the more normal looking bowl barrows has a two foot deep ditch surrounding it very close to it’s base, this again is fairly unusual in these parts , as most have had the plough too close to them or it’s silted up.
Something must be said about pond barrows here, as there were three I could see, although at this time of year the long grass makes them hard to spot. They may well be the oldest burials on this ground, but are probably the most overlooked features in any landscape.
The added bonus to being on this site today, with nobody else about, were the half dozen or so hares I saw running about the place. Normally with dog walkers about , these shy creatures have long since legged it. Unlike rabbits these non burrowing native animals don’t knacker these old places by digging great big holes in them , the normans have a lot to answer for.
This must be one of the best preserved, most varied barrow fields in Dorset, it’s only rival for different types, is the Winterbourne Poor Lot on the south Dorset ridgeway.

I parked in a layby on the B3081 next to Ackling dyke, crossed the busy road, and headed south along the dyke down the hill to the barrows. This is a group of about 10 – 15 round barrows of various sizes, it’s difficult to say exactly how many as some can be seen in the distance. Unfortunately my camera can’t zoom in enough to photograph the more distant group and there is a crop in the field , I must come again in the winter to get close enough to see the remaining part of the cemetery.
The O.S. map shows some crosses on this site which are presumably where barrows used to be, indeed Grinsell shows more in his map from the 1930’s, I’m guessing these have now been ploughed out in the intervening seventy or so years.

There is a confusing amount of ditchs and defences up here on Knocksefin. There is clearly the remains of part of the Hill-fort however the rest of them dont really fit into any form of monument I know and may be domestic or perhaps of a latter date, Cromwellian perhaps?

This Barrow is about 32m radius. Half of it is actually destroyed so only a semi-circle remains.
Again this does not appear on the OS map for the area.

This is marked on the map right across from a school close to the Morning Star River in the town of Bruff. It is given a circular mark on the map however looking at it on site I think there is a chance it is in fact a barrow of some kind.
Its located within a nice park beside the river and is about 1.75m high.

This standing stone isnt on the OS map. Again another example of the huge amount of stuff in Limerick that isnt on the map. It is located with great views to the south close to the slopes of Cnoc Firinne. It is located close to a glad of natural wood-land possibly part of an abbey.

This long barrows looks in pretty good nick. It sits between Blackdown and The Valley of Stones. It’s surrounded by ancient things, a cromlech,barrows and three stone circles. It’s not the most impressive of the local long/bank barrows, but is probably the most convenient and accessible one to visit.

I went here and the nearby quoit in September 2006, I’ve only just found the pictures again. You can probably see more of it in winter, when it’s not so overgrown. It’s difficult to know how much stone has been pinched over the years, but the basic outline is still there to see. It’s a very exposed site, when I was here, there was a low mist and drizzle, but still very atmospheric.

Kinda deep down I was hoping to find another Raven Tor Triple Cairn, the mention of these cairns on Stanton Moor as being a triple cairn was too good to resist. I knew they were gonna be covered in heather but was hopeful non the less.
On the ground the cairns are a mish mash of decent sized kerbstones and small sections of well preserved walling but in all it’s a very confusing and overgrown site.

This large piece of what looks like Portland stone is on it’s own in a picnic area, off a minor road leading uphill from the east of Abbotsbury. It appears to be deeply buried in the ground, sticking out about two and a half feet .It’s about five feet by four feet and must weigh in at several tons, whether it’s megalithic is probably debateable, but it certainly didn’t get here , half way up a steep hill, by accident.
Ancient or not it looks like it’s been toppled from an upright position at some stage, as it sits at an odd angle. I couldn’t see any markings on it either old or new.

Another trip to this out of the way hillfort, it’s had a lot of scrub and brambles cleared from the western banks and ditches. The entrance to the fort is more complicated than I remembered, it may not of course be the original, but does look like it.
Once again there were no other people on the hill, not even the sheep are here now, just a lot rabbits and magpies for some reason.

If you want to see one of the most peculiar cairns the north of England has to offer, come here.

As stated below, the variety of rock art is top notch, with many motifs, of all different designs and execution. But don’t be distracted by the bvious carvings, there are a few heavily eroded complex ones to be found on the northern side of the cairn. These are at one end of the extant spectrum of visibility at thi site, with the other end being occupied by the most in-yer-face motif, which looks susiciously as if it’s been re-touched at some point in the distant past. Much the same as one nearby at West Horton

But the thing that makes this cairn odd is the large number of portable marked stones found during excavation. It’s generally a workable rule of thimb that portable cup marked stones in cairns are associated with some kind of funereal function, like those on the underside of cist covers. But the carn here yielded absolutely no sign of any burials at all, not even a bit of burnt bone, nor potsherd.

This doesn’t mean it wasn’t of course, but it certainly adds to the ambience of the place to think that it’s maning, and the meanings of the carvings, is so obscurely lost in the mists of time, that it defies even the most general of generalisations.

Access does require getting in touch with the farm though, they’re quite keen on that, as they usually have livestock in the field.