Burnt Mounds Project

A view looking down a steep grass-covered dale-side with, rising up in the background, the grassy far side of the dale, divided by dry-stone walls. In the foreground is a dome-shaped, grass-covered mound marked by nine or ten molehills on the visible side. Behind the mound and lower down the slope are a couple of small bare trees in front of a small stone barn in a field corner made by the meeting of two dry-stone walls.
Burnt mound at Straw Beck spring, Muker. Photo Tim Laurie.

The curious archaeological phenomenon of burnt mounds has been the subject of discovery and investigation in the northern Yorkshire Dales since 1993, when the first four were identified in Wensleydale.

Over the following 10 years, tireless investigations by Tim Laurie led to the identification of more than 150 sites in the north-eastern Pennine dales, including many across Wensleydale, Swaledale, and Teesdale. There are 120 records of burnt-mound sites in the SWAAG database.

Burnt mounds vary in size. They are usually found covered by turf or heather, but some reveal the core composition mainly of stones that have evidently been cracked and reddened by heat and then discarded. Such mounds are well-recorded elsewhere in Britain and Ireland, and some have been radiocarbon-dated to between 2,400 BC and 800 BC. Their purpose remains the subject of speculation, some of which seems very surprising to the layman.

Close-up of a heavy-thermal-black-gloved open hand holding three irregular-shaped stones. The largest and the smallest are coloured a dark shade of red-orange and black. The mid-sized stone is mottled pale-pink and black.
Burnt and fire-cracked stones from molehills at the burnt mound at Straw Beck spring, Muker. Photo Tim Laurie.

Tim Laurie wrote extensively about the burnt mounds he had identified in a wide-ranging article about archaeology in the dales published in 2003. Afterwards, he wrote two more articles specifically about the burnt mounds – one discussing in detail the nature and locations of burnt mounds in Wensleydale and Swaledale, and another reporting on an excavation of a mound on the Feldom army firing range. All three articles also summarised the evolving academic hypotheses on the purpose of the stones. The articles can be read by clicking the links below:

Tim Laurie, ‘Researching the prehistory of Wensleydale, Swaledale, and Teesdale,’ in The Archaeology of Yorkshire, eds. T G Manby, Stephen Moorhouse, and Patrick Ottaway, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Occasional Paper No. 3 (2003), see pages 242-246.

Tim Laurie, ‘Burnt mounds in Wensleydale and Swaledale’ – First published in: Archaeology and Historic Landscapes of the Yorkshire Dales, edited by R F White and P R Wilson, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Occasional Paper No. 2 (2004). © Tim Laurie.

Tim Laurie, ‘Burnt mounds on the Feldom Ranges: Excavation of an enigma,’ published in edited form in Defence Estates: Conservation Update, Issue 5, Summer 2007.

In 2013, a Cambridge University academic, Dr Alex Loktionov, considered new potential evidence that burnt mounds might have been sites of ritual significance. He examined the mound at How Talon Ridge on Barningham Moor (SWAAG database record no. 84) as a site best-supporting the hypothesis. His paper in The Post Hole, online archaeology journal, January 2013, is accessible here: Something for everyone: a ritualistic interpretation of Bronze Age burnt mounds from an ethnographic perspective | The Post Hole.

More information and photographs concerning the burnt mound sites in Wensleydale, Swaledale, and Teesdale can be found in three PDFs containing all the records categorised as Burnt Mounds in the SWAAG database. Links below:
Burnt Mounds 1 – record nos. 3-77 (50 records)
Burnt Mounds 2 – record nos. 78-621 (50 records)
Burnt Mounds 3 – record nos. 622-1006 (20 records)

There are also two photographic records of burnt mounds in Swaledale here:
Photographic category PDF – see records 785, image 1, and record 929, images 8-9.

And photographic records of several burnt mounds in Wensleydale are here:
Enclosures category PDF, see record 258.
Burial Mounds and Cairns category PDF, see record 403.
Geographic category PDF, see records 433 and 690.
Standing Stones and Circles category PDF, see record 774.