Tag: Snowden

Snowden Carr, Askwith, North Yorkshire

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Cairnfield:  OS Grid Reference – SE 1777 5099

Getting Here

Cairns, front & rear

Park up at the singular dusty car-park on the east-side of Askwith Moor Road.  If you walk to the sloping eastern edge of the car-park and then go down and over the collapsed fence onto the moorland immediately east, walk in the direction of the Tree of Life Stone to the north-east (be aware that there’s no footpath here and it’s boggy as fuck in places) .  Just over halfway towards the carving, nearly 400 yards from where you’ve parked, you’ll begin to see various ruinous piles and scatters of stone.  You can’t really miss them!

Archaeology & History

Cairn, looking north

In a region teeming with prehistoric sites, the great Eric Cowling (1937) seems to have been the person who stumbled across this “barrow group”, as he called it, during one of his rock art forays in this neck o’ the woods.  Little has been written of them since.  Not to be confused with the Snowden Moor cairnfield more than 350 yards to the north, at this place we find at least a dozen quite distinct cairns scattered around the grid-reference cited, most of them much larger in size than the cairns to the north, ranging between five to twelve yards across and up to three feet high.  They have all been opened and robbed, with considerable disturbance on the largest of the ‘barrows’.  We know not who may have done this, but there’s been a history of quarrying close by and it may have been some of the workmen who did the damage, knowingly or otherwise.

Large scatter of cairn-spoil
Cairn covered in bilberries!

As far as I’m aware, no burial or funerary remains have been found here—but there’s been negligible archaeological attention given to any of the sites on this moorland, meaning that we can draw no real conclusions about the nature of the cairns.  They seem to be far too large to be clearance cairns; and the proximity of large scale prehistoric settlements and rock art all round here would strongly suggest they possessed a funerary nature.  Several impressive petroglyphs exist right at the edge of this group, literally yards away from them.  Check them all out out the next time you see the Tree of Life stone…

References:

  1. Cowling, Eric T., ‘Cup and Ring Markings to the North of Otley,’ in Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, volume 33 (part 131), 1937.
  2. Cowling, Eric T., Rombald’s Way: A Prehistory of Mid-Wharfedale, William Walker: Otley 1946.

© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian

Snowden Carr (596), Askwith Moor, North Yorkshire

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Cup-Marked Stone:  OS Grid Reference – SE 17959 51141

Getting Here

Carved stone in foreground

If you’re looking for this carving, you’ll have been to the impressive Tree of Life stone first.  From there, you need to walk further away from the walling, 30-35 yards southwest, across the other side of the footpath.  There’s a scattered mass of stones all over the ground here: you’re looking for a low-lying long curved stone—longer than most of them hereby.  If the heather’s grown back over the stone, it might take some finding!

Archaeology & History

Close to a line of prehistoric walling (seemingly a section of a settlement), this typically curvaceous female stone is possessed of two pairs of faint cup-marks on the eastern side of the rock.  It was included in Boughey & Vickerman’s (2003) survey where they described the carving as being, “two small cups visible and two further cups under heather.”  A third possible cup exists close to one of the pairs. The carving is found in an area rich in untouched prehistoric remains. 

References:

  1. Boughey, Keith & Vickerman, E.A., Prehistoric Rock Art of the West Riding, WYAS 2003.

© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian

 

Snowden Carr (570a), Timble, North Yorkshire

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Cup-Marked Stone:  OS Grid Reference – SE 1777 5128

Getting Here

The stone in question

From the Askwith Moor car-park (SE 1757 5067), walk along the road north for a few hundred yards until you reach the gate on your right and head through the heather to the Death’s Head carving.  From here walk in a northwesterly direction up the gentle slope for 50-60 yards and, before reaching its crown, keep your eyes peeled for a low flat stone with a curvaceous crack running roughly halfway across it.  If the heather’s deep, you might not have a cat in hell’s chance of finding it!

Archaeology & History

This carving isn’t much to look at on two levels: i) it’s a pretty simplistic design with no rings, and (ii) it’s very faint and almost impossible to see until the light is just right—except for one of the cups, which itself might be natural (there are a few like that amidst the Askwith complex).  It’s very much a carving for the purists among you, as I always say.  Nonetheless, for the record:

Crap sketch of design

Faint cups visible

The most notable element is the single “cup mark” on the more easterly section of the stone, on one side of the natural crack.  It catches your eye and is what makes you give the stone a little more attention, although I couldn’t make up my mind whether this was Nature’s handiwork or humans.  It may be a bit of both.  On the other side the crack we can see a small group of very faint eroded cup-marks — just!  What seems to be three of them cluster in a small triangle formation, but one of these may be natural (tis hard to say for sure), with another isolated cup closer to the crack, and a final one further to the outer edge of the stone.  All are very faint but stood out when the sun was low on our recent visit here.  Give it your attention when you’re next having a look at the settlement and cairnfield close by.

© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian

Snowden Carr, Askwith Moor, North Yorkshire

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Ring Cairn:  OS Grid Reference – SE 1786 5129

Getting Here

Low remains of cairn mass

From the Askwith Moor car-park (SE 1757 5067), walk along the road north for several hundred yards and go through the gate on your right.  Head northeast through the heather to the Death’s Head carving and keep along the same direction for barely another hundred yards onto the ever-so-slight crown of a small hillock.  This is a hut circle you’re standing in/on.  A few yards away just to the southeast of where you’re standing is the very denuded remains of this ring cairn.

Archaeology & History

Low remains of rubble wall

Not visible when the heather’s in full growth, it’s nonetheless worth visiting if you’re trying to get a picture of the prehistoric landscape hereby.  Less than 10 yards southeast of the notable hut circle on the small crown of a hill, it was first noticed by Sarah Walker on a group visit here recently.  Roughly 12 yards across, the most notable section of the circle is the remains of the rubble bank on its east and southeastern sides, raised a few feet above ground level.  The majority of the monument comprises of a scatter of various rocks and small stones within and round the edges of the circle.  There’s a lot of scattering from other adjacent remains, such as the hut circle and nearby walling, that give the initial impression of it being little more than a spurious mess of stone; but the more you walk around and inside it, the more you come to recognize its structure.

It has that Bronze Age hallmark look about it, but without an excavation this is just educated guesswork.  It might actually be older.  The widespread mass of prehistoric remains all round here shows that it was once a mass of activity in prehistoric times.  It’s a brilliant area, even if you can’t find this particular site!

© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian

Snowden Carr (566a), Timble, North Yorkshire

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Cup-Marked Stone:  OS Grid Reference – SE 17724 51258

Getting Here

The 2 cups, top-middle

Easiest way is to park up at the Askwith Moor car-park spot, turn right and walk along the road for about 350 yards until you reach the gate on the right (not the one across the road!).  You then need to head to the Death Head’s Stone carving about 450 yards across the moor to the east. It’s pretty conspicuous.  From here, walk through the heather 80-odd yards northwest.  You’ll walk past some extensive rubble walling (whose nature yet eludes us) before you get there.

Archaeology & History

Looking down at the cups

Discovered recently by Sarah Walker on a venture to see the extensive settlement and graveyard around Snowden Crags, this petroglyph is a simple basic design cut into a relatively large flat stone just above ground level.  Found less than 100 yards east of the dubious Snowden Carr (565) carving, there are two large cup-marks on this one: one of them is an inch deep and two-inches across and may originally have been geophysical in nature, but has subsequently been worked by human hands.  To its side is another much fainter and shallower cup-mark about the same width.  On some photos there’s what appears to be a very faint large ring surrounding the faint cup, but until visits are made at low sun and the stone brushed with water, we cannot be sure whether it’s real or just a trick of the light.  There may be more cups on this stone beneath the peat.  We didn’t brush it all off.

Some 30-40 yards to the east is the rubble of an extensive prehistoric man-made structure, the nature of which has yet to be discerned.  The Snowden Moor cairnfield begins immediately to the northwest, with the first tomb barely 50 yards away.

© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian

Mixing Stone, Low Snowden, Askwith, North Yorkshire

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Cup-and-Bowl Stone:  OS Grid Reference – SE 18074 51241

Getting Here

Follow the directions to reach the Ancestors’ Stone and the Sunrise Stone; and there, roughly halfway between them, right by the edge of the old collapsed walling, you’ll see this rise of a stone with a large ‘bowl’ on top.  That’s it!

Archaeology & History

Mixing Stone, looking E

Laid upon the same geological ridge as our Ancestors’ and Sunrise carvings, there are one, possibly two faint cup-marks visible on the low flat surface near the edge of this rock, barely visible unless the light’s right.  But the important element here, perhaps regardless of the cup-marks, is the ‘bowl’ or rock basin on top of the stone.  Internally, it’s smoothed equally on all sides and, due to being in-between the two impressive petroglyphs, may well have had a practical function to it.  Bear with me on this one…

The Mixing Stone’s bowl

Stone ‘bowls’ or cavities—natural and otherwise—have been made use of in many cultures for simple functional purposes, such as grinding flour, herbal mixes, etc.  We find such traditions in some of the bullauns of Ireland and Scotland; whereas in similar stone bowls known as cat troughs in nearby Haworth, milk was poured to appease the spirits of the land (this tradition was still being maintained in 2001!).  Folklore and traditions of such rock basins spread far and wide beyond the UK: one of the German terms for rock basins is Opferkessel, meaning ‘sacrificial basin’ and suggests ritualistic usage by early societies.  Elsewhere on Earth there are numerous accounts of the ritual use of petroglyphs in which indigenous peoples tell of their use of plant- or rock-based paints (in many cases red ochre) to decorate the carvings.  And it’s this element that I’m interested in here.

Water-painted cupmarks

The Sunrise and Ancestors’ Stones 10-15 yards either side of this Mixing Stone are ideal candidates for such petroglyphic paintings using early ochre and other stone or plant-based agents.  Such activities would always have been ritualised, either in honour of ancestors, genius loci, calendrical rites, or whatever the pertinent ingredient was at that place and time.  I’m suggesting simply that the rock basin on the Mixing Stone was used for just such purposes.  This is no spurious suggestion, but at the same time it’s important to recognise that my thoughts here represent merely an idea, nothing more—not a fact.  Whilst we know full well that these carvings were imbued fundamentally with animistic properties—a simple ‘fact’—this functional idea is just that—an idea.  Students and petroglyph-nuts need to understand this.  And the faded cup-marks at its edge are perhaps merely incidental…. though I don’t buy that misself!

© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian 

Ancestors’ Stone, Low Snowden, Askwith, North Yorkshire

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Cup-and-Ring Stone:  OS Grid-Reference – SE 18083 51229

Also Known as:

  1. Carving no.606 (Boughey & Vickerman)

Getting Here

The Ancestors Stone

If you’re coming up from Otley or Askwith, take the same directions as if you’re going to visit the impressive Naked Jogger Carving (stone 612), not far from the well-known Tree of Life Stone.  From the Naked Jogger carving, walk up to the small outcrop of rocks that bends above you.  There’s a small collapsed line of walling just behind the outcrop.  Walk along this up the slope as if you’re heading for the Sunrise Stone carving, but only 30 yards along, low down and right into the edge of the wall itself, you’ll see this elongated piece of stone.  That’s the spot!

Archaeology & History

If you’ve caught the petroglyph-bug, you’ll like this one!  It received its name from the curious fusion of natural cracks with the man-made pecked lines that shows, quite distinctly when the light is right and the stone is wet, the outline of two humanesque forms joined to each other.  Figurative rock engravings of ancestors in the UK are extremely rare and when we came across this example, we noticed how the design could be interpreted as two Askwith Moor ancestor figures. Figurative rock art images elsewhere in the world such as the magnificent Wandjina paintings and the extensive galleries of figures engraved at Murujuga (Burrup Peninsula) in Western Australia, might provide an initial comparison, though more specific work needs to be done to better understand this unique petroglyph.

Sketch of the carving

You can almost make out the figures in the above photo: the upper torsos of two beings on the right-hand side of the rock, almost fused together.  And the carved shapes of these “ancestral beings” are morphically similar to some elements in the Sunrise Stone just 50 yards away – which themselves remind me of a Northumbrian carving near Doddington known as West Horton 1a. (Beckensall 1991)  But we should’t get too carried away by the idea because—as we can see here in the sketch of the carving—when looked at from a different angle above, we could infer the right-hand carved elements to be representative of an animal: a deer, perhaps.  Rorscharch’s once more tickle the exploring mind….

The rock has been quarried into at same time in the past (just like the nearby Sunrise Stone), leaving us to wonder what the complete carving might have looked like.  No doubt some pieces of it will be in the collapsed walling either side of the stone.  All we have left to see are the two unfinished cup-and-rings above the natural cracks that give rise to the “ancestral being” appearance.  The faint double cup-and-ring has curious linear arcs to its side, with two well-defined cups enclosed by two of them.  It’s a nice-looking carving when the light is good.  The petroglyph was carved over a long period of time, as evidenced by the differing levels of erosion in different sections of the design.  It’s a common attribute.  The oldest section is the faint double cup-and-ring, whose mythic nature was added to / developed at a much later date, perhaps even centuries later.

In the always-expressive archaeocentric description of Boughey & Vickerman’s (2003) otherwise valuable tome, they told this carving to be,

“Long, narrow, thick rock of medium grit. Six cups, one with a double ring with a tab out and two with at least partial single rings, grooves.”

Evocative stuff!

It’s very likely that this carving had some mythic relationship with its close neighbours either side of it, probably over a very long time period and I’m inclined to think it somehow related to the rising of the sun, just like its solar companion further up the slope.  Please note how I emphasize this ingredient in the site profile of its neighbour, the Mixing Stone 10-15 yards away—roughly halfway between this and the Sunrise Stone.   A distinct place of ritual was happening in this close-knit cluster of carvings…

References:

  1. Beckensall, Stan, Prehistoric Rock Motifs of Northumberland – volume 1, 1991.
  2. Boughey, Keith & Vickerman, E.A., Prehistoric Rock Art of the West Riding, WYAS: Leeds 2003.
  3. Reeder, Phil, “Snowden Carr Rock Carvings,” in Northern Earth Mysteries, no.40, 1990.

© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian

Longbarrow Field, Timble, North Yorkshire

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Cairn (lost):  OS Grid Reference — SE 18 53

Archaeology & History

Described in the Field Lore of Timble village by William Grainge (1895) are the names and short histories of some of the local place-names—with this in particular standing out like a veritable sore thumb!  Quite plainly, as Grainge told us,

“The name ‘Longbarrows’ is indicative of some burial mounds of a very early day.  None exist at present.  The land is under the plough, and is about the best in the township.”

But I cannot locate the position of this long-lost site and it’s not shown on any of the early OS-maps hereby.  Grainge said that the land on which it once stood was owned by a local farmer called Charles Dickinson, who leased it out to others.  He wrote:

“Dickinson had in Longbarrows 3 roods* and 23 perches*, and William Jackson’s share in Longbarrows was 1 acre, 3 roods and 21 perches.  Besides these, John Ward of Nether Timble had 1 rood and 17 perches int he same field, a long narrow slip without fence, between Dickinson’s and Jackson’s lots.”

Does anyone know where this was?  One of my suspects is the gathering place of the Fewston witches, a half-mile south of the village; but no remains of anything can be found there today and I may just be barking up the wrong tree.

The area south and west of here is rich in little-known prehistoric heritage, from the cairn-fields of Askwith Moor, the cairn circle at Snowden Crags, the settlements of Snowden Carr and the extensive petroglyphs all over the place!  Giants cairns of the early Bronze Age and neolithic period were also once more numerous upon the moors to the west and south, so the former existence of a long barrow in Timble wouldn’t necessarily be too unusual.  But where was it?!

References:

  1. Grainge, William, The History and Topography of the Townships of Little Timble, Great Timble and the Hamlet of Snowden, William Walker: Otley 1895.

*  A rood is an English unit of area, equal to a quarter of an acre or 10,890 square feet; a perch was a more variable unit of measure, being lengths of 161⁄2, 18, 21, 24 and 25 square feet.

© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian 

Snowden Carr Carving (569), Askwith Moor, North Yorkshire

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Cup-and-Ring Stone:  OS Grid Reference – SE 17746 50923

Getting Here

Inma’s Drawing of the Carving

Takes a bitta finding unless you’ve got a GPS system, or someone like me to show you where it is! The best way’s probably via the Askwith Moor Road car park, up the road 160 yards till you hit the straight line cut into the moor on your right, where the landscape’s been damaged.*  Walk along this for less than 100 yards, then walk right, through the heather and onto the singular tree roughly 200 yards away.  From here, walk 75 yards (strides) north from the tree.  You’re damn close!

Archaeology & History

About 20 feet from a line of ancient walling in an area pretty rich in prehistoric sites, is this medium-sized stone with a lovely cup-and-ring design.  The carving was first recorded by fellow antiquarian, Eric Cowling (1937), in his short survey of other carved stones in the area.  He called this ‘carving no.7’ and described it, thus:

“In the central area of Snowden Carr is a barrow group, which occupies a slight ridge running from the edge of the bog to the east, almost to the moor road on the west.  The ridge is almost devoid of vegetation except at the higher end.  Here, on a heather-covered boulder, is marking no.7.  The cups are smaller than usual, and only one ring completely surrounds a cup.  The lines linking the cups are only lightly incised, and the whole marking has a delicate appearance.”

Old photo of the carving

Cowling’s 1937 sketch

I first visited this stone in the 1980s with fellow rock art student and author, Graeme Chappell, and for some reason it has always impressed me (I recall Graeme laughing whilst I made joyous noises and stroked the rock, reverentially!).  Cowling’s description of the stone as ‘delicate’ is appealing, as the stone and its design has a nurturing aspect to it, female in nature. (forgive me — but many of these stones tend to capture me in such ways!)  The stone was described more clinically in Boughey & Vickerman’s (2003) more recent survey, in the way that archaeologists tend to do, saying plainly:

“Fairly large, flat, smooth grit rock with crack.  Up to seventeen possible cups, one with complete ring, one with partial ring, one with possible ring; connecting groove.”

Doesn’t quite capture the feel of the place, which I’m sure they’d admit.  The next time I’m up here, I’ll get some better photos of the carving.

References:

  1. Boughey, Keith & Vickerman, E.A., Prehistoric Rock Art of the West Riding, WYAS 2003.
  2. Cowling, E.T., ‘A Classification of West Yorkshire Cup and Ring Stones,’ in Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 1940.
  3. Cowling, E.T., Rombald’s Way: A Prehistory of Mid-Wharfedale, William Walker: Otley 1946.
  4. Cowling, E.T. & Hartley, C.A., ‘Cup and Ring Markings to the North of Otley,’ in Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 33, 1937.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Huge thanks to one of my fine ladies, Inmaculada Ibanez-Sanchez, for the drawing! Cheers Inma!

* A pipeline was laid across the moor here, and subsequent work (I presume by the same company) was done again in early 2011, cutting through and damaging several prehistoric monuments and destroying at least one prehistoric cairn.  An archaeological survey of the region should have been done before any work proceeded here, but I’m unaware of any such excavations, or archaeological reports preceding or concurrent to the ecological and historical damage performed.

© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian


Snowden Carr Carving (603), Askwith Moor, North Yorkshire

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Cup-Marked Stone:  OS Grid Reference – SE 17993 51112

Getting Here

Snowden Carr carving 603

From Askwith village go up the Moor Lane and at the crossroads go straight across (Snowden Moor is across left).  Go down and along Snowden Carr Road until the road levels out and, watch carefully, about 500 yards on from the crossroads on your left you’ll see a small crag of rocks in the fields above.  Stop and go through the gate walking up the field and as you near the top you’ll see a gate across to your left that leads onto the moor.  Go through this and on the path which veers up to the right up to the Tree of Life Stone.  About 20 yards along, keep your eyes peeled just off-path, to the left, where a small rounded stone hides at the edge.

Archaeology & History

This was one of a number of cup-markings that Graeme Chappell and I came across in the early 1990s, though it didn’t receive any literary attention until included in Boughey & Vickerman’s (2003) survey.  It’s only a small fella, consisting of just six or seven cups on its upper rounded surface — though what may be a carved line runs round the southern side of the stone.  It seems to have been associated with a small cairn close by (a common feature on these moors) and adjacent prehistoric settlement walling.  In Boughey & Vickerman’s text, they gave the following notes:

“Small rock with rounded surface at ground level, near scattered cairn. Seven or eight cups, possible grooves at edge.”

Drawing of the stone (Boughey & Vickerman)

[You’ll notice in the photo above that the local phantom painter had been here again, artistically highlighting the cup-marks.  The photos we took were done earlier this year, when the paint (or whatever it is) was first noted.  It had not been painted-in the previous autumn.  But most notably is the fact that this carved stone has never previously appeared on the internet (until today) and the only other reference to it is in the standard Boughey & Vickerman text.  This would indicate that whoever it is that’s painting the carvings up and down mid-Wharfedale possesses a copy of that text, aswell as being relatively new to the subject of rock art.]

References:

  1. Boughey, Keith & Vickerman, E.A., Prehistoric Rock Art of the West Riding, WYAS 2003.

© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian