Walkers Put Heritage at Risk.

Hill walkers in the Yorkshire Dales are destroying ancient cairns to build their own modern versions.
Robert White, Senior Conservation Officer for the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, cites the example of a Bronze Age cairn, built on Beamsley Beacon 4500 years ago to mark the burial place of a local chieftain and to act as a territorial boundery marker: much of the cairn has been disturbed by people using it as a quary for stone from which to make modern cairns and wind breaks. A detailed archaeological survey of the hilltop has been carried out, and Robert and his team are appealing for old photographs of the site to build up a picture of what it looked like in the past.

The site was also used as a beacon, recorded as early as 1667, and was part of the signalling system constructed in 1804 during the Napoleonic Wars when a guardhouse was built to shelter the beacon keeper. This structure is also suffering from stone removal. "We would urge walkers to resist the temptation to pick up stones and build cairns," Robert says, "because they can unwittingly damage ancient sites."