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The Ancient Landscape

From what is clearly visible today, it is not possible to get a picture of how Prehistoric and Romano-British peoples lived on the Peak District limestone plateau.  Later agriculture has transformed this land, removing the obvious signs of earlier occupation.

Gib Hill prehistoric burial barrow

However, some clues have survived such as the larger prehistoric monuments not easily removed by ploughing, or the low earthworks that indicate the sites of timber buildings with fields and yards dating back to the Romano-British period.

Neolithic Monuments
Bronze Age Monuments
Romano-British Farms and Fields

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Neolithic Monuments

Some of the earliest and most impressive monuments people built here in prehistory, dating to the Neolithic, are a series of large mounds.  Some of these, called chambered cairns, contain structures built of limestone slabs.

One of the chambers of the Five Wells chambered cairn, between Taddington and Chelmorton, with part of the extensive view northwards

Most are now ruined, but enough remains to show that they were often designed to be entered via low passages down which you had to crawl, each leading to a somewhat larger chamber buried at the heart of the mound.  These contained human remains, the bones of the ancestors.  Entering them, literally placing yourself in a dark other-world, must have been a powerful experience.

Arbor Low from the air with the Gib Hill barrow in the background

Perhaps the most impressive Neolithic monument in the Peak District is the henge at Arbor Low, sited high on a limestone ridge south of Monyash.  The collapsed stone circle lies hidden from outside by the surrounding ditch and its external bank, which define a sacred space in which to hold ceremonies.

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The interior of the henge at Arbor Low, south of Monyash, with its fallen stones of a large stone circle and central setting

Bronze Age Monuments

In contrast, Bronze Age monuments are more local in emphasis.

The number of round barrows on the limestone plateau is well over a hundred and these often survive on hilltops, making obvious landmarks today and in the past.  They were built by local extended-families to hold the bodies of selected representatives, the spirits of whom could oversee the well-being of the local land within which the family lived and farmed.

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Romano-British Farms and Fields

Nothing in the way of obvious earthworks survives of Prehistoric settlements and fields on the limestone plateau.

In contrast, a number of sites of Romano-British date, some probably with Iron Age origins, can still be found.  These are often at the fringes of later agriculture, suggesting that farms at this period were common over much of the landscape, but only a small minority survive as earthworks.

A classic and easily visited example, at Chee Tor near Blackwell, lies on a rocky spur high above a sweeping bend in the Wye Valley gorge.

Romano-British field boundaries can still be traced as earthworks on the valley side, near to the settlement

People at this time, living away from close everyday contact with the Roman military and the administrators of the Empire, inhabited scattered farmsteads and hamlets.  They farmed within small fields that divided much of the landscape.  This was a way of life that probably continued until late Anglo-Saxon times when many farms were abandoned at the time of nucleation into village communities and the advent of feudalism.

For more information on this topic try the archive.

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