21st August 2020 - barrows

Yesterday was spent mostly reading, a friend had given me a link to 'Incense Cups' or the Wessex Bronze Age 'grape cup's.  We should be so grateful that people make their work available on the net in the form of PDFs, and if anyone is bored by archaeology, move on;).

Wiltshire museum, from Upton Lovell barrow

Incense cups are found in barrows, not every barrow though, and from the 19th century vicars who so loved to rob these barrows, were the first to find them but fortunately  they did record their finds.  They are miniature cups, often perforated, this is what gives the idea of shaking either oils/water or maybe the scent of wild flowers over the deceased. You can see down below it was the Canon William Greenwell that attacked the Bronze Age barrows round Yorkshire, and round Somerset it was the Reverend Skinner of Camerton.

To most people the rounded barrows are boring, their method of construction can fall into a pattern, the burial will tell of either inhumation or cremation and the grave goods will give some evidence of wealth, or what was personal to the dead person.

So yesterday I set off on another mind adventure and with the help of maps tracked down  some barrows not too far from the village.  To understand this area of the Pickering Vale, you must imagine a large inland lake thousands of years ago surrounded by hills, they are now called 'The Tabular Hills' and the 'Howardian Hills'.  The waters slowly drained away to leave marshy land, that is why there is a lot of 'Carr' landscape names around.  Bronze age people seemed to have lived on the higher ground, so evidence of barrows will be found on high, often unproductive land. Also of course on the moors.

Well Slingsby barrows are just on the top of a wooded hill on the road to Castle Howard, I have often seen the public footpath that crosses the road but never have walked it, something to do in the future, well a small cup was found in one of these barrows, now in the 19th century, the antiquarians often referred to the 'rude' nature of the artefact, and this cup is certainly clumsily made, as many of the cups illustrated are in the PDF file, in this thesis from the University of Bradford.

Slingsby cup

There are also a spate of barrows up on Spaunton Moor, which will probably show the same evidence.

Barrows are reflections of a culture, long gone now, we can only speculate about the effort that went into digging and then covering these mounds, obviously reverence for the departed but also these people emotional needs, sometimes the remains of flowers are found, alongside a treasured dagger or necklace of beads.

Now here is for me one of the most obvious of barrow cemeteries to be found in the Mendips, there are in actual fact two sets of barrows, the Ashen Barrows (8) and the Nine Barrows following the ridge of a hill, ceremony is obvious, were they following the lines of a track way? Were they showing respect and reverence of the ancestors as they passed?  I find these photographs please me still, the excitement of first glimpsing as I and Moss trudged over the fields, the bullocks to be negotiated, and then the golden grass  crowning the barrows in the distance.

Ashen Hill Barrows

Priddy Nine Barrows, 7 here and two on the lower ground

Dear old Moss who just loved these hikes, as long as you took a ball for him.

The earliest evidence of settlement in the area now occupied by Slingsby and Fryton is the remains of pre-historic barrows – roughly circular burial chambers – located on higher ground on the southern slopes of Slingsby Bank Wood, to the south of the village. No fewer than 13 local barrows were excavated in the late 19th century by Durham-born archaeologist and antiquarian, the Rev. William Greenwell. Articles discovered include five incense cups, two large funerary urns, as well as smaller items such as bone pins, dress fasteners and arrow heads – all of which he donated to the British Museum in 1879.

https://www.slingsbyvillage.co.uk/history-of-the-parish/

Canon Greenwell's book on Barrows