The Evolution of an English Town | Page 9

with
the lower, the more primitive people becoming influenced by the more
advanced. A wave of great progress came with the Iberians of Spain
who spread across France and reached Britain by means of boats at a
time when it was probably once more an island.
Armed with bows and arrows and carefully finished stone axes and
spears, clothed in skins and wearing ornaments of curious coloured
stones or pieces of bone threaded on thin leathern cords, these Iberians
or Neolithic men gradually spread all over the British Islands. They

evidently liked the hills overlooking the fresh waters of Lake Pickering
for their remains have been found there in considerable quantities.
The hills on all sides of the Vale are studded with barrows from which
great quantities of burial urns and skeletons have been exhumed, and
wherever the land is under cultivation the plough exposes flint arrow
and spear-heads and stone axes.
Many of the numerous finds of this nature have disappeared in small
private collections and out of the many barrows that have been
explored only in a certain number of instances have any accurate
records been taken. It is thus a somewhat difficult task to discover how
much or how little of the plunder of the burial mounds belongs to the
Neolithic and how much to the Bronze and later ages. The Neolithic
people buried in long barrows which are by no means common in
Yorkshire, but many of the round ones that have been thoroughly
examined reveal no traces of metal, stone implements only being found
in them.[1] In Mr. Thomas Bateman's book, entitled "Ten Years'
Diggings," there are details of two long barrows, sixty-three circular
ones, and many others that had been already disturbed, which were
systematically opened by Mr. James Ruddock of Pickering. The fine
collection of urns and other relics are, Mr. Bateman states, in his own
possession, and are preserved at Lomberdale; but this was in 1861, and
I have no knowledge of their subsequent fate.
[Footnote 1: Greenwell, William. "British Barrows," p. 483.]
One of the few long barrows near Pickering, of which Canon
Greenwell gives a detailed account, is situated near the Scamridge
Dykes--a series of remarkable mounds and ditches running for miles
along the hills north of Ebberston. It is highly interesting in connection
with the origin of these extensive entrenchments to quote Canon
Greenwell's opinion. He describes them as "forming part of a great
system of fortification, apparently intended to protect from an invading
body advancing from the east, and presenting many features in
common with the wold entrenchments on the opposite side of the river
Derwent...." "The adjoining moor," he says, "is thickly sprinkled with
round barrows, all of which have, at some time or other, been opened,

with what results I know not; while cultivation has, within the last few
years (1877), destroyed a large number, the very sites of which can
now only with great difficulty be distinguished. On the surface of the
ground flint implements are most abundant, and there is probably no
place in England which has produced more arrow-points, scrapers,
rubbers, and other stone articles, than the country in the neighbourhood
of the Scamridge Dykes." The doubts as to the antiquity of the Dykes
that have been raised need scarcely any stronger refutation, if I may
venture an opinion, than that they exist in a piece of country so thickly
strewn with implements of the Stone Age. These entrenchments thus
seem to point unerringly to the warfare of the early inhabitants of
Yorkshire, and there can be little doubt that the Dykes were the scene
of great intertribal struggles if the loss of such infinite quantities of
weapons is to be adequately accounted for.
[Illustration: The Scamridge Dykes above Troutsdale.]
The size and construction of the Scamridge Dykes vary from a series of
eight or ten parallel ditches and mounds deep enough and high enough
to completely hide a man on horseback, to a single ditch and mound
barely a foot above and below the ground level. The positions of the
Dykes can be seen on the sketch map accompanying this book, but
neither an examination of the map nor of the entrenchments themselves
gives much clue as to their purpose. They do not keep always to the
hill-tops and in places they appear to run into the valleys at right angles
to the chief line. Overlooking Troutsdale, to the east of Scamridge farm,
where the ground is covered with heather the excavations seem to have
retained their original size, for at that point the parallel lines of
entrenchments are deepest and most numerous. In various places the
farmers have levelled cart tracks across the obstructions and in others
they have been almost obliterated by ploughing, but as a rule, where
cultivation touches them, the