Latest Fieldnotes

If you walk to Birsay it feels as if you are at the top of Orkney Mainland, with the result that you have great difficulty orientating yourself. For instance the bit of road with Oxtro on it feels like it goes straight across the top but you are actually going down the ‘side’ of Mainland. Finally popped into the field, barely missing the usual muddy bit other side of the gate. Must confess I wasn’t expecting much beyond further outer wall. If I had only checked the diagram properly beforehand I could have made more use of my time with better observations (beware that diagram by the way as it shows the broch as seen looking towards the road). The intramural stuff I easily made out but I mistook the well for a burial area as it looked fairly rectangular. Next time I will take a photo overlooking that, the picture I took was owing to my keeping a big plastic bucket out of sight. Seen from the direction of the road the chamber at the right is your basic intramural chamber whilst that on your left has a flight of stairs (apparently). Very nice for us brochaholics.

[visited 23/4/5] This is a delightful little fort hidden away on the edge of the mendips. I imagine the views are immense, unfortunately it was very hazy / misty on this visit and so I could only make out shadows in the mist. I could however see the Pen Hill transmitter & hill in the near distance, though I suspect the barrow is hidden over the crest of the hill from this angle.

Condition wise this is ok, though the banks are somewhat denuded & I suspect this site has been ploughed in the past. There are also a couple of points where the bank could have been levelled. On the West side is what looks like the remains of a cobbled entrance, which if true, makes this somewhat strange. That said evidence of wheeled vehicles have been found not too far away at the glastonbury lake village.

Accesswise, I parked just off the road to the South of the fort and followed the footpath over it. Its about a 5-10 minute walk up a steep bumpy field. You could possibly get to it via the golf club next door, but that way lies madness.

Just visited the ‘Knob’ this spring (2005) and have seen new changes. There is now a fence around the base of the knob and there has been some clearing of the scrub and trees on top. Guess I kind of liked it better before!

Visited 2nd August 2004: We parked by the Bernera Bridge information board and walked back across the bridge to Iarsiadar. There’s a gate by the road giving access into the field where the stone now stands. The climb up to the stone isn’t too steep, but there’s no path as such.

When you’re up by the stone you just have to imagine that you’re a few metres further west than you actually are.

Visited 2nd August 2004: Just as enigmatic as I’d anticipated, Bernera Bridge is a weird old thing. It’s situation above the channel of Sruth Iarsiadar is a great sensory bonus. The reflection of light (even on a dull day), the sound of the sea, the distant views, and even the modern bridge make it a great spot.

Long before the bridge this was a crossing point to Bernera, but what would it have looked like during the Neolithic? The sea levels were lower, so what did this spot represent to the people who put up the stones?

The Bernera Bridge ‘circle’ could be a lot more accessible than it is, given how close it is to the road. A steep gravel slope leads up to the site, so not ideal for anyone who’s got limited mobility.

Visited 2nd August 2004: The first site of the day, it was good to meet Ceann Hulavig in the flesh. Shame that the weather wasn’t great, but you can’t have everything. We were pressed for time (not recommended) and so any scope for chilling out and enjoying the place was rather limited. Would have liked to have made a second visit in the sunshine.

In an area covered in rock art this stone is easily the most interesting and ornate . First described by the minister at Kenmore , J.B. MacKenzie in 1895, the “cups” are almost non-existent , and the motifs and manner of pecking are much closer in style to Irish passage grave and some Northumbrian markings .

This roughly square hillfort encloses about 3.6 hectares and is defended by a single rampart and ditch with a counterscarp bank on its southern side.
This fort gave it’s name to a particular type of construction, whereby the rampart was built of 2 rows of posts 2 metres apart,
tied together with cross beams to form a continuous box, and then filled with chalk rubble.
On my visit today a large section of the interior has been freshly strimmed (much is still covered in thick gorse) and so gives a chance to have a better look at the disk barrows near the center.
I have visited the larger one many times before, but two other smaller barrows are evident to the North of this one.
There is an even smaller barrow to the West, but I didn’t spot it. These (bronze age) barrows predate this sites defensive use.
Someone had placed a small bunch of fresh flowers at the meeting of the paths that disect the interior of the fort.
Those seeking a glimpse of the eternal and an escape from the modern bustle of Brighton can do no better than to climb the Ditchling Road to the stunning viewpoint of Hollingbury.

Access: It’s in the middle of a public golf course, several paths leading in from all directions. Bring your wits, or a cycling helmet!

20/04/05 – visited in the hope of seeing a peaceful space. We got there to find the surroundings to the site has been stripped of all plants – the meadows are bare, right up to the edge of the earthwork. Piles of uprooted vegetation were dotted around – some of the larger trees on the periphery had had branches torn/broken off. The circle itself within the earthwork is intact, but, the the portal stones are exposed to whatever is to come.

One of the party suggested that it’s the kind of clearance done for building rather that agricultural work; I’m no expert on such things, but there’s going to be some serious changes to the site. No stone clearance had been done at the time of our visit, certainly.

We’ve alerted heritageaction.org and various pagan/druid groups both in the UK & Eire. I hope to be able to delete the pictures and edit or delete this post in the future. If any does or can visit soon, please do, keep us updated here – alternately email me – thank you.

24-4-05: Early on a Sunday afternoon, sounds of people cutting grass and fixing cars with loud pumping music, getting watched by a woman with her hands on her hips over her garden fence... I could think of more atmospheric places!!!

I felt really sorry for this place. It has a classic metal signpost and fence but unfortunately was scattered with rubbish, including a broken bottle smashed right onto the panel. Very sad.

Tor Dike is a 2km linear earthwork, consisting of a ditch cut into the limestone, and an earth and stone rampart. According to the SMR there are Iron Age type enclosures and hut circles abutting the rampart. Couldn’t spot them myself, but you can’t really miss the ditch and banks. Would have been quite defensible if it wasn’t for the fact that you could just walk round the western end.

The stone is fairly easy to find, it’s embedded into the south side of the bridge, just under the arch. When the Beckensall archive describes it a 80cm from the bridge, it’s not a typo.

There’s a convenient parking spot just on the bend of the road for those in cars, but beware the humpbacked bridge, it makes a blind summit, and has been the site of a few head-on dunches in the past, so beep as you approach. It’s fairly easy to get down to the stone, there’s a gate in the fence, and a permissive path.

If it’s dry, you’d be hard pressed to make out the rings unless the light was very low. Fortunately, there’s all this water right next to it, so the full motif is easy to moisten to bring out the detail.

I can’t help but think that the people who put it here may not have noticed it, and that there may be others in the immediate vicinity. Given the bridges proximity to the carvings still in situ at Middleton and Shaftoe crags, and the portables at Old Deanham, it’s a good chance there are more marked stones in the area waiting discovery.

Rumor has it there was once a large panel in the area, which has been covered over for a long time now. Hopefully it’s still there and hasn’t been broken up. Lots of the prehistoric stones around here have been broken and/or moved.

The general line of the mounds is a diagonal approaching the loch. Using basically the 1946 account first of six in the field is a gravelly mound 30x4’ against which the largest, the second, lies which was exposed down to the ground to reveal a small cist (modern labelling ‘C’ with short cist at HY26732511). Fifty yards to the southeast is a third roughly 26’ by 3’high. The fourth is another fifty yards away measuring 20’ by 12-18”, a protruding stone about 5 1/4” by at least 27” on top another cist probably (’E’ at HY26792505). It has a few stones about its margin. A pointed stone at the centre of another barrow (’F’ at HY26772505) another 13 yards west, is the third probable cist. This barrow is 35’ across and 4-4 1/2 high and has had a trench through its middle, as has the sixth mound which is about the same height but 37’ diameter and lies between the second and fifth enumerated. The next I have details on is ‘H’ at HY26772507, the smallest at 10x1’.
These mounds lie in the field next to the house before the Bigbreck Quarry as you come down on the B967 nearing the Twatt junction. I have been here one or two times and strangely have never noticed them. Actually my attention was first drawn by the several large stones lying by the top end of the field. There is enough material exposed in several of the barrows to make them worth a visit if you are in the area, another site for an other day. Before reaching here, between Nicol Point and the barrow cemetery, I saw two big stones isolated in the middle of a field, a grey standing stone and lying against it a thick slab of IIRC a sandy coloration. When I found the Queenafjold barrows I wished to turn back for a photo of this stone anomaly but my schedule had slipped too far already.

Can you call it a field visit when you have only viewed from the road with a high-powered digicamcorder. Answers please on a postcard ;-)
Approaching Birsay from Swannay not long past the Knowes of Lingro (possibly even along the same ridge, see vid.supra I think the term is) you see two small square wartime buildings on the hillside with a grassy hump between them and directly to their right a mound. This is the Knowe of Crustan. You can easily find a mound that seems to be another fragment of this as you scan along the horizon.

A very disappointing site, what you see from the roadside is all you get. Going towards Birsay pass Harray Farm and where the main road turns right instead continue straight on and then take the first track left. Soon you will see the site on your right. It does disappear for a minute or two before you reach the top of the hill. Very carefully slip through the barbwire fence, the barbs are rather long. The mound is surrounded by an electric fence to keep coos oot, stoop or slide under that. Not geometrised but certainly no sign of any features – a flatter area on top could simply be the result of animal activity. I saw nothing else about here, but maybe I should have looked harder for the other scant remains ?

Alongside the road at the Ring of Brodgar there are two large mounds. Opposite the modern entrance, practically at road level, is the Plumcake(-shaped) Mound. But the first you encounter is the bulk of Fresh Knowe (presumably called so as against Salt Knowe near the sea loch).
For this you have to go down a slight slope – indeed the lochside edge is practically at loch level and in the present day perilously close to the water’s edge, making it damp around this side. Running down to the loch alongside the northern end is a stream a section of which is occupied by some kind of ?concrete tank. Didn’t think anything of it at the time, but later found a report of “a fine spring of water at the foot of the tumulus”.
The area of Farrer’s excavation is well evident from the road as a large blister of dark vegetation. Don’t go down with fancy shoes. Looking from the lochside there appears to be a slight saddle at the top of the mound. Also there is a concavity like a big scoop from the southern end. Perhaps there was an even earlier excavation here, and the unconfirmed report of a burial comes from this (it has been another suggestion for the silver fibulae source)?? There could always have been a cist there, as probably with Salt Knowe. Which reminds me of the, admittedly smaller, Queena Fjold barrows which reportedly each only held a single central cist according to the prime investigators.
If the Watch Stone really was part of the arc of a long-gone stone circle I would be inclined to place this site in the same time-frame.

To visit this site, marked on the OS maps as “Cairns”, we parked at the lay-by on the Kirkstone Pass road, opposite Limefitt Park camp site. A long walk through the camp site and along the valley took us to the south end of Troutbeck Tongue. A steep ascent to the top was well worth it for the views. Walking north along the ridge and descending gently, we arrived, unmistakabley at the first cairns.
These first two were small, but obviously old, a small collection of boulders in a desert of grass.
The next three(?) cairns were large, and obviously very old. Two appear to have small chambers under a flat slate roof.
The most northerly cairn is difficult to spot, being covered in moss, grass and reeds. Again it is composed of round boulders, piled up. This is a substantial cairn.
It’s a beautiful, quiet site, deep in a lonely valley, with the fells towering overhead. The High Street Roman road rises to the ridge on the east.
We continued steeply up the ridge to Caudale Moor. I checked all rocks we passed for rock art, but found none.

Coming to Birsay directly after the working mill is a side road for the Barony Hotel. The well is at the side of this road not far from the junction. The mediocre description is all too accurate. But the surrounding environ promises there was once a more ancient site hereabouts, either side of the road looks promising. Of course it could be the original well lay further down (down in Yesnaby there was a Crossiekield holy well near St. Bride’s Chapel. No wells appear thereabouts in 1882 and I strongly suspect that it lay opposite the Brough of Bigging) or resembled more a spring. Over the road can be seen a rounded stone several feet long. Min came to mind. If this ‘phallic’ object is original perhaps this was alway’s Man’s Well locally and the St. Magnus apellation used by the toffs or to impress enquirers ?

Last year’s grain only stubble now, fallow field falicitating photography. The messiest view is from uphill, all those stones at the western end like builder’s rubble. The 1882 map shows a stone 160 yards away slightly north of west in the next field (in the direction of a northern house wall). Didn’t see this, only the usual standing stone as field boundary, and there are plenty of those on the track along to here.

Thanks to the directions in Goffik’s fieldnotes, I got here without incident: the sun was shining, and, as I tramped across the moor, Skylarks rose from the ground before me, singing their song, but finding little purchase in the gusting wind that blew cold from the south-east. The long grass was dry, flat and bleached white, but the peat beneath still held it’s generous allotment of water, squelching beneath my Size 12’s as I approached from the east.

The circles themselves, and the little avenue, sit well in the landscape, between the imposing mass of Sheepstor, and the lesser height of Gutter Tor. As the small stone row certainly seems to align through the circle to the smaller five stone circle slightly higher up the slope, and I believe towards a flat (fallen?) stone south-west of the circle (and the small stream) on the slope. One stone of the inner circle is recumbent: perhaps it was too heavy for the restorers of 1921?

It is a peaceful place, worth the twenty-minute tromp from the car park: stay a while and try to figure it out – you’ll find yourself lost in a very simple landscape. A walk around four concentric circles* (all but the outer one complete) allow the visitor to view the moor in different aspects; the impressive grandeur of neighbouring Sheeps Tor, the greener enclosed land of the farm in the valley below, the gently sloping rough grassland that hides the circle from the east, and the distant granite tumble of Leather Tor. A marvellous place to recharge and ponder beneath the blue spring sky.

I walked out via Sheeps Tor, down into the green lushness of the valley beyond the farm; as I came out onto the road leading back to the car, I happened to look up to my left across the valley towards Sheeps Tor. Amazingly, a near-perfect circle of some sixty sheep were formed in a field below the Tor... synchronicity? No, they were being fed by a farmer on a quad bike!

* An interesting entry in Volume 5 of the Dartmoor Atlas of Antiquities (Jeremy Butler, 1997, p186) notes that: “perhaps......multiple rings, such as the free-standing stone circles, represent a faint ancestral echo of those gigantic pillared monuments in stone or wood in Wessex.”

When you look at the map, it’s easy to think that it should be possible to get here from the north side of the river Coquet. There’s a nice dotted green line crossing the river, just to the west of the cliff. Do not be fooled. This may be a suitable fording place if the river is exceptionally low, but when I visited, the water came up to me waist and the current was strong enough to cause slight concern.

Still, it was worth it, as this is a unique collection of carvings.

There’s just enough room to scramble along the edge of the river below the cliff, but the ground is quite sandy and loose, and the overhangs mean that quite a bit of ducking and dodging is mandatory, so a hard hat may be another thing to add to the list of required kit.

The panels are spread along the cliff, at various heights. It’s worth checking the Beckensall archive link to get an idea of what’s there, but as yet, no-one has come up with a diagram of exactly where each panel is on the cliff. This isn’t surprising, as it’s a very 3-D surface, and making a decent diagram would be quite tricky. Besides which only nut-cases* are likely to actually go visit such an inaccessible panel of faint carvings, so there wouldn’t be much call for such a diagram.

The site has a quite powerful atmosphere, especially when you’re sitting hiding from the rain under the overhangs of the rockshelter. Perfect opportunity for pondering the whys and wherefores of the unusual motifs. They’re made all the more inscrutable by the lack of any other prehistoric remains in the vicinity, though Beckensall reports that years ago, it was said that there were possible burial mounds nearby.

One thing that occured to me on the way back to Warkworth, is that to a bod travelling up the Coquet from the sea, the hill directly above Jack Rock is the first one which affords a view of the omni-present Simonside. It also seems that the present level of the river is unlikely to have been the same when the carvings were made, but why this should be of any significance is difficult to pin down, other than vague thoughts of why some motifs are ‘up-a-height’, whilst others are ‘way-doon-below’.

* By which I mean, err, ‘Dedicated Rock Art Enthusiasts‘

We parked in the Breamore House/Tea Rooms car park and followed the path up past the house through the wood. Exiting the woods and following the path round the edge of a field the next wood is sign-posted by the Estate with a large ‘Miz-Maze’ pointer. We carried on to the left of Miz-Maze Wood and Giants Grave is in the field behind. For Hampshire its quite a large barrow. Interestingly the ‘mutilation’ referred to in ‘Hampshire Treasures’ actually give it a horn-work feel, like a Cotswold Severn a la Belas Knap.

You know how some stones just get you and some stones just don’t? This is the latter.

It has been secured into the ground with a neat ring of concrete and exhibits itself more like a farm implement than a stone of wonder.

How sad!

Great location though, with the the ridge of the Campsie Fells creating its northern horizon.

A three foot high stone in a sea of three foot high stones (it’s in a churchyard). Quite comical, really. Walked around the graveyard twice before I could find it. Probably says more about me than the stone, that!

“Severn Trent’s contribution to the long-standing tradition of Derbyshire hill top monuments”….

That’s what it says on the info board….and that’s what keeps going over and over through your mind when you look at Carsington Water’s Stones Island.....On it are without doubt, the crappiest collection, of the most ugly looking manufactured stones ever assembled together in a sorta circle (?) fashion...

Shame when you consider the Bronze Age barrow that, until quite recently, went unnoticed/unacknowledged by the waters edge on the northern side of Stones Island was gonna be the centrepiece….

A causeway linking the 40m between the reservoirs shoreline and the 28m diameter mound was soon forgotten when later Anglo-Saxon burials were also found…fearing possible hoards of metal detector carrying folk…
The idea was scrapped in favour of today’s visual delight.

There’s been a half-hearted attempt to make something of the barrow of late….
An archway in the style of a Bronze Age roundhouse over the path to the barrow and a model showing the stratigraphy….which is pretty useless without a board explaining what it’s all about.

All that aside the Hognaston barrow is still worth a visit….even if it’s only for the “you’ve flooded a valley and I’m still here…….Bring it on” factor.