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My attention was first brought to this set of stones by it gaining a mention by Aubrey Burl1 where he quotes Knox2.
Knox describes a 'four-poster' consisting of two pairs of stones
approximately 110 yards apart, this made for a long thin rectangle
which Burl pronounces as a 'dubious' four-poster. Intrigued by this
site I decided to investigate it myself.
Upon finding the site I quite quickly located a pair of standing stones
about 1 metre in height aligned on an east-west axis but could find no
trace of the other pair. Searching the area proved fruitless and I
therefore contacted the Archaeological Conservation Officer for the
North York Moors National Park and asked if he knew of their
whereabouts. He informed me that they were not scheduled monuments and
that on the maps he had looked at they were not recorded.
This puzzled me because Burl had listed them in 1988 and I, naively,
assumed he had visited the site. This has subsequently proved not to be
the case and he had taken the record from Knox's work, over 130 years
earlier. After checking the OS maps for 1913 it was clear the
northernmost pair were not in existence then and must have disappeared
sometime in the 58 years prior to the map being made. (A stone from
somewhere on Dunsley Moor was said to be outside a house in the nearby
village of Sleights up until the mid 1940s, I have checked and this has
not been there for at least 25 years - I am still hopeful of tracing
this stone).
The first photograph below shows the eastern stone of the southern
pair and an earthfast boulder on the right. As can be seen this stone
lies just outside a stand of deciduous trees on the edge of a
plantation of fir trees.
The second photograph is of the western stone which lies at the
other side of the deciduous trees but not quite within the fir
plantation.
The western howe is a bowl barrow and almost invisible lying as it does
among the plantation of trees, its low profile barely distinguishable
from the hills and furrows of the plantation. The stones are aligned
east-west and also align with both Swarth Howe to the east and the bowl
barrow, there is a further howe to the east of Swarth Howe which is
also said to be aligned but in fact lies slightly to the north.The
stone marked to the extreme west on the above diagram is shown on maps
as 'Grey Stone' (shown below) and a boundary stone. This is no longer
upright but continues the alignment of the other stones and the howes
so may be contemporary.
Then comes the view eastwards over the fallen Grey
Stone looking across the western howe to the western stone of the pair.
The next is a view from the western stone through the trees to Swarth
Howe, it can just be seen as a flat area of the skyline in the centre
of the photograph. The eastern stone is masked by the trees.
Finally a view from the eastern stone over the moorland to Swarth Howe clearly visible on the horizon.
The barrows were the only parts of this site to be scheduled until,
quite coincidentally, in January 1999 the site was reviewed and the
pair of stones was included in the same schedule as the small barrow. The area has a number of other barrows and stones, some of
which are cup and ring marked, and was obviously of some significance
in the Late Neolithic period and Bronze Age.
1. Burl, A., (1988) Four-Posters: Bronze Age Stone Circles of Western Europe, Oxford, BAR British Series 195.
2. Knox, R. (1855) Description Geological, Topographical and Antiquarian in East Yorkshire between the Humber and Tees, London.
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