Latest Fieldnotes

Raining as usual when I visited this – and just couldn’t find a satisfactory place to park, ended up perched on the edge of the main road hazards flashing.. The field was FULL of enormous horses, who looked happy enough to see a visitor (until it transpired I had no food at which point they turned their bottoms to me to face out of the rain). But I felt rather small in comparison and didn’t dare go in with them. One was even stood on the barrow.
If you are more prepared than I was and can find a safe place to park, there is a legitimate footpath through the field and you will be able to see the chamber on the far side from the road.

Julian mentions this barrow in passing in TMA as reminding him of the recumbent stones of the north: there are two uprights either side of huge slab; they stand at one end of the mound.

I made a little pilgrimage to this alone and in the rain, parking on the lane which is the Fosse Way and squelching through the field towards the stones. You feel quite remote but humming along in the distance is the wretched M4 – but that doesn’t seem to matter, this place is so old and the motorway is just a transient upstart.
The stones are interestingly patterned and one has a strange bite out of it.
In more clement weather conditions I think you could sit here for even longer.

We visited this site a year or two ago just as the sun was going down. It’s in the middle of a grassy field and we did trot down to the nearest farmhouse to ask permission – but it turned out to be converted into holiday cottages. So well we hopped over the gate and ran over.
Just a couple of stones propped up against each other, quite small – but a beautifully pinky colour that just glowed in the sunset, a lovely calm friendly spot.

2 cairns lie in the plantation at Minninglow a massive Neolithic and a smaller Bronze age one, both with exposed chambers.
The Neolithic cairn is still big after much stone robbing, there are four visible chambers a couple with intact capstones, tho’ some of the chambers have been infilled, after some dodgy digging unsettled the place. There may be another chamber still in the remaining mound.

Minninglow can be from miles away, (Five Wells, Bamford Moor). Only when you’re up close to it the hill looks pretty unremarkable.

An excellent place, and no-one goes up there ...that might have something to do with dodgy access rights...
But it’s got to be seen. This is ‘the’ site of The Peak District.

I see the great whale- back of Upleathham every day from my home and i find it a totally mystical place.
The side that faces me houses a mesolithic site from which lots of flint tools and cores have been recovered. The other side of the hill houses a round barrow with a, supposed, cup marked kerb.
All the bits in between are covered on one side by Errington Woods and the remains of the Victorian Iron stone mines and farmland everywhere else.
Approach the site from New Marske and you’ll encounter a lovely sunken trackway leading around the hill. Upleatham village is a bourgoise spot but has a certain charm (but no pub!) a lovely romanesque church, now a private house, a well, a tiny unused chapel surrounded by a DMV.
The woods also yield the occasional cup marked rock from their bed of pine needles. I’m sure if the woods were stripped, much more would be revealed, but what would be the point of that.
The views over Teesside and the Tees bay are beautiful .
If you go to the woods at dawn or dusk you’ll see lovely shy deer chillin.

Visited Barrowfields today.

Nice day for it... overlooking newquay bay, with the surf of Tolcarn to my left and the slightly bigger surf of lusty glaze to my right. I have always seen the main mound of barrowfields, in the past, but have never really known what it was until recently.

Standing on top of it made me realise it’s true size... quite impressive really, especially with the moat around it :-)

An extremely draughty place to be (we were reduced, old person stylee, to eating our sandwiches in the car). If you can tear your hair away from your eyes you’ll find the top of the down (?) is riddled with all manner of bumps and ditches. The far (east) end of White Sheet Hill is a pretty small Iron Age site – but with triple? banks and some fairly steep ditches (as we discovered, all angled either to funnel the wind straight at you or, if sheltered to be disgustingly soggy so you can’t sit down – excellent defence or what). There are Bronze age barrows half way along the down (mind the reckless model plane fliers here).
But! at the western end – a Neolithic Causewayed Enclosure, no less. It has a single causewayed ditch and it sits out on the spur of the hills. It could be 5000 years old.

Now for my speculative bit. It’s not overly convincing from the map, but when you’re up there it seems that the Neolithic earthworks directly address the hill ‘Long Knoll’ across the valley. And it’s my opinion that Long Knoll looks like a recumbent figure. I have to buy a digital camera to take with me everywhere.. Anyway, this would fit in so well with similar ideas about recumbent images of the earth god/dess being sighted on by Neolithic sites, that you can read about in TMA and in here. The nearby village is called ‘Maiden Bradley’ (Maiden + Bride-lea?) which seemed highly significant in my enthusiasm to prove my new discovery.

Please visit and tell me your opinion! Turn up the lane at the pub on the B3092 between Maiden Bradley and Stourhead. There’s a car park half way up the hill, but if you want to skid in the gravel you can drive up to the top where there are a range of enormous potholes to park in. Don’t bother following the track down the other side – it just gets ridiculous unless you’re in a landrover, and if you’re in anything remotely lowslung you simply have to turn round.

---

I believe that Jack’s Castle barrow is very close to Alfred’s Tower (shown in the above photographs). Would it have been visible without the trees? And did Colt Hoare deliberately put his tower next to it?

I can’t believe this is the first fieldnote for Golden Cap – this place is terrific.
Contrary to TMA, there’s no signposting off the main road (this can only be a good thing if you ask me) but you’ll be fine with your OS map. Julian describes the first wooded hill where you park (at SY 412 930) as the body of the sacred landscape, with Golden Cap as the head. You follow the gentle path round the body, but it’s quite some exertion up to the top of Golden Cap (but all nicely stepped as it’s on the coastal path). It’s the highest point on the south coast, and if you walk out to the end you’ll totally believe it, the drop is pretty monumental.
I took three other people up there – they were kicking a bit to begin with but once we were up there noone wanted to leave, it was so warm and we were sat on the closely nibbled grass chatting. You should be able to see a very long way but last thursday it was beautifully hazy and you couldn’t tell where the sea met the sky. You could hear the waves far below, there were bees everywhere, and the generally car-bound cynics were at peace. The oranges I’d brought were hailed as delicious.
As my better half said: ‘This is definitely somewhere we’ll come back to.‘

Visited this afternoon in the strange high, mizzly haze which had wrapped itself over the Wiltshire plain............having never ventured as far into the Southern interior as Wilts before, i found the rolling, hazy, hedgeless plains disorientating......the same sense of landscape bowling away over the lip of the Earth as I’ve found whilst crossing Bodmin Moor......
......never seen monoliths as big before.....craggy and proud, they seem to stare out the village(and how intrusive this settlement seems outside the rarified aerial shot or Ordnance Survey map!!).......felt a definite current from one of the large stones near the circle- and how awe-inspiring it must ‘ve been to see this site intact and resplendent.
I’ll definitely be back to explore the wider landscape, think next time I’ll park and walk in from a few miles out, taking in a few outlying sites on the way.....it can only be right to arrive on foot, tired and blissful from The Ridgeway.

Perfectly located, nestled below a prominent outcrop. The outcrop can be clearly seen from the main road, and I knew instantly that this would be the location of this wonderful site. I cannot imagine many people visiting here, so this is a great spot to just chill out.

This site left us stunned, everything about it is perfect (apart from the reproduction stone). Within the monuments chamber stands a single monolith, adding an ambience I’ve never felt in a burial chamber before.

Lying in the adjacent field this huge outcrop offered us the perfect peace and solitude to view and contemplate the burial mound without much fear of being disturbed. From the top it is perfectly clear that the mound and the nearby menhir are aligned with this gorsedd.

Bodowyr sits imprisoned within a silly little fence. With nobody around, the fence being low and without a gate, the best bet is to hop over for a closer inspection. The views from here to the mainland and the Snowdonian mountains is quite breathtaking.

The setting of Barclodiad-y-Gawres is awesome. The whole thing is spoilt by the huge grass covered dome which houses the monument. The gates were padlocked on the day we came and we were left frustrated by the fact that whoever had been allowed access last had left candles, foil wrapped chocolate Easter eggs and daffodils! Each to there own, but this kind of thing is pretty meaningless. A walk by the cliffs, down to the nearby cove showed the setting off further, with views out to Holy island. The orange coloured foam, as mentioned in TMA, was found frothing round the cliff edges, which shows this must be a perennial problem.

The broken capstone of Ty Newydd is held up by two wide stone built supports which ruin the site – however from one angle, they are obscured so it is possible to see the site as it would have been. A series of large stones in the wall next to the monument look quite suspicious.

Sitting in a field overlooking the gorsedd and monument of Bryn Celli Ddu. The menhir is shot through with a seam of quartz and is covered in thick lichen giving it a fascinating surface quality.

I only had the opportunity to see the central henge on this my first visit, my companion for the day wasn’t feeling too good, and I didn’t want to drag out his suffering any longer! The henge is in quite a bad state of repair, but is pretty big and good enough to recognise and so is worth seeing.

My first time seeing these three fantastic stones. The largest stone lies behind a locked gate on a busy road which is way too conspicuous to just leap over, so it’s best to be content viewing this one from a short distance. The other two stones are accesible and cannot fail to impress with their immense size.

Round Loaf lies off the beaten track. We were walking in the area (Tockholes), and decided to extend our walk to take in this site. The mound is worth visiting for its isolated position, but is probably best combined with a first time visit to the Pikestones site near Anglezark.

NB: It’s a good idea to take a bag with you for the worrying amount of litter – we spent 10 minutes tidying the site up when we arrived.

The best way to reach the Goggleby stone is to take the road from Shap to the Thunder Stone and turn left on the single track road, parking at the sharp right hand bend, a footpath leads to the stone which lies in the next field. The stone stands huge and proud, spoilt only by the concrete reinforcement at it’s base.

Kemp Howe is a travesty. These stones lie dejected by the side of a railway track, overlooking an industrial site. The stones are themselves beautiful, and despite the circles destruction, should be visited.

Well worth the visit to the Iron HIll cairn circle and it’s companion cairn just a few feet away, intersected by a dry stone wall. The circle is difficult to understand, at first, but does eventually make sense. Taking photographs was very hard!

Mayburgh henge never fails to impress. On this day the busy traffic sped past on the M6, Easter bank holiday being well under way, but the solitude of this site *still* impresses. I came with two friends who’d never been before, and both were overwhelmed by it’s size and the thought of this site being used by the ancients.

Castlerigg on a warm spring afternoon is perfect. Swarming with tourists – I still LOVE it. It never fails to amaze me how people, with no apparent interests in their ancient ancestors, can come to sites like this and feel it. We came and chilled here for an hour or so, and in that time watched numerous people arrive, approach the site, and proceed to wander round with broad smiles across their faces.

This small circle near Oddendale is of a similar size to the nearby Iron Hill cairn circle. When we visited five mad sheep were resident in the field which is fenced off and the gate padlocked. It seemed best just to observe from over the fence as those sheep looked just wrong, one came right up to the fence and wanted attention, another grunted wierdly in the background. Quite sad really.