Hill Hill and the Art of Furtling

It was one of those charming so-called “lazy winds”—the sort that cannot be bothered to go around you and instead cuts straight through, ensuring you feel every bit of its bitter, bone-chilling embrace. Hardly the sort of day for a leisurely stroll around Kildale Moor, but, there I have been, engaged in the enthralling task of surveying Bronze Age burial mounds on Brown Hill.¹NYMNPA HER Records (Monuments) HER No: 52 Prehistoric landscape on Kildale Moor.

Frank Elgee, in his wisdom, noted that “Brown Hill” is a not uncommon name found across the moorlands of north-east Yorkshire. He also suggested, with apparently some degree of justification, that it derives from the Welsh “bron,” meaning “hill,” thus giving us the poetic redundancy of “Hill Hill.”²THE YORKSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL VOLUME 67 1995 https://archive.org/details/YAJ0671995

Elgee was also the reason for this survey—to verify the accuracy of a sketch map he produced in the early 20th century, depicting the profuse spread of prehistoric cairnfields, settlements, and funerary monuments littering this moor. And profuse it is. Paul Ashbee, a relatively modern archaeologist, has estimated that there are some 60 cairns visible on the moor³THE YORKSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL Vol 39 https://archive.org/details/YAJ0391958. Many of these cairns barely reach half a metre in height, which is particularly inconvenient given that the heather could quite exceed that. Identifying them requires a certain level of artistry. Once one is located, the next task is to determine its size—the accepted technique involves shuffling backwards from the crown to detect a change in gradient. A scientific method, no doubt.

Occasionally, the heather has been over enthusiastically burnt away, exposing the peat beneath. This, in turn, dries out and erodes—archaeology and land management working in perfect disharmony. One such example is captured in the accompanying photograph. Many of these Bronze Age burial cairns have already suffered at the hands of Victorian antiquarians such as the Reverend J. C. Atkinson, who busied himself “furtling” about for treasures in the form of flint flakes, charcoal, and pottery fragments, leaving behind telltale central depressions.

“Furtling” is a delightful word, is it not? It means having a good rummage. Not at all scientific.

There has been some speculation that these stone heaps are merely the by-product of field clearance in this particularly rocky region. However, Ashbee, who excavated several cairns near the summit of Brown Hill in the 1950s, concluded that the sheer scale of clearance implied by these cairns would have made little difference to agricultural conditions—not nearly enough to justify the effort⁴Ibid.. A remarkable notion indeed: that prehistoric farmers might have considered time and motion.

• 1
  NYMNPA HER Records (Monuments) HER No: 52 Prehistoric landscape on Kildale Moor.
• 2
  THE YORKSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL VOLUME 67 1995 https://archive.org/details/YAJ0671995
• 3
  THE YORKSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL Vol 39 https://archive.org/details/YAJ0391958
• 4
  Ibid.