A brief introduction to the Bronze Age
The Bronze Age, from around 2500–800 BCE, saw metalworking transform daily life. Communities farmed, traded, and buried their dead with ceremony. Stone circles, barrows, and bronze tools reveal a society shaped by ritual, skill, and growing connections across Europe, including long-distance exchange, new hierarchies, and changing relationships with landscapes.
Hillfort and Home
This dramatic escarpment was once home to a large Iron Age hill fort. Its imposing, elevated position offered sweeping views and natural defence, ideal for protecting the local community and their livestock. This led early archaeologists to focus on the military role of Roulston Scar, often overlooking their broader social functions. The people in the area (labelled the Brigantes by the Romans) most likely lived in extended family settlements across the landscape, with forts such as this serving as hubs for trade, marriage alliances, dispute resolution, and seasonal gatherings as much as for military purposes.
Boundaries and Burials
A section of earthwork marks the line of Casten Dyke, an Iron Age boundary dating to around 400–100 BC. Likely used to mark tribal land or control movement across the landscape, the dyke once stretched for miles.
Nearby stands a Bronze Age burial mound, or barrow, built over a thousand years earlier probably to commemorate an important individual. The Iron Age builders chose to construct Casten Dyke around the existing Bronze Age barrow rather than cutting through it. This respect for the ancient burial site suggests the barrow held significant cultural or spiritual importance, possibly serving as a landmark or a symbol of connection to their ancestors and the landscape.