Читать книгу Walking in the Yorkshire Dales: North and East. Howgills, Mallerstang, Swaledale, Wensleydale, Coverdale and Nidderdale онлайн

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Human settlement

Homo sapiens appeared in Europe some 40,000 years ago, and during the warm interludes between glaciation, wandered into Britain. But with each ice age driving them back south and wiping the archaeological slate almost clean, those early incursions of people, and the beasts that they followed for food, have left few traces.

Stone Age peoples eventually returned to the Dales around 9000 years ago, small bands of hunter-gatherers eking a nomadic existence in a steadily warming climate. Although artefacts are thin on the ground, they left their mark by beginning the clearance of primeval woodland, a process that gathered momentum with the later development of agriculture and the transition to a more settled lifestyle. The many caves and crevices in the limestone hills served as shelters for living and burial, a fact which perhaps explains the relative absence here of the constructed internment chambers, cairns and henges found elsewhere in the country.

By the time of the Bronze Age, large areas had been cleared for grazing and agriculture, but a deterioration in climate led to the spread of extensive blanket bog across the upper plateaux.