Tag: prehistoric
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Stanydale Temple
A wide-angle lens is a master of deception. It makes the walls of Stanydale Temple look rather squat. I reckon they are about 1.5 metres in height. The Temple is a Neolithic pile of undressed stone. Of course, it’s not really a temple, folk have called it so since 1949. This is because it shares…
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The Scord of Brouster
We stumbled upon this site by chance. Hidden on Shetland’s west side sits one of Scotland’s oldest farming puzzles. Over 5,000 years ago, the Scord of Brouster was not the bleak, wind-battered moorland you see today. It was a working farm surrounded by scrubby hazel and birch woodland. These were New Stone Age settlers, and…
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The Broch at Levenwick
This photograph looks across the Burn of Burgadies, which drains the Loch of Levenwick towards the sea. Beyond the boggy, pool-scattered moor, the broch stands sentinel on the higher ground. This rather damp approach from the nearest tarmac at Southpunds may go some way towards explaining why this remarkable site rarely features in visitors’ plans…
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Mousa: Beyond the Broch
Rising from the rocky shores of Mousa, this 13-metre-high drystone tower is more than an ancient ruin; it is a marvel of Iron Age engineering. Known as the best-preserved broch in the world, Mousa has stood defiant for over 2,000 years. But what exactly was a broch? These circular, double-walled towers are unique to Scotland.…
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Warrendale Knotts and Attermire Scar
The scarps east of Settle rival any picture of the Dolomites. Vast columns of rock stand gaunt against the skyline, and in its shaded valleys, hill sheep regard the intruder with resentment and suspicion. The geology is almost absurb. Warrendale Knotts is a dramatic cliff of shattered limestone crags along the Mid Craven Fault —…
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Gribdale Gate and the Edge of the Ice
A view from Cliff Rigg looking across to Gribdale Gate and Easby Moor, where the monument to Captain James Cook stands like a stubborn finger pointing at the sky. It is a landscape that seems quiet until you realise how much has happened here while humanity was busy elsewhere. Gribdale Gate is a well known…
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Redcar: Where Time Was Scoured Clean
When Storm Chandra recently lashed the North East coast, it behaved like a blind cosmic spade, scraping away millions of tons of sand to uncover a bleak, barnacle-furred graveyard. This was no run-of-the-mill blow. It delivered a rare, once-in-a-decade “unsanding” that laid bare the black, broken teeth of a 6,000-year-old petrified forest, alongside the skeletal…
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The Slow Making of Buttermere and Crummock Water
That flat sweep of rich green pasture is not there by chance. It sits on the land bridge between Buttermere and Crummock Water, quietly doing the job of keeping the two lakes apart. It was built by a geological feature known as a fan-delta, courtesy of the steady graft of Mill Beck. Long before maps…
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Barningham Moor
Barningham Moor lies high in the Northern Dales between the Swale and the Tees, a stretch of upland that most travellers notice only as a vague rise on the horizon while speeding along the A66. I have passed it for years without realising there was anything remarkable up there at all. From its upper slopes,…
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The Watchers of the Plain: Highcliff Nab in the Stone Age Landscape
From Gisborough Moor, Highcliff Nab rises starkly above the Cleveland Plain, and it is easy to imagine the lives of its earliest visitors, the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who roamed here during six millennia before 4000 BC — 900 years before Stonehenge was even thought about. Highcliff Nab is recognised as a key site of Early Mesolithic…