How flames led to a heavy rock find

11:18am Saturday 6th September 2008

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STEPHEN LEWIS goes on the trail of ancient prehistoric rock art on the North York Moors.

GRAHAM Lee crouches in the heather on the exposed top of Brow Moor and caresses the weathered surface of a huge boulder.

A cold wind whips through the upland grasses and sends clouds scudding across the sky. Far off in the distance is the blue of the North Sea and the cliffs above Robin Hood’s Bay. The view is spectacular.

Graham, however, is more interested in the strange carvings etched into the face of the stone beneath his hands. There are deep, hollow cup shapes, grooves – often linking the cups together – and in one corner a more complex right-angled design of three cups linked by two sets of grooves.

The designs remind me oddly of the way Thornborough Henges look from the air – and these date from about the same period, the Neolithic or late stone age.

Some time about 5,000 years ago, one of our distant ancestors crouched just here and carefully carved these symbols into the face of the rock with primitive stone tools.

“You can still see the little peck marks where he chipped away,” Graham says, pointing them out to me.

But why did they do it? Ah, well there’s the question. In this small area of the North York Moors alone there are about 200 boulders displaying similar rock art. Each one was a labour of love. Over decades or even centuries, successive generations of prehistoric artists carved symbols into these stones, each respecting the work of previous artists.

“They took an enormous amount of time and trouble,” Graham says.

But what do the designs mean? There are plenty of suggestions, says Graham, senior archaeologist with the North York Moors National Park.

The designs appear to be abstract, but they may represent routes through the ancient moors landscape. They may have provided information for travellers, or they may simply have been tribal symbols or markers.

“There are dozens of different suggestions,” Graham says. “The bottom line is that we will probably never know, which is a little bit sad. But they are wonderful finds, so enigmatic. People can’t fail to be enchanted by them.”

Archaeologists have known about the rock art of the North York Moors for a long time. But it wasn’t until a devastating fire swept through part of Fylingdales Moor in September 2003 that they realised just how many rock carvings this one small area of moorland contains.

The fire burned for three days, destroying 2.5 square kilometres of moorland (equivalent to about 500 football pitches). It was so severe that it burned away not only the heather, but several inches of peat underneath.

Although devastating for the moorland ecology, there was one unforeseen consequence. The fire exposed a wealth of previously unknown archaeology, ranging from prehistoric times to the second world war.

Among the prehistoric remains uncovered were rock art, burial mounds and cairns – evidence, Graham says, of land clearance for early cultivation. There were fields up here, thousands of years ago.

The finds formed the basis for an exhibition at Whitby Museum last year, and national park bosses have even created a waymarked trail, the Stoup Brow Trail, which takes walkers on a tour of some of the more interesting archaeology.

Five years on from the fire, and following extensive restoration work, the moorland is beginning to recover. It is carpeted with grass and young heather, which is beginning to hide much of the archaeological evidence again.

That is partly why English Heritage has provided £26,900 of funding to consolidate the record of what was found up here.

“As the moorland regenerates, the archaeological sites are being covered so it is important that we draw together all the information gleaned,” Graham says.

For the interested amateur, however, there is still plenty to be seen from the Stoup Brow Trail, with the help of its marker posts.

It is this trail that Graham is leading me on now. The first thing we encounter is a “clearance cairn” – a low pile of stones dumped here perhaps 3,500 years ago, in the mid Bronze Age.

Five thousand years or so ago these uplands would have been drier and warmer than they are now. There would have been little of the heather moor that is such a feature today – that is the result of modern grouse moor management.

Instead, these uplands would have been wooded and fertile – and, because they were less damp and densely-forested than lower-lying areas, attractive to people who were just beginning to switch from hunter-gathering to cultivation and crop growing.

By the Bronze Age, 1,500 years later, that process of cultivation was already well advanced. These 3,500-year-old cairns are not waymarkers, as modern cairns often are, Graham says. Instead, they are evidence of the way Bronze Age farmers cleared the land, dumping the stones they found in neat piles as they went.

“They are clear evidence that this was farmland,” he says.

A little further on, we encounter some Second World War foxholes – waist-deep hidey-holes dug in the surface of the moor. “The Army used this area extensively for training in the lead-up to D-Day,” Graham says, crouching down in one of the holes.

Before the fire in 2003, you would never have known the foxholes were here, he adds. “All you’d have seen would have been a sea of heather.”

Near to the foxholes, we come across a large early Bronze Age burial mound rising out of the moorland. It is a broad, low, circular mound carpeted with grass.

An amateur Victorian antiquarian had a go at excavating it a century or so ago, leaving a large hole in the top. Sadly, they did a very poor job of recording what they found, Graham says.

Evidence from other, similar mounds, however, suggests this large, prominent mound would have been the grave of someone important. Inside, there may well have been a cist – a kind of coffin made from stone slabs. The body would probably have been laid inside that.

So could there still be a skeleton in there? It’s very possible, Graham says. It is not known whether the Victorian excavators found and removed the body. But even if they did, there may well be other skeletons somewhere deep in this mound, from later, secondary burials.

The wind whistles across the moorland, and a passing cloud casts a sudden shadow. I shiver. Suddenly this beautiful moorland, with its hidden secrets, seems a distinctly spooky place. Spooky, but thrilling.

* Copies of the guide to the Stoup Brow Trail can be downloaded as a pdf from the internet, by visiting the website of the Hawk and Owl Trust. Simply key Stoup Brow Trail into Google and search UK pages.

* The walk is about two miles long and will take about one hour. It starts from the telecom mast above Ravenscar, where there is parking. But be warned: the moor is exposed, and you will need stout footwear, warm clothes, and a map.

The archaeology of Fylingdales Moor

5,000 years old – Neolithic rock art

4,000 to 3,500 years old – burial mounds

3,700 tp 3,300 years old – clearance cairns that are evidence of Bronze Age farming

18th century – “hollow ways”, trails used by workers at the alum works on the coast below the moor

1940s: foxholes, tank tracks and other evidence of military training on the moors in the lead-up to D-Day.