Читать книгу The North York Moors. 50 walks in the National Park онлайн

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Walkers follow an old railway trackbed above Rosedale (Walk 30)

Brief history of the moors

Early settlement

The first people to roam across the North York Moors were Mesolithic nomads, eking out an existence as hunter-gatherers some 10,000 years ago. Swampy lowlands surrounded the uplands, and apart from a few flakes of flint these people left little trace of their existence. Evidence of the Neolithic settlers who followed can be seen in the mounds of stones they heaped over their burial sites, called barrows, which date back to 2000BC. Soon afterwards, from 1800BC onwards, the Beaker People and Bronze Age invaders moved into the area. They used more advanced methods of land clearance and tillage, and buried their dead in conspicuous mounds known as ‘howes’. These people exhausted the land, clearing too much forest too quickly. Minerals leached from the thin soils, so that the uplands became unproductive. Climate changes led to ground becoming waterlogged and mossy, so that tillage became impossible and scrub moorland developed. Iron Age people faced more of a struggle to survive and had to organise themselves in defensive promontory forts. Perhaps some of the linear dykes that cut across the countryside date from that time, although many structures are difficult to date with any degree of certainty.