Gardom pits

The Iron Age pit line of Gardom ( English Gardom Pit Alignment ) is located in Gardom's Edge complex, north of the hamlet of Robin Hood, east of Baslow , in Derbyshire in England .

The archaeological peculiarity consists in an east-west-oriented row of up to 70 cm deep pits, which have been carefully lined with clay and are full of water after damp weather. The pits were dug during a period of deteriorating climatic conditions during the late Iron Age that made survival at Gardom's Edge more difficult.

It is possible that the alignment, coupled with the worsened conditions, had a ritual purpose. The mine complex examined in 1998–1999 was not viewed by the excavators as a cattle trough. They consider other theories to be a kind of territorial boundary marking. It is less likely that they were used to clean ritual objects. The pits may be related to other existing monuments.

There are numerous other monuments in Gardom's Edge:

• Gardom's Edge Carved Rock ( rock carving )
• Gardom's Edge Enclosure (Meg's Walls)
• Gardom's Edge Ring Cairn
• Gardom's Edge Standing Stone
• Gardom's Edge Round House and the three Cairns
• Three Men of Gardom's (three Cairns )

See also

• Cooking pit

annotation

1. ↑ Such rows of pits are a little-known type of prehistoric monument in the British Isles . Their function is not yet fully understood. In some cases an accompanying wall survived. These monuments are as dammed pit alignments ( English embanked pit alignments called). You can also as segmented rows ( English segmented pit alignment ) occur following a same line

Web links

• Description Engl. and picture

Coordinates: 53 ° 15 ′ 20.6 "  N , 1 ° 35 ′ 24"  W.