Ryedale Windy Pits

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

This visit may not be possible due to access issues or private land but you might be able to ask the landowner.

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Location

The Ryedale Windy Pits are archaeologically significant natural underground features within the North York Moors National Park. The windypits are a series of fissures in the Hambleton hills, near Helmsley, located on the western slope above the river Rye.

You can walk along the Cleveland Way between Helmsley and Rievaulx Bridge. The windypits lie within the estate of Duncombe Park, and if you want to visit the windypits you should contact the estate office in advance for permission. I found a route to the Jinny York Bridge and across a sheep field to the forested hills where the windypits still hide within the woods.

The home of the Beaker Folk

Human remains were first discovered in the Ryedale Windy Pits, in the nineteenth Century by William Buckland, discoverer of the Kirkdale Cave. There is evidence that at least one of the human remains had been scalped suggesting ritual sacrifice.

Warm or cold air rises from the fissures and comes into contact with the air outside the entrance. In winter a steamy vapour rises eerily in puffs or jets from the holes.

There are over 40 known windy pits, but only four windy pits have known significant archaeological deposits. These are Antofts, Ashberry, Bucklands and Snip Gill.

The windy pits have strange vertical shafts with occasional horizontal chambers rising within the limestone cliffs. They are accessed from the surface through small openings in the woodland floor. The near vertical shafts are sometimes seventy feet deep. In all the skulls and bones of at least eight people were found in Antofts and animal bones from pigs, wild boar, red deer, roe deer, sheep, goat and dog as well as four or five beakers have also been found. The human remains include the skull of an elderly woman with a fatal wound inflicted by a long sharp, metal weapon and many disarticulated human bones.

Bronze age hoards of axes cast in bronze have been found at Keldholme and Gillamoor. There are barrows and tumuli such as at Whinny Hill Farm near Kirkbymoorside and Keldholme and a road in the centre of Kirkbymoorside, Howe End, circles the site of a howe, a large round mound which contained several burial sites.

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