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Go to the Listen Again page | | | | | Tri Radial Cairns in NorthumberlandÌý | | | |
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The moors of Northumberland are an ancient landscape. They are littered with trackways, medieval field systems, Iron Age hill forts and Bronze Age burial cairns. But among them, members of the Boarders Archaeological Society began to notice rough piles of rocks in certain alignments, with arms pointing North and to the sunrise at special times. Were they just old sheep shelters with chance alignments, or could they be an important relic of ancient ceremonies in this ritual landscape?
| | |  | | | From left to right: Presenter Aubrey Manning, artist Manuela Walker, archaeologists Jim Nesbit and Philip Deakin | |  ÌýListen again to the programme | |
There's no shortage of rocks in the Northumberland hills. Boulders rounded by ice and water are littered across the moors. In some parts they are piled up into groups of many cairns, often marking ancient burials, dating from the Bronze Age more than 4000 years ago. Some of the larger stone slabs are carved with strange, concentric ‘cup marks’, pounded out with stone hammers in prehistoric times.
There are other structures too: dry-stone walls and the remains of structures piled up to give sheep shelter from the biting wind. A few years ago, members of the Border Archaeological Society were surveying prehistoric remains in the hills above Wooler in Northumberland. Retired aircraft engineer Jim Nesbitt noticed a pile of stones that seemed to be laid out as three radial arms several metres long. He remembered seeing something similar further south near Rothbury. Once the archaeologists new what they were looking for they began finding them all over the place - more than 20 to date. Eventually, they got permission to excavate one. When they began, the stones were barely visible above the peaty soil, but excavation showed that this was indeed a so-called tri-radial cairn with its three arms each about five metres long. It did not seem to be associated with a burial but was close to a field of Bronze Age burial cairns. So what was it and who put it there?
The archaeologists quickly ruled out the possibility that it was a recent sheep shelter. You wouldn't shelter many sheep behind a low structure like that. In that case, as with the others surveyed so far, the three arms of the cairn are aligned in roughly similar directions, one pointing north and the others at 140 and 240 degrees. That alignment means that they could be pointers to the mid-summer and midwinter sunrise and sunset. We know from famous monuments such as Stonehenge that Bronze Age Britons attached great importance to these solstices. Although the precise alignment of the arms varies, they could have supported marker posts to give accurate sightings of the astronomical events.
But how old are they? It is this difficult to get the precise date on the cairns, though some do incorporate cup-marked stones and even a prehistoric grinding stone or quern. Charcoal from just beneath the cairn excavated gave a radio-carbon date of more than 4600 years ago, in the early Bronze Age. That doesn't prove that the cairn was built that long ago, but Philip Deakin of the Border Archaeological Society thinks it's reasonable to suppose that the Bronze Age people burnt off the heather in order to clear the site for the construction of the cairn.
So far, the evidence is still compelling that these tri-radial cairns were indeed constructed for Bronze Age astronomy, perhaps for seasonal ceremonies to honour the dead who are buried under nearby cairns. All around are signs of prehistoric and later activity. At the site of Lordenshaw near Rothbury, the tri-radial cairns are overlooked by an Iron Age hill fort and nearby there are traces of a medieval field system. Bit by bit the moors are giving up their secrets | | |
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