Now here's a strange thing. Maybe this mound is a natural mound. Though unnatural mounds are hardly unheard of in the vicinity. The Magic database is not giving anything away, though the site is listed as a scheduled monument.
It's quite common for barrows to have been reused by later peoples - here burials were found from the 6th to 9th centuries AD (first maybe locals, later maybe from a monastic community). Get this - the minster of Ripon (Saint Wilfrid's church) "appears to be aligned on Ailey Hill," which for whatever reason, along with the burials, tends to suggest the church was trying to assimilate this mound and what it apparently represented.
Info from the article:
A Fear of the Past: The Place of the Prehistoric Burial Mound in the Ideology of Middle and Later Anglo-Saxon England
Sarah Semple
World Archaeology, Vol. 30, No. 1, The Past in the Past: The Reuse of Ancient Monuments. (Jun., 1998), pp. 109-126.
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Posted by Rhiannon
27th October 2007ce
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