Latest Fieldnotes

No sign of these standing stones, the field they should be in is now ploughed and there are a few stones in the ditch that may be field clearance or at least one of them look like they could an original stone.

This Ogham stone is meant to be down a cul-de-sac, no sign of it at the grid ref.

This standing stone is meant to be in behind some houses. As far as I could see its gone.

This is quite an out of the way spot, but what a revelation once you get there.Getting there isn’t particularly difficult with an o.s. map, as it’s all on public foot paths.The route I took up here takes you past the remains of the earthworks of the roman aqueduct into Dorchester. The alternative name for this place is the seven barrows, at first I could only see six, and indeed could only photograph six. Four of the six visible are similar sized, with two low bowl types.The seventh barrow is in dense undergrowth in an adjacent copse, I could see it through the trees, it is of a similar size to the four bowl barrows I did take pictures of. This place is off the beaten track and I had it completely to myself, to the north can be seen the high chalk downland , which contains sites of ancient settlement, some of which I will walk again soon and put on T.M.A.
Very close to these barrows is The New Barn Field Centre , which has a reconstruction of an Iron age round house and gives demonstrations of ancient pottery making.

There are 3 cairns marked on OS sheet 62 at Colvinstown Upper. The Arch. Inventory of Co. Wicklow says they are all on a steep NW facing slope of the hill. Well, one is and the other 2 are more west-south-west. The largest and best preserved (the main one of this site) was not located by the inventory people back in 1989 due to heavy forestation. No more. The forestry have been at their task and in the process have made an unholy mess, practically destroying the 2 lesser cairns. They are a shambles and a disgrace. Would they do the same to Kilranelagh graveyard at the western foot of the hill?
We approached the scene of devastation from the tracks on the northern side of the hill, after spending a while at Boleycarrigeen stone circle. We circled around to the south first and spotted the main cairn up above the gorse line. It’s a long cairn, about 25 metres on it’s longer axis. It looks to have been robbed out quite some time ago, with some of the structural stones of its burial cist visible in a depression on its eastern side.
The views from here to the flat plain to the south and over west to the Pinnacle on Baltinglass Hill are lovely. I couldn’t help wondering at the significance of the placing of all 3 cairns, with the passage grave cemetery on Baltinglass Hill such a prominent visual feature.
The other 2 cairns are now a shadow of their former past. The most southerly and easterly, Colvinstown Upper III, may not last much longer. It’s a flattened dumping ground. Colvinstown Upper II shows some remains of its burial cist, but the forestry made a grievious error years back when they decided to plant pine trees in the mound.
All the forestry hereabouts has been cleared recently, and though not all the damage to these cairns is of a recent vintage, major damage has been caused in the last year due, I’d guess, to a callous indifference and an ignorance of our ancient past. This even goes so far as planting new trees on each of the 3 cairns.

GPS: V76703 77430

I could just about see this site from the road , it’s in a small copse. Sadly it was a bit too overgrown to take a photo of from the distance I was away from it.

Had a walk along the footpath here this afternoon , but sadly couldn’t see the barrow , which I think must be over the crest of a hill. I will try to see this barrow again at some stage , but I don’t like tresspassing as a rule , so I will have find out whose land it is and get permission.

What does one say about a site like this? Another of Hampshire’s “lost” Long Barrows. Unvisited, unloved and almost inaccessible later in the growing season because of the waist high stinging nettles. Partly trashed in the past by a small quarry at the NW end and a track over the centre and rabbit/badger burrows at the SE end. Photographic recording of sites like this is important, boring though the images may be, as ancient barrows like this can so easily be lost.

As a case in point, my old (1976) 1: 25,000 OS Map (SU42/52) shows clearly a fenced Long Barrow a couple of hundred meters to the SE.
Later maps and a site visit show no traces. What has happened to it in the past 30 years?

Access Private woodland but footpaths close by.

Found this while trying to compose a straight landscape shot after giving up on finding any rock art in the area. Lined up two upright stones and this to get a shot of some weak sun breaking through in the gap on the horizon when I caught a glimpse of one cup and ring from the corner of my eye! There’s definitely two cups with single rings and some possible stuff beside them but very dubious. In the vicinity of one ‘rock art’ dot in the OS map.

I’m naming it panel D since it was the fourth I found today, will try and locate proper details.

My GPS reading for this panel: V76615 77599

This is a nice spot...on a steep sided hillside south of Ashbourne overlooking the river Henmoor. Fine views out over Ashbourne to the hills of Bunster and Thorpe Cloud at the mouth of Dove Dale.

The O.S map marks the mound as a tumulus, although John Barnatt notes it as only a possible example in his ‘Barrow Corpus’. There are no recorded excavations.

These four similar sized round barrows are placed at right angles to the Ridge hill group .They run down the north facing slope of Great hill. Widely and equally spaced apart they do not appear to have either ditches or banks surrounding them.

Situated just below Ridge hill , with Maiden castle to the north east , this is almost certainly the only quadruple barrow in Britain. They are all the same size and are very close together , Grinsell says they share a common ditch , I couldn’t see this as there was a crop in the field. Just north of the four is another large , low round barrow with what appears to be a small standing stone next to it.
This quadruple barrow is only a few hundred metres west of a unique bell/disc barrow at the top of Gould’s hill.

This is a more subdued Dorset hillfort than either nearby Hod or Hambledon hills. It shows on the ground as a low bank from the footpath, the site itself is on private farmland. As I was feeling law abiding and being looked at by a bloke on a tractor in the next field, I decided not to climb the gate and go for a look.

What a monster climb it is to get up here , shows how unfit I am. A beautiful clear day , Hambledon is in clear view to the west , and is so massive it looks closer than it probably is. I think because of the steep climb , there are never many people up here ,only saw one bloke walking his dog in two hours. On the way up the hill I found a piece of worked flint near a badgers sett.

This really was the best time to visit these sites, a perfect 20 degree sunny spring day. The bluebells in their first flush of flower and the beeches just coming into leaf. Later in the season, with the tree canopy developed and the understory in full growth, the sites are more obscured and dark.
To add a few comments to Nat’s... The pub has been demolished and if you take the anti-clockwise path from the car park the Banjo Enclosure is first (almost impossible to photo but see FlashEarth link.) then the E barrow (with trees removed), follow the path to the conifers and turn right parallel to the (very noisy!) M3 to the N barrow.
Jim.

Finally made it up to see the “Rolling Sun” at Boheh Stone. It is a very interesting expierence. Talking to a local lady that had seen it everytime in the last 36 years she said that this instance was the brightest she can remember. I would recommend bringing some kind of tinted “welders” goggles with you so that you can observe it better. I think I am still seeing sun-spots after it.
The stone is on the Clew Bay Arch trail as Site 2 and can be found by following the signs for Croagh Patrick coming out of Westport and then following the sign for Site 2.
There is a lot of construction going on close to the stone (which is in someones backyard but access is allowed!) and another spot where it is possible to view the “rolling sun” from the road will be gone as another bungalow is built up in front of it.
It happens twice a year on the 18th April and August 24th. However the locals that were there last night agreed that today the 19th April would probably be better so it looks as if it could be slightly either side of this.

Visited this site again and have found another two barrows in the area surrounding the Hardy monument. One is very low and small and the land owner has circled it with wooden posts , as people used to park on top of it. The other is a much larger round barrow , sadly looking in quite a battered condition. This site is a local viewpoint and gets very busy in the summer , most of the damage done to this barrow is probably done by rabbits , which are abundant on this site , but some of it must be man made.

This is an island I know very well as I worked here for 5 years and can trace family back for several hundred years. I’m not surprised that Mr Hamhead couldn’t find many sites in this pock marked landscape , it is after all a giant quarry, from which many millions of tons of stone have been removed. The Culverwell site, which he mentions is difficult to access , but is well worth the effort. It is a mesolithic ” summer” camp of about 12000 years b.c.e. which has been a largely amateur labour of love , led by local archaeologist Susann Palmer. There is, albeit scant, evidence from paintings of the island that there was a major Durotrigian hillfort on the site of the Verne prison. The current prison is a converted Palmerstonian fortress , which when it’s defensive ditch was dug by convicts in the 1860 / 70 period, was found to contain a great many burials which showed sword and spear wounds. Artifacts recovered from these burials were of the iron age period, and it is reckoned to be a war grave. Contemporary roman documentary evidence (Tacitus) nicknames the island the “isle of slingers”, the nearby Chesil beach providing millions of pebbles as slingshot ammunition. Enormous caches of pebbles from chesil beach have been found in Dorset hillforts many miles inland.

The region between the convergence of the A68 and A696 main roads on their way to Scotland is not known for its rock art and the cluster of 13 panels at Ray-Sunniside in the Beckensall Archive stands out. It is lovely walking country of rolling heather moorland and recent forestry blocks dotted on the map with cairns and ancient settlements of all kinds.
Although only 4km south of the impressive multiple cup and ring carvings of Tod Crag, all 13 rocks at Ray-Sunniside were described as having just single or multiple cup-marks, most were portable but probably associated with cairns. It’s often hard to prove cup-marked rocks as being artificial and not natural features so I visited with an open and largely sceptical mind.
The site is approached from the minor road which runs between Ridsdale on the A68 and Knowesgate, just north of Kirkwhelpington on the A696. The main ridge is about 260m above sea-level and runs SW to NE on a slope south of Ray Fell.
There proved to be a large number of cairns, old boundaries and enclosures with a few remains of round-houses.
Of the Beckensall panels, I failed to find two (b and m) and six (d, e, g, h, k and l) were unconvincing as definite rock art as the cups were shallow. h is a strangely grooved rock but may be the result of natural erosion along the bedding planes. The others though have deep cups and several are located close-to or were closely-ssociated with the cairn-field.
Although many of the cairns may have been for field clearance, a few may have been used for burials and the incorporation of portable cup-marked rocks in such Bronze Age cairns is a well known phenomenon. Rock i, for example, which has a single cup-mark about 8cm diameter and 4cm deep, lies close to a prominent cairn. The Archive entry quotes Phil Deakin that the stone was used as the end stone of a burial cist, facing inward. The cup-marks on a, c, f, and j, and also b and m on Archive evidence, are similar in size and form and I reckon are convincingly genuine rock art, albeit of the not very exciting kind!
A search of the area on Keys to the Past showed two records under Canny Cleugh (the name of a small stream to the north). One is for an enclosure, field system, cairns and hollow ways of unknown date and the other for a field system, clearance cairns and the ring banks of round houses (seen on aerial photos) and assigned to the later prehistoric period. At the west end of the ridge is a very prominent rectangular-banked enclosure with the remains of round houses and a field system (given the name ‘Sunnyside near Ferneyrigg’) which links to a similar site to the SE (’Ray Burn’) by a hollow way. These are both described as Roman-period native farmsteads.

This is a stunning place and a real rarity, most of the bank barrows in the country lay along the south Dorset ridgeway, of which this is a part. At the field margins and where a round barrow gets close to it’s northern side , signs of a ditch can be seen. From the top of the bank the Bincombe bumps set of round barrows can be seen on the southern horizon. To the east there are various round barrows and immediately south is Chalbury hilfort.The island of Portland looms large in Weymouth bay as it does from most of the ancient sites along the ridgeway of Dorset.

I think the best time to see this site is when the trees aren’t in full leaf. There is a definte combination of berm, ditch and bank surrounding the base of the barrow. I’m not sure I like the trees either but they do stop these barrows from being ploughed into oblivion.

Managed a quick visit here following a call to the thoroughly decent farmer to ask permission to wander the fields. This later involved a bit chat about the placement and possible meanings of the carvings. It was this chap who first discovered the carving in the early 1970s, he says he’s scoured the area for others, but none have turned up.

The carvings itself is placed in such a spot that there has to be a high likelihood that it’s creator was making reference to the natural feature of The Piper’s Chair. As Beckensall says, it is very finely carved, it put me more in the mid of the Galloway carvings I’ve seen than of the general style in Northumberland. Quite tightly made, and unusual in this neck of the woods to see 4 penannulars and such a shallow cup.

It’s also puzzling to try and work out what the damage was. I’d always assumed that it must have been quarried, but on close inspection, this seems unlikely. It’s really just surface damage, but deliberate or accidental, who can say?

I can see this cairn from my house in Cahir, originally I thought it was the cairn on Sturrakeen. However it is on Slieveanard, its funny the cairns that are marked on Greenane West and Sturrakeen dont look like cairns at all while this one definitely is a cairn but isnt marked.
The cairn itself is about 2m high by about 15m diameter. There is a fantastic view from it back along the spine of the Galtees. It is a relatively easy climb up. I followed the path marked on the OS map that takes you up to the lower of the two peaks and then walked from there over to the higher one.
The cairn on the higher peak isnt visible from the lower.

This is a great and varied barrow cemetery , having most of the known types included in it .The Ackling dyke roman road runs right through it , indeed it cuts part of the oval ditch of a twin disc barrow off. It looks to me that this may have been a deliberate show of military power on the part of the romans , as a few yards movement could easily have avoided this. Most of the barrows on this site have been excavated , thankfully in a reasonably sympathetic way, it wasn’t done by the local vicar with a shovel .Burials of different types were found within the mounds along with grave goods.