Monument Class Description

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A Monument Class Description provides a synthesis and summary of the archaeological evidence for a particular type of British ancient monument. The Monument Class Descriptions were created by English Heritage as part of the Monuments Protection Programme.

Archaeology, or archeology, is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts and cultural landscapes. Archaeology can be considered both a social science and a branch of the humanities. In North America archaeology is a sub-field of anthropology, while in Europe it is often viewed as either a discipline in its own right or a sub-field of other disciplines.

United Kingdom Country in Europe

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a sovereign country located off the north-western coast of the European mainland. The United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland, and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom that shares a land border with another sovereign state, the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border, the United Kingdom is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the North Sea to the east, the English Channel to the south and the Celtic Sea to the south-west, giving it the 12th-longest coastline in the world. The Irish Sea lies between Great Britain and Ireland. The United Kingdom's 242,500 square kilometres (93,600 sq mi) were home to an estimated 66.0 million inhabitants in 2017.

English Heritage charity responsible for the National Heritage Collection of England

English Heritage is a charity that manages over 400 historic monuments, buildings and places. These include prehistoric sites, medieval castles, Roman forts and country houses. The charity states that it uses these properties to ‘bring the story of England to life for over 10 million people each year’.

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Because archaeological remains are seldom good subjects for rigorous classification, these monument classes are regarded as provisional. However, they provide a good basis for beginning to understand the variability of the archaeological record in England.

Prehistoric Monuments

Early Prehistoric Monuments

Bank barrow Type of tumulus

A bank barrow, sometimes referred to as a barrow-bank, ridge barrow, or ridge mound, is a type of tumulus first identified by O.G.S. Crawford in 1938.

Bowl barrow Ancient funerary monument, the most numerous form of round barrow

A bowl barrow is a type of burial mound or tumulus. A barrow is a mound of earth used to cover a tomb. The bowl barrow gets its name from its resemblance to an upturned bowl. Related terms include cairn circle, cairn ring, howe, kerb cairn, tump and rotunda grave.

A causewayed enclosure is a type of large prehistoric earthwork common to the early Neolithic in Europe. More than 100 examples are recorded in France and 70 in England, while further sites are known in Scandinavia, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Ireland and Slovakia.

Bronze Age

Bell barrow Type of burial mound surrouonded by ditch with flat berm resembling a flattened bell

A bell barrow, sometimes referred to as a Wessex type barrow, campanulate form barrow, or a bermed barrow is a type of tumulus identified as such by both John Aubrey and William Stukeley.

Cross dyke Linear earthwork

A cross dyke or cross-dyke is a linear earthwork believed to be a prehistoric land boundary that usually measures between 0.2 and 1 kilometre in length. A typical cross dyke consists of one or more ditches running in parallel with one or more raised banks. Univallate cross dykes typically have a flat-bottomed ditch while the ditches of multivallate cross dykes possess a V-shaped cross-section. A defining characteristic of a cross dyke is that it cuts across the width of an upland ridge or the neck of an upland spur. Cross dykes generally occur at altitudes over 150 metres (490 ft) above mean sea level.

Iron Age

Hill figure Large visual representation created by cutting into a steep hillside to reveal the underlying geology

A hill figure is a large visual representation created by cutting into a steep hillside and revealing the underlying geology. It is a type of geoglyph usually designed to be seen from afar rather than above. In some cases trenches are dug and rubble made from material brighter than the natural bedrock is placed into them. The new material is often chalk, a soft and white form of limestone, leading to the alternative name of chalk figure for this form of art.

Roman Monuments

Early Medieval Monuments

Medieval Monuments

Post Medieval Monuments

Related Research Articles

Dinas Emrys castle

Dinas Emrys is a rocky and wooded hillock near Beddgelert in Gwynedd, north-west Wales. Rising some 76 m (250 ft) above the floor of the Glaslyn river valley, it overlooks the southern end of Llyn Dinas in Snowdonia.

Anglo-Saxon architecture architectural style

Anglo-Saxon architecture was a period in the history of architecture in England, and parts of Wales, from the mid-5th century until the Norman Conquest of 1066. Anglo-Saxon secular buildings in Britain were generally simple, constructed mainly using timber with thatch for roofing. No universally accepted example survives above ground.

Uffington Castle hillfort in Oxfordshire

Uffington Castle is an early Iron Age univallate hillfort in Oxfordshire, England. It covers about 32,000 square metres and is surrounded by two earth banks separated by a ditch with an entrance in the western end. A second entrance in the eastern end was apparently blocked up a few centuries after it was built. The original defensive ditch was V-shaped with a small box rampart in front and a larger one behind it. Timber posts stood on the ramparts. Later the ditch was deepened and the extra material dumped on top of the ramparts to increase their size. A parapet wall of sarsen stones lined the top of the innermost rampart. It is very close to the Uffington White Horse on White Horse Hill.

Badbury Rings Iron Age hill fort in east Dorset, England

Badbury Rings is an Iron Age hill fort in east Dorset, England. It was in the territory of the Durotriges. In the Roman era a temple was located immediately west of the fort, and there was a Romano-British town known as Vindocladia a short distance to the south-west.

Chanctonbury Ring hillfort in West Sussex

Chanctonbury Ring is a prehistoric hill fort atop Chanctonbury Hill on the South Downs, on the border of the civil parishes of Washington and Wiston in the English county of West Sussex. A ridgeway, now part of the South Downs Way, runs along the hill. It forms part of an ensemble of associated historical features created over a span of more than 2,000 years, including round barrows dating from the Bronze Age to the Saxon periods and dykes dating from the Iron Age and Roman periods.

Bathampton Down

Bathampton Down, is a flat limestone plateau in Bathampton overlooking Bath, in Somerset near the River Avon, England.

Hillforts in Britain

Hillforts in Britain refers to the various hillforts within the island of Great Britain. Although the earliest such constructs fitting this description come from the Neolithic British Isles, with a few also dating to later Bronze Age Britain, British hillforts were primarily constructed during the British Iron Age. Some of these were apparently abandoned in the southern areas that were a part of Roman Britain, although at the same time, those areas of northern Britain that remained free from Roman occupation saw an increase in their construction. Some hillforts were reused in the Early Middle Ages, and in some rarer cases, into the Later Medieval period as well. By the early modern period, these had essentially all been abandoned, with many being excavated by archaeologists in the nineteenth century onward.

Burial in Anglo-Saxon England

Burial in Early Anglo-Saxon England refers to the grave and burial customs followed by the Anglo-Saxons between the mid 5th and 11th centuries CE in Early Mediaeval England. The variation of practice performed by the Anglo-Saxon peoples during this period, included the use of both cremation and inhumation. There is commonality in the burial places between the rich and poor - their resting places sit alongside one another in shared cemeteries. Both of these forms of burial were typically accompanied by grave goods, which included food, jewellery and weaponry. The actual burials themselves, whether of cremated or inhumed remains, were placed in a variety of sites, including in cemeteries, burial mounds or, more rarely, in ship burials.

Sigwells

Sigwells is a hamlet located in an area rich in archaeology remains, overlooking Cadbury Castle in Somerset, England.

Knook Castle site of an Iron Age univallate hillfort in Wiltshire, England

Knook Castle is the site of an Iron Age univallate hillfort on Knook Down, near the village of Knook in Wiltshire, England, but within the civil parish of Upton Lovell. It has also been interpreted as a defensive cattle enclosure associated with nearby Romano-British settlements. It is roughly rectangular in plan with a single entrance on the south/southeast side, but with a later break in the wall on the western side.

Aston Valley Barrow Cemetery

The Aston Valley Barrow Cemetery, or Ashton Valley Barrow Cemetery, is a group of Bronze Age bowl barrow and bell barrow tumuli located on the south facing edge of Codford Down on the west side of the valley of the Chitterne Brook, and within the civil parish of Codford, in Wiltshire, England. There were originally ten bowl barrows and a single bell barrow, but some of these have now been ploughed out. Only the bell barrow and five bowl barrows currently survive.

Architecture of Scotland in the Prehistoric era

The architecture of Scotland in the prehistoric era includes all human building within the modern borders of Scotland, before the arrival of the Romans in Britain in the first century BCE. Stone Age settlers began to build in wood in what is now Scotland from at least 8,000 years ago. The first permanent houses of stone were constructed around 6,000 years ago, as at Knap of Howar, Orkney and settlements like Skara Brae. There are also large numbers of chambered tombs and cairns from this era, particularly in the west and north. In the south and east there are earthen barrows, often linked to timber monuments of which only remnants remain. Related structures include bank barrows, cursus monuments, mortuary enclosures and timber halls. From the Bronze Age there are fewer new buildings, but there is evidence of crannogs, roundhouses built on an artificial islands and of Clava cairns and the first hillforts. From the Iron Age there is evidence of substantial stone Atlantic roundhouses, which include broch towers, smaller duns. There is also evidence of about 1,000 hillforts in Scotland, most located below the Clyde-Forth line.

Scheduled Monuments in Ceredigion

Ceredigion is a large rural county in West Wales. It has a long coastline of Cardigan Bay to the west and the remote moorland of the Cambrian Mountains in the east, with the mountainous terrain of Plynlimon in the northeast. Ceredigion has a total of 264 Scheduled monuments. That is too many to have on a single list page, so for convenience the list is divided into two, 163 prehistoric sites and 101 Roman, Medieval and Post Medieval sites.

Scheduled monuments in Mendip Wikimedia list article

Mendip is a local government district of Somerset in England. The Mendip district covers a largely rural area of 285 square miles (738 km2) ranging from the Mendip Hills through on to the Somerset Levels. It has a population of approximately 110,000. The administrative centre of the district is Shepton Mallet but the largest town is Frome.

Beacon Hill, West Sussex

Beacon Hill, also known as Harting Beacon, is a hillfort on the South Downs, in the county of West Sussex in southern England. The hillfort is located in the parish of Elsted and Treyford, in Chichester District. It is a Scheduled Ancient Monument with a list entry identification number of 1015915. The hilltop enclosure is dated to the Late Bronze Age, from the 8th to 6th centuries BC. The hillfort defences were renewed during the Late Iron Age.

Chalbury Hillfort

Chalbury Hillfort is an Iron Age hillfort about 1 mile (1.6 km) south-east of the village of Bincombe in Dorset, England.

This is a list of scheduled monuments in Cornwall, United Kingdom. Monuments are listed by Historic England as part of the National Heritage List for England. For the scope of this list, the Isles of Sicily are included and the ceremonial county boundaries are used.