Buxton Museum & Art Gallery
There is evidence of a Saxon church in Bakewell which dates to 920, but the present church dates to the twelfth century in a typical Norman style, of which only the front and west parts of the nave survive today. The rest of what you see before you now was built in the early thirteenth century, with an assortment of restoration taking place in the nineteenth century.
In a field near Biggin, along a country road and surrounded by the rolling green hills of Derbyshire, a small mound is just about apparent. It would be easy to miss, but if you look along the back of the dry stone walling at the intersection of three fields, the Liff’s Low bowl barrow is suddenly very noticeable as a raised mound of earth.
The Liff’s Low burial mound revealed the single grave burial skeleton of a Bronze Age man from 4,500 years ago who has been estimated to be between 30 – 35 years of age. He was discovered in a limestone cist and surrounded by many rich grave goods. Amongst them, polished flint axe heads, boar tusks, knives, a deer horn mace head, and a stone pendent on his chest. The man found would have been a farmer, and it is not difficult to imagine his life. He would have possibly had a family, tended to his fields, reared livestock and built his own tools to use.
We Homo sapiens haven’t always had the landscape to ourselves – we once rubbed shoulders with other hominids. On such cousin on the evolutionary tree were Neanderthals, who thrived throughout Europe and Asia for around 200,000 years.
An object found nearby in the limestone crags that overlook Ravensdale suggests they were even living here in what would become the Peak District.
This flint scraper was discovered in Ravencliffe Cave in the early 1900s. The 9cm long tool was knapped from a flake of blueish-grey flint. Archaeologists identified the flint knapping technique as Mousterian – a style closely associated with Neanderthals. The scraper is thought to date to around 40,000 years old, during the Middle Palaeolithic.
Neanderthals living in Derbyshire at this time were probably following herds of migrating animals. The bones of mammoth, woolly rhino and reindeer were also discovered at the cave – all potentially providing food, skins, bone and antler for Neanderthal hunters.
The green hilltop of Fin Cop seems peaceful and unthreatening to a modern spectator, but beneath the ground is a mass grave dating back to the Iron Age. This raised many questions when the fort was uncovered and showed evidence that parts of it had been built quickly in response to a threat to the settlement.
Hillforts were originally assumed to have been built for warfare, but without much evidence of actual conflict many were instead viewed as a show of wealth and power.
The findings from Fin Cop give one of the only examples of warfare in Iron Age Britain, but other settlements have been discovered which show similar evidence. This is challenging our ideas of Iron Age warfare and defence once again.
You should be able to see the large entrance of Thor’s Cave up on the craggy hillside to the south. There are many other small caves hidden away around here too. Many were excavated at some stage by the Peakland Archaeological Society, under the leadership of Don Bramwell.
When most people think about the work of Don Bramwell they think about science and archaeology. But there was also a creative side to his work – finds and excavations beautifully drawn and coloured, and notebooks full of doodles and sketches.
Below is his drawing of a bear skull found at nearby Elderbush Cave in the 1940s. You can see the precision he gave to these drawings and how invaluable his talent was to aid in the recording of these sites, at a time when it was much harder to get a perfectly clear image from a camera.
Has your school been learning about the history, geology or art of the Peak District?
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For more information, or inspiration, e-mail buxton.museum@derbyshire.gov.uk.
