Crawley Edge Cairns facts for kids
 Location in County Durham
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| Alternative name | Crawley Edge Cairnfield |
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| Location | near Stanhope, County Durham |
| Region | North East |
| Coordinates | 54°45′11″N 1°59′49″W / 54.753149°N 1.9968609°W |
| Type | Bronze Age Cairnfield |
The Crawley Edge Cairns are a group of forty-two ancient stone piles. They were built during the Bronze Age, a time long ago when people used bronze tools. These cairns include different types of stone structures: round barrows, cairns, and clearance cairns. You can find them in a field near Stanhope, County Durham, England.
What Are the Crawley Edge Cairns?
This special area, called a cairnfield, is located on a gently sloping hill in Weardale. It's still open moorland today, meaning it's a wild, uncultivated area. Archaeologists have studied this site to learn more about the people who lived there thousands of years ago.
Discovering the Cairns
Experts have been exploring the Crawley Edge Cairns for years. Two of the cairns were carefully dug up in 1977. Later, in 1984 and 1991, more surveys were done to map and understand the entire site. These studies help us piece together the past.
Different Types of Stone Piles
The cairnfield at Crawley Edge has a mix of stone structures. Some are clearance cairns. These are piles of stones that ancient farmers cleared from their fields to make space for growing crops. Finding these usually means people were farming there.
However, the Crawley Edge site is a bit unusual. Among the clearance cairns, there's also a barrow cremation mound. A barrow is a mound of earth or stones built over a burial. A cremation mound means it was used to bury the ashes of people who had been cremated. This mix of farming and burial structures makes the site very interesting to archaeologists.
