Act 2

The Primeval Swamp

The Iron Age, Bronze Age, Neolithic, Mesolithic evidence of the people of the immediate vicinity to Farndale

The Farndale lands were part of a large estate of which its southern lands at the northwest edge of the Vale of York, were settled for a millennium and more. So whilst we can’t tell individual stories before the thirteenth century, we can still continue the ancestral story, through the story of the place where the family emerged into records.

Whilst it is probable that our family were inhabitants of the stable estate lands around Kirkdale perhaps back to Roman times, we can’t be sure of our deeper ancestry. However we know the history of human settlement in Yorkshire, and this page focuses on the evidence of human activity in the immediate vicinity to the family homeland.

The Primeval Swamp Podcast

This is a new experiment. Using Google’s Notebook LM, listen to an AI powered podcast summarising this page. This should only be treated as an introduction, and the AI generation sometimes gets the nuance a bit wrong. However it does provide an introduction to the themes of this page, which are dealt with in more depth below.

Return to the Contents Page

Scene 1 – Early Human Settlement

Those individuals who came to be the first inhabitants of Farndale who we met in Act 1 had been plucked from the primeval sludge of Bronze Age Beaker Folk, Iron Age Settlers, and Brigantes people who had roamed the moors, dales and vales of Yorkshire since about 9,000 years BCE, most likely settling by Roman times in the cultivated lands around Kirkdale, a place of even greater antiquity, which has left us the remains of interglacial age hippopotami.

Tropical Yorkshire

Nearby to the church at Kirkdale is the Kirkdale Cave discovered by workmen in 1821 and found to contain the fossilised bones of a variety of mammals no longer indigenous to Britain, including hippopotami (the farthest north any such remains have been found), elephant and hyena. The cave is only 500 metres southeast of St Gregory’s Minster. The Reverend William Buckland came to understand that this was a cave into which hyena had dragged their prey during the interglacial period, a time when the earth was warmer than it is today, and which started 130,000 YBP (“years before the present”). This was before the age of humans in Britain, but a place of very deep antiquity, and the very place where our ancestors would later live, in a different period of geological time.

Kirkdale Cave A Time Machine to a different era of geological time in the heart of our ancestral home

Kirkdale Cave The start of the Victorian discovery of modern scientific method

Laying our Ancestors Back in the sun The genealogist’s ambition

Human settlement

A vast epoch of time then passed before the first human settlers following the last great Ice Age entered Britain across Doggerland, the lowlands of what is now the North Sea, probably following animals such as reindeer.

Humans had visited our shores long before these early settlers. Human footprints have been discovered at Happisburgh in Norfolk which date to 900,000 YBP when early humans visited Britain during an earlier period of warming when Britain wasn’t an island. The oldest human remains are those of a six foot specimen of Homo heidelbergensis found at Boxgrove in East Sussex which date to about 500,000 YBP. Shorter and stockier Homo neanderthalensis and then Homo Sapiens visited Britain between about 400,000 to 50,000 YBP. However no human remains have been found in Britain between about 180,000 to 60,000 YBP. Ice Age cave art has been found at Creswell Crags in Derbyshire dating to about 13,000 YBP.

The first wave of our ancestral settlers arrived in the area of the North Yorks Moors after the last Ice Age, about 10,000 YBP. They were hunters, hunting wild animals across the moors and in the forests. Relics of this early hunting, gathering and fishing community have been found as a widespread scattering of flint tools and the barbed flint flakes used in arrows and spears.

There is a wealth of archaeological evidence of Mesolithic Yorkshire. This includes recovery of Mesolithic tools from the high moors above Farndale.

A Mesolithic group settled at Star Carr, near Scarborough. They lived in tents made from animal skins which were erected on wooden platforms around the edge of a large ice-dammed lake, Lake Flixton at the estuary of the once Lake Pickering. Star Carr is a Mesolithic archaeological site, about 5 miles south of Scarborough. It’s the most important Mesolithic site in Britain. Star Carr was first occupied about 9,000 years before the common era.

Star Carr

The richest Mesolithic suite in Britain, a few miles south of Scarborough, on the edge of the ancient Lake Pickering, only 30 km from Farndale

Microlith sites have been found on the Moors at Bransdale and Farndale and many more locations including flint and stone chippings and tools. The area between the heads of Farndale and Westerdale is one of the richest series of sites in Britain. Large collections have been made at Common Stone, near Ash House, and at Blakey Howe. Petit tranchet microliths or arrowheads, have been found at the Farndale sites.

For thousands of years before the Romans came to the area, prehistoric folk hunted, farmed and lived in communities. They discovered how to exploit stone, then bronze and later iron. The first metal objects were made from copper, but by adding tin, they became much stronger.

Flint tools, the Yorkshire Museum Pottery vessels for cremated remains

Scene 2 – Stone, Bronze and Iron

Stone

A revolutionary advance was made in the cultural development of northeast Yorkshire by around 3,000 BCE when the first Neolithic, or New Stone Age, settlers arrived from Continental Europe who probably crossed the new sea around Britain in dug out canoes. The New Stone Age was the period when tool making skills produced stone axes, flint axes, arrow heads, spear points, fired clay beakers and woven cloth.

The start of stone age farming in the area of the north Yorkshire moors was in about 3,000 BCE. The Neolithic Revolution involved arable farming and the domestication of animals. Neolithic society made pottery, weaved cloth and made baskets. Small village communities became settled, more reliant upon domestic animals and less on hunting. They built stone enclosures for animals.

The development of grinding and polishing stone allowed a variety of stone as well as flint to be used. Hard boulders from local glacial deposits were useful raw material. Flint axes, some polished, were found at Peak, south of Robin Hood’s Bay and green stone axes were found in Seamer. Seven miles east of Pickering in the centre of a round barrow were found a burnt flint knife and a round axe.

The Neolithic people buried their dead with ceremony, in chambered mounds called barrows, or in caves and in stone lined graves. The organisation required to erect the large megalithic structures and the barrows suggests highly developed society.

From about 2,000 BCE huge prehistoric monuments appeared in the Megalithic Period. The largest standing stone in Britain is a single pillar of grindstone, 25 feet high. It dominates the churchyard at Rudstone, a few miles west of Bridlington. The nearest source of stone is 10 miles north of the site.

The Yearsley Moor long barrow and round barrows on Ampleforth moor have been excavated at the home of the later ancestors of the Ampleforth line of Farndales.

Bronze

The use of bronze was probably introduced into Yorkshire by the Beaker Folk, who arrived in the area via the Humber Estuary in about 1,800 BCE. They came across the Wolds and crossed the Pennines. Their name is derived from their tradition to bury beaker shaped urns with their dead.

Beaker Folk reached Malham Moor near Settle in the west Yorkshire dales and occupied sites on the Wolds. They cultivated wheat and there is evidence of trade. They imported flat bronze axes from Ireland and exported ornaments made of Whitby jet. They traded in salt and had sea connections with Scandinavia.

The people of the Bronze Age continued to hunt in upland areas. There have been finds of their barbed and tanged flint arrowheads. Gradually these were replaced with metal tools and weapons. There is evidence during the Bronze Age of metal working and tin mining, leather and cloth manufacturer, pottery and salt production. There was domestic trade and trade beyond the island’s shores. The population steadily grew to perhaps about 2 million.

The Bronze age was a time of changes in burial rituals. Bodies continued to be buried in barrows, but increasingly these were circular mounds, round barrows, often accompanied by bronze artefacts. There are many barrows in upland locations on the Wolds and the Moors. Early Bronze Age burials were performed at Ferrybridge Henge near Wakefield.

There is a Street House Long Barrow, later added to by an Anglo Saxon royal burial site, near Loftus, where many later Farndales lived and are buried.

Round barrows of the early part of the Bronze Age are the most conspicuous archaeological features of the North York Moors. The scarcity on lower ground is due mainly to agricultural activity. Those on higher ground have generally been found to contain cremations, while those on lower ground in limestone areas contained both burnt and unburnt bodies. The skeletons are most often accompanied by pottery (beakers, food vessels, collared urns and accessory cups), and flints, and sometimes by jet ornaments, stone battle axes and occasionally by bronze daggers. Collared urns and cremations have also been found with stone embanked circles such as at Great Ayton moor. Excavations at Gillamoor in 1975, close to Farndale, found burnt and unburnt human bones, mixed with burnt stones and clay, with scraps of Bronze Age pottery.

The Ryedale Windy Pits are underground features now to be found in a wood about 10km west of Kirkdale. They were found by our friend the Rev William Buckland, after his Kirkdale cave fame. Human bones were found in these natural underground caves, with pottery associated with the bronze age Beaker Folk.

The Ryedale Windy Pits

Underground caves, only 15 km from Farndale, which were the home of the Bronze Age Beaker Folk

Permanent settlements were built, like to one at Ulrome, between Hornsea and Bridlington, where a dwelling built on wooden piles on the shore of a shallow lake has been found.

Iron

The Bronze Age people, such as the Beaker Folk, were conquered by Celtic speaking invaders originally from the Mediterranean, but crossing from northern Gaul. They settled in Britain and became known as the Brigantes. The Celts were skilled horsemen with iron wheeled, horse drawn chariots, who attacked their enemy with swords and spears.

The Kirkburn Sword, East Yorkshire, British Museum

The European Iron Age was a period of upheaval when technology and societies were changed forever.

The Brigantes were not the only Celtic tribe to occupy northeast Yorkshire. In Holderness and the Wolds area, were a folk known as the Parisii who came from France and Belgium.

Mobility provided from their horsemanship enabled the Celtic folk to control larger areas. Their farmsteads were made up of groups of small square or rectangular fields and were often enclosed by low walls of gravel or stones. Their huts were made of branches, or wattle and stood on low foundations of stone.

There was a massive promontory hill fort at Roulston Scar, which dates back to around 400 CE. The site covers 60 acres, defended by a perimeter 1.3 miles long. It is the largest Iron Age fort of its kind in the north of England. Roulston Scar at Sutton Bank is a limestone cliff which overlooks the Vale of York, between Helmsley and Thirsk, about 20 kilometres to the west of Kirkbymoorside and Farndale.

Roulston Scar

A massive Iron Age promontory Hill Fort only 20 km from Farndale

There are outlines of other Celtic settlements near Grassington and Malham. The most impressive Iron Age remains are at Stanwick, north of Richmond where pottery has been found across a large area which had originated on the continent.

The Brigantes fought fiercely to defend themselves against the Roman invaders. Several large fortifications witness their efforts. The last inhabitants of the area before the Romans were illiterate, but left their mark in the place names of Yorkshire. Many Yorkshire rivers carry Celtic names including the Aire, Calder, Don, Nidd, and Wharfe.

The main Parisii settlement was probably close to Brough near Hull. There is evidence that the aristocracy lived in rectangular enclosures often about 60 by 80 metres with two metre wide defensive ditches piled high inside for further protection. The homes, similar to Iron Age roundhouses, may have been established in groups of two or three. Each farm worked about 250 acres and the fields around the farms grew cereals and hay for winter feed. The non aristocratic folk would have worked the land in the enclosure farms for their masters.

The Brigantes and Parisii have left evidence across modern Ryedale of round houses within enclosed sites.

Iron furnace remains and slag from smelting have been found. Iron ore may have been mined in Rosedale. Those living closer to the sea may have picked up food from the beaches. The Bronze Age is the period when for the first time the land had been cleared for growing crops and rearing cattle and sheep. Significant advances were made in culture and politics and the use of land. The landscape may have looked similar to the present day but with more woodland in the valleys and no towns or roads. There may have been tracks for wheeled vehicles.

Costa Beck is a small river near Pickering. Excavations from the 1920s revealed Iron Age lakeside settlements through the Vale of Pickering. Animal bones, pottery sherds and a human skull have been excavated. There are several sites in the Pickering Vale, including at Heslerton where there were small enclosures for stock breeding and growing crops in the wetlands around the once Lake Pickering.

The birth of a nation

In 320 BCE, the Greek explorer, Pytheas of Messalia sailed around Britain and called it Pretannike, probably from the Celtic word for tatooed, and which evolved to Britannia over time. The larger island of the British Isles came to be called Alba or Albion and the western island, modern Ireland, was Ivernia or Hibernia. Centuries later in the History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, written in aboutpytheas of messalia 1136, a story emerged that the Trojan Brutus had landed in Albion finding only giants and named the land Brutaigne.

The lands of Kirkdale

There is archaeological evidence of settlement across the Vale of York in the period before the arrival of the Romans. This included farms, many within ditched enclosures, surrounded by small fields. The vicinity of Kirkdale was a rural area, with dispersed settlements. There was contact between these settlements by north to south routes through the valleys on the sides of the moors and east to west through the Vale of Pickering.

Go Straight to Act 3 – Roman Kirkdale

or

Return to the Contents Page

A chronology of the story is told in the Brief History of Time in the Ancestral lands around Farndale, with some links to source material.