Percy Rigg: Iron Age Living

The heather has gone. Local archaeologists have begun to strip the vegetation back to where the 1960s excavators left off, not to dig fresh ground, but to expose what was already found and read it again with sharper eyes. The aim is a proper sequence: which house came first, which blocked which, and how five round houses on this ridge took their turns rather than standing together¹Teesside Archaeological Society BULLETIN 2024, No.28. Page 50-59. https://teesarchsoc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/bulletin-2024-28.pdf.

The site sits at 260 metres, likely the highest confirmed Iron Age settlement in the region. That height was not chosen for the view. It was chosen because, at the time, the moor could still carry a house and a family.

Soil here has a memory, and its memory is not kind. Bronze Age and Iron Age farmers worked this high ground hard, and the ground answered by wearing thin. Peat crept in. Nutrients leached out. Down in the valleys, by contrast, the land held and was cleared for proper farming, the kind that lasts²Prehistoric and Roman Archaeology of North-East Yorkshire. Edited by D A Spratt. Council for British Archaeology North York Moors National Park. CBA Research Report 87. BAR British Series 104. Revised to 1990..

Percy Rigg has been called a poor farm, and the label sticks. One house at a time, modest tools, sparse finds beyond a scrap of jet bangle. It may only have been lived in through the fair months, abandoned each winter to wind and frost, which up here arrive early and leave late.

Grey ware pottery from one of the later houses hints at occupation stretching past three centuries, right into the Romano-British period, before the soil finally gave up and the moor took the place back for itself.

• 1
  Teesside Archaeological Society BULLETIN 2024, No.28. Page 50-59. https://teesarchsoc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/bulletin-2024-28.pdf
• 2
  Prehistoric and Roman Archaeology of North-East Yorkshire. Edited by D A Spratt. Council for British Archaeology North York Moors National Park. CBA Research Report 87. BAR British Series 104. Revised to 1990.