Five Thousand Years on the Hill: Why Moorland Archaeology Survives

Quick summary

• Moorland holds some of Britain's best-preserved archaeology, having been spared the ploughing and development that reworked the lowlands.

• Over 125 miles of Bronze Age boundary banks survive on Dartmoor alone.

• Rombalds Moor near Ilkley carries close to 500 recorded prehistoric carved rocks.

• How the land is grazed and managed today decides whether this heritage survives.

Much of our uplands are among the most densely storied ground we have, featuring the marks of five thousand years of human life.

The reason so much survives on the hill comes down to what has not happened there. Lowland Britain has been ploughed, drained, built over and reworked for centuries, erasing most of what earlier people left behind.

The moors escaped much of that. As English Heritage notes of Dartmoor, the remarkable survival of so many monuments is largely down to the lack of intensive agricultural or industrial activity on the moor in modern times.

The Dartmoor National Park Authority goes further, describing the moor's archaeology as among the finest in Europe, both in how much survives and how varied it is, helped by the fact that so much was built in granite.

There is a second kind of preservation at work too. Peat seals and protects. Buried beneath blanket bog and old ground surfaces lies a microscopic record, down to the spores of fungi that once grew on the dung of Bronze Age livestock, along with pollen that tells us what the land looked like before the moor existed.

The Bronze Age is still on the surface

Nowhere shows this better than Dartmoor's Bronze Age remains:

• Reaves. These low, stony banks are prehistoric land boundaries, and over 125 miles of them have been identified across Dartmoor. Many run for miles across the hillsides, and in places today's field walls still follow lines first laid out more than three thousand years ago.

• Roundhouses. The moor holds the remains of over 5,000 Bronze Age houses, their granite footings still visible as circles in the turf.

• Settlements. At Grimspound, the walls of around 24 roundhouses survive inside a large enclosing wall, a late Bronze Age village roughly three thousand years old.

Peer-reviewed research describes Dartmoor's prehistoric field systems as arguably the best-preserved example anywhere of a profound change in the mid-second millennium BC.

Across Britain and northern Europe, people were then shifting from a world of ceremonial monuments to one of settled farms and divided land.

The carved stones

Some of the most enigmatic marks are the ones made purely by hand. Across the gritstone of the Pennines and the sandstone of the north, prehistoric people pecked patterns into rock: small hollows known as cups, often ringed by circles, sometimes linked by grooves and lines.

Rombalds Moor, which includes Ilkley Moor in West Yorkshire, holds one of the densest concentrations of this rock art in upland Britain — a volunteer survey completed in 2013 recorded close to 500 carved stones there.

The carvings are thought to date to the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age, somewhere between about 2800 and 500 BC, which means the oldest were cut before the pyramids were built.

Meanwhile the rock art recorder Stan Beckensall recorded over 1,500 carved rocks across Northumberland and neighbouring counties. What the carvings meant is still debated.

The story does not stop in the Bronze Age

Above the Bronze Age remains sit medieval farmsteads and longhouses, the ruins of communities that returned to the higher ground and later abandoned it.

Later still come the marks of upland working life: peat cuttings, quarries, boundary and marker stones, packhorse routes worn into the ground, and the tracks, walls and shelters of the moor as a managed landscape. Taken together, they show the same hill being used, left, and used again, over and over, for thousands of years.

Why it is fragile

None of this is safe simply because it is old. English Heritage's Monuments at Risk Survey found that since 1945, on average, one archaeological site had been destroyed in England every day.

Moorland monuments face their own pressures: scrub and bracken encroachment that hides and disturbs them, erosion, burrowing animals, and damage from visitor pressure at popular sites.

The North York Moors show both the threat and the response. From 2009 to 2018 the National Park ran a Monument Management Scheme, set up with English Heritage, to repair sites and take them off the Heritage at Risk Register.

Over its nine years the scheme reduced the at-risk status of 212 monuments, the main risks being farming techniques, bracken growth and visitor numbers.

The land manager's part in it

The survival of moorland archaeology is not passive. Historic England is clear that low-intensity grazing land holds some of the nation's best-preserved sites, in far better condition than cultivated ground, but that keeping them that way takes active, careful management.

Grazing that keeps the moor open stops scrub and bracken swallowing the stones. Sensible stocking and the careful placing of feeders and gateways prevent erosion scars forming around monuments.

Controlling bracken protects buried remains. These are everyday decisions made by the people who work the uplands, and they are the difference between a monument that stays visible and one that is lost.

Recognising this, Historic England and Defra established a Countryside Stewardship Heritage Service in 2024 to advise land managers on looking after the historic features in their care.

Why this matters

Far from empty wilderness, the moor tells one of the longest continuous human stories in the country, which is why it is vital that the land is carefully looked after.