Forbidden History - Medieval Dead: Peak District Frontier Fortress

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

Perched high above the Peak District moorlands, Carl Wark is a mysterious ancient hillfort that has puzzled archaeologists and historians for centuries. In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we explore its possible origins and why this mysterious outcrop continues to captivate the imagination... Cast List: Tim Sutherland: Archaeologist, University of York Prof. Andrew Reynolds: Institute of Archaeology, London Bill Bevan: Archaeologist & Author Zac Nellist: Archaeological Records Officer, South Yorkshire Archaeology Service Paul Oldfield: Author & Battlefield Guide Mick Savage: Author, ‘Carl Wark; Peak District Fortress or Folly?’ Eric Meyers: Narrator The Happiness Experiment: Start your journey to a happier, healthier you today – visit ⁠this link⁠ to begin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Landscape and sky. Peak, Hill, and Moor. Bracken, Heather, and Gritstone Tour. An abandoned place.

Lost in the black earth. Lost in the dark age. In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we follow a team of experts as they investigate the origins of a hill fort in England's Peak District National Park. The Mystery of Carl Wark. Of all the landscapes of Britain in the medieval period, the hills and uplands were the most remote places. From Cornwall to Scotland, the Great Moors, fells, or heaths, reached for scores. of miles, dividing the more populated areas like inland seas. Few people lived there.

Fewer still traveled through them. Forbidding and dangerous, they were lands at the periphery of society, the home of robbers and bandits, or worse. The uplands were places of folklore and superstition, places that were unknown, uncomprehended, and to be feared. tombs and burial mounds, standing stones and hinges, castles and hill forts, uplands like the north of England and the Peak District. On the moors to the west of Sheffield in northern England lies a site which baffles archaeologists. Carl Wark is said by some to be like no other place in Britain.

Its appearance is unusual, foreboding, monumental, unique. It's known as a hill fort, an enclosed outcrop looking out over the hathersage and burbage moors. But it's a fort which doesn't seem to belong to any one period in history. When was it made? Or who made it? And why is all unknown. It's even possible it's not a fort at all. Was it for refuge or ritual? A fortress or a burial place? Very little is known for sure. Surprisingly, for a site of its impressive size, hardly any archaeology has been carried out there. The most commonly heard theory about Karl Wark's origin is that it's a hill fort which dates to the very earliest part of the Middle Ages. From the end of the Roman Roman,

occupation in 410 AD to the Norman invasion of 1066 the period of Britain's history is known as the Dark Ages. It's called the Dark Ages for all sorts of reasons. The main one really is the lack of written evidence that we have from the earliest part of the post-Roman period. So the 5th and 6th centuries and into the 7th century we're very very little really in the way of explicit documentation or written evidence. But this perception began to change through the late 20th century, after a series of startling archaeological discoveries.

Perhaps the best known of these was Sutton Who in East Anglia, with its stunning finds from a great 7th century ship burial. Things like the Sutton Hoo ship burial really turned people's minds around to thinking of this not just as a sort of a decline in social terms, following. the Roman set up, but actually see it as a kind of like a re-emergence of what then eventually becomes the unified Kingdom of England by the 10th century. We have a mental image of the Dark Ages, but in fact it's anything but. It's sort of a misnomer in some ways, but it's derives from the fact that we used to know

very little about it. We have a huge amount of really good archaeology, some sort of the nicest jewelry, the gold work, the sort of flamboyant side of the things that we find. For example, at Sutton Who, it's really impressive and it's anything but what we would term dark. Karl Wark might well date from the Dark Ages, yet the written sources that do remain from the times like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle contain no known mention of the place. On such an apparently strong and powerful sight, history is so far silent. It makes it hard for archaeologists to make a straightforward judgment. Carl Wark's a complete enigma. I think we can probably place it in the Anglo-Saxon period, but it's an odd one. When I look at Carl Wark, I see

somewhere which is quite a foreboding place and it doesn't fit neatly into another archaeological type site. So maybe that, it's sort of distinctive, unusual configuration, it's remoteness, because it's not that hand easy to get to, and it's slightly forebode and air has put a lot of archaeologists off from excavating it and investigating it. The mystery of Carl Walk is something that clearly engage people's minds and thoughts for a long time. It doesn't fit into any known pattern. And so it becomes impossible to fix it in time, specifically, or in a culture specifically. We just simply don't know who made it and when it was done or

why it was done. So that, to me, is the mystery of Carl Woe. What we do know about Carl Woe, Park begins with the geology. Bill Bevan worked in the Peak District National Park for 17 years and knows the area very well. Karl Walk is a natural feature is a plug of quite harder gritstone. So when the gritson was being eroded due to rain, due to weather, such as wind, by the rivers, the softer beds of gritson were washed away, turned into sand and grit. The harder beds, the harder beds were left standing. It's got sheer cliff edges on three sides and it sort of joins the valley side

at its western end. So it's a natural feature. It would have formed millions and millions of years ago and as a feature in the landscape, it presumably attracted people's attention throughout thousands and thousands of years of human occupation of the Peak District. Tim Sutherland has come to the Peak District to learn what he can about about this enigmatic site. Local author and amateur archaeologist Mick Savage is from Sheffield and he grew up just a few miles from here. He's always been fascinated by Carl Wark.

When you live so close to the Peak District and you see things like MAMTOR and you see things like the lead mines and eventually you find somewhere like Carl Walk or Wark, some people say we always call it walk, then it just intrigues you as to want to know why and who did it. And how old is it? He was so intrigued, in fact, he wrote a book about it. It's still the only one in print, which focuses solely on this site and its history.

I've always enjoyed writing, and I thought it's an ideal thing. And, as you say, there were no other books I could find. I would look at the Orner's Survey maps. I always loved maps. You'd see that Gothic writing, Fort and so on. And then it would be down to town, to Sheffield, to the archives. I used to spend a lot of time in the archives. And I think that's where I would really start to see some of the stuff that I included in the book, some of the references.

Mix agreed to meet with Tim and explain what is known about one of the Peak District's most mysterious historic sites. When you look at Karl Wark, it asks you questions about your place in the world, I think. It's a bit like something out of an old western, you know, you're looking up at the canyon and you've got these maze and features. And that still strikes me now. And it's quite an emotional impact when you walk along the valley and you see these big fortress-like cliffs rising up. It's something that is a bit primeval, I guess, for somebody living in the 20th or 21st century. And if you see somebody then stand on the edge of it, it brings that a feeling of grandeur of a landscape that is bit more special, a bit bigger than most of the places we live in England.

It's certainly a strong position, if its purpose truly was a defensive fort. It sits atop a spur off the hanging valley beneath Higger Tor. The natural steep slope bounds it on three sides. And on the fourth is Car Walk's most striking feature, a 130-foot stone rampart, banked with turf 26 feet deep, made of boulders hewn from the very gritstone on which Carl Wark sits, a formidable defense, which bars access to the natural plateau beyond. The entrance is defended by two large semicircular bastions, like the Barbican of a medieval castle. Inside there's a level area, the only obvious part of the Carl Wark where its conceivable

buildings might once have stood. The rest of the interior is a maze of large earth-fast boulders, with seemingly little room for buildings, at least along the lines of conventional huts or roundhouses. An obvious place for a stronghold, yet with no features to tie it to any one era. It could have been made in prehistoric times, the Roman era, or the Middle Ages. It's an archaeological mystery that Mick has pondered for many years. There were local people living in Sheffield and the area around here. Once you start to talk about something like Carwalk, say, yeah, it's always puzzled me.

But doesn't it say it's Iron Age? Yes, it does on a plank, but that doesn't mean that it really is. It's not a classic hill fort, although elements of it, look as though they are. And it's not like anything I've ever seen in terms of hill forts or defensive enclosures. But it just doesn't jump out. doesn't jump out at you what it is, does it? No, that's the problem with it? No, no. Is this a meeting place from the Bronze Age?

It could be. It could be the place where people gathered for meetings, who knows? So then you step forward in time and you come into the Iron Age, which is what this tended to be thought to be, because Iron Age equals Hillford. We've looked at the features, it's got a few of them, you've already said it's not got all of them. Then along come the Romans.

If this was occupied at that time as a defensive hill fort, the Romans would not have left it alone. Could it have been built in that period in between when the Romans left? So in the sort of whatever, because of the Dark Ages? The Dark Ages. Yeah, yeah, and so on. And beyond there, we are on the border, the Mercia Northumbrian border. And literally on that border, there was all kinds of problems and strife until there was a truce, so it could have been something to do with that border.

This remains an enigma. Yep. As enticing as they are, they're just theories. The big problem really was trying to get handled on what Colwalk was about, when it was dates from and what it was used for is that there's no real evidence archaeologically. And that's not unusual because most sites, most hill forts, hilltop enclosures in the peak of not been excavated, or have only been excavated to a really small amount. When we look at Carl Wark and we try and say,

well, it's going to be one period or another, it was a hill fort or was a refuge or a ceremonial, we're really starting from a blank canvas. And anybody who tries to say, it was one thing either, is really speculating. It is a real enigma, basically. Nothing has ever been found here to give even a vague historical date as to when it was built.

nor even its use for any purpose at all, beyond the last few centuries. Who built these walls and then vanished into time leaving no trace? There's no evidence so far, but that doesn't mean nobody's tried to find any. In England, every county archaeology unit has its own SMR, a sites and monuments record. Tim's in Sheffield to have a look at South Yorkshire's SMR. He's heard it contains details of some archaeological work carried out at Karl Wark many years ago. Perhaps there's some information here that will help, something that was missed before.

We've only been in existence since 1974, more or less, but there's been interesting the site for a lot longer than that. We've collected what we can together. There's no doubt other stuff, but this is what we've got, so I can talk through this. It's an important site, it's an impressive part of the landscape, and people have been interested in it for a long time. The earliest mention of Carl Wark is by local antiquarians of the 19th and 18th centuries. There's a Heyman Rook, did a walkover survey of the site.

We've got a few copies of pages from his notebook in here. Among the files, Zach has found the record of the only known archaeological dig to take place at Carl Wark, just after the Second World War in 1950. In 1950, a chap called Simpson put a... trench through the turf wall. I've got the diagram in here. All right, yeah, yeah. Which is what you want to know,

is you know, what's the wall and the rampart made of? So he says it's basically turf and stone revetment. There's no report from Simpson's Dig, no record of anything he found in the way of artifacts, just the illustrations of where he dug. Yeah, that's right. He's not come up with definitive evidence, has he really, as far as we know.

Well, he's told us how the rampart was constructed. And like you say, there's little else, unless he got lucky and, you know, managed to find something else with these other trenches. But as far as I know, he didn't. It's tantalizing. Maybe Simpson kept notes or a report. But it's lost to us now. The dig plans give us something to go on, though.

What parallels are there for Carl Wark in the Peak District? If it were much earlier than the Dark Ages, are there some other places which resemble its characteristics? The description, Hillfort often leads us to think Iron Age. If there's one site in the Peak District that's the epitome of a hill fort of the Iron Age, it's Mam Tor. It's just 10 miles from Carl Walk, but a world away in scale and design. The deep banks and ditches enclose a hilltop fortress over 1,000 meters in circumference.

Many platforms have been found, and there were perhaps dozens of buildings here once, enough to house a large population in safety during times of crisis. Karl Wark is completely different to MAMTour. Most Iron Age Hill forts are quite big sites. They tend to have, they've got evidence for occupation inside them. They're an enclosed settlement of some sort. People were enclosing them either because they had to defend their settlement due to warfare, a bit like the nuclear deterrent of the time.

Or it was about status. They're shown off. You know, whoever is the leader of that tribe, the chieftain or whatever, can mobilize lots of people to build some big ramparts, some big banks and ditches. That's saying, look, I'm fairly boss. I can control all these people. You know, I'm an important man, you don't mess with me.

Karl War has the feel of something more workman-like, more improvised. There's no known spring or well. It probably couldn't have supported a large population for long. Mamtoe in the Peak District, not far away, as we said, is built around a spring. So if that's the interpretation of Hillfort's defended settlement, you'd be quite happy to living on Mamtoe, you've got your water supply, that doesn't happen with Carl Wark. So that really questions, can it be a hill fort in the normal sense of an Iron Age hill fort?

acidic soils brought anything organic so whether that's metal or whether it's iron whether it's human bone animal bone leather cloth etc which really reduces what we can find and what survives from the past on the whole the only way that the dead survive in this landscape is if they were cremated first and put in a pit or a clay pot or a bag and buried together the burnt bones survives. But otherwise, human internment in the form of skeletons just leaves no trace. Within a number of decades, those bones have just completely rotted away. If people were buried within Karl Wark's enclosure, probably very little will now remain.

Now there's a chance to build on what's known so far. Tim and the team have been granted permission to go ahead with new work. It's the first that Carl Walk for more than half a century. The site isn't easy to access. Everything has to be carried in on foot. The fast-flowing Burbage Brook and the steep, boggy terrain of the approaches demonstrate the strength of Carl Walk's position. It's maybe another reason why few people have ever done much archaeology here.

The survey is aimed mainly at the area immediately within the stone rampart. It seems the most likely area where we might be able to find traces where buildings once stood, what Simpson was presumably looking for with his snaking trenches in 1950. They'll use several techniques, along with the standard magnetometer. Emma tests the magnetic susceptibility of selected areas. This measures the soil's potential to become magnetized by burning, for example, so it can help identify possible hearths or trash fires. At the same time, they'll carry out a photogrammetry survey, using an aerial drone.

From this, they'll hopefully create a 3D terrain model of Carl Wark. Carl Wark may have always had some importance because of its proximity to this border zone, which goes back at least to Roman or late Iron Age times. But whether as a fort, settlement, meeting place, or sacred place, we can't tell. Now in 21st century Britain, the most significant period in this story of the borderlands is the Dark Ages. From the late 6th and early 7th centuries, this was the frontier between Mercia and Northumbria, powerful and competing kingdoms. There is evidence that the Peak District was under the influence of the Mercians and under the influence of Northumbrians at different time, and that the Northumbrians sent Christian missionaries down to the Peak District because it was a

pagan Mercian area. And you also get the stone crosses which were built as sort of wayside preaching crosses or as boundary markers. Anglo-Saxon Britain is a period which fascinates archaeologist Andrew Reynolds. It's a really interesting period to study because it tells us about all sorts of aspects of human, the development of human societies. So we can look at things like the emergence of kings and kingdoms. We can look at things like the emergence of legal frameworks, legal apparatus, judicial activity. We can look at the emergence of towns and villages.

So for example, much of what you see in the modern English landscape has its roots in the Anglo-Saxon period. Andrew sees Karl Wark as being similar to many other fortifications in Britain from this period, which seem to utilise distinctive features in frontier areas. The kind of form of the fortification up here finds its best parallels really in what we call either the Dark Ages or the early Middle Ages in a series of fortifications which are very similar to those built in the Iron Age. And again we tend to find these in Northern Britain, in Wales and down in South Western Britain.

So in terms of its parallels, it really finds its best comparisons in the Iron Age or in the early medieval period. It's perfect for controlling movement in and out of the region. You know, we know it's a border area. It marks this sort of, it's a very, very marked transition in the nature of the landscape, the geology changes, the soil types change, the vegetation changes. And given the nature of the topography, there are only really a few ways that you can safely or easily traverse this landscape. And Carl Wark sits absolutely smack bang in the middle of one of the freest routes of passage across this particular patch of ground.

Wherever people travel across borders, you find powerful expressions of state-like institutions. The main roads which today enter the peaks near Carl Wark are all relatively recent. The now disused Houndkirk Road was an 18th century road for from Sheffield. It's probably followed the line of earlier routes, which must have passed near Karl Wark since at least Roman times. See, one of the things that you'd expect

in a region like this, if you're crossing from one kingdom into another, it's a gallows. And from the seventh and eight centuries AD, you find setting up with places of executions a really kind of common thing in England. It makes you fully aware that you're passing from one political territory into another. So given the importance of this particular region, a major route way, a fortification possibly of that period,

this is exactly where you'd expect those kinds of territorial markers to be. So building a fortification like this sends out a very powerful political statement. So in some ways you don't even have to occupy it. If you've got sort of your enemies up to the north, you're setting up something which is staring them right in the face. Yeah. And basically what it's saying is somebody is here. It is not an open land. landscape. Something is here, we have constructed it, we are strong enough to do this and we are,

it is an exhibition of how powerful, even in this border region that we are in, that's how determined we are that this is our border. So anybody coming from a distance would come to this area and think, ah, something is changing here. It's a very, very powerful way of expressing your dominance of a region at the margins of your territory. So this is why these early kingdoms set up things like gallows, defences, they dig great big banks and ditches and so on. Especially when you set that in the context of emerging kingdoms, you know, they're trying to kind of forge large-scale identities. And the way that you can do that is just start to map out the landscape. You start to name it in very, very distinctive

ways. And they attempt to control it. Yeah. To fortify, strengthen, around the borders. So that anybody coming from afar will think, ah, now we have to deal with these people who are capable of doing this. By now the results of the survey are ready. It's taken time to get a handle on all the data, but it's been worth it. The photogrammetry reveals the natural promontory on which Carl Wark sits, dominating the valley below. The natural steep sides of the eastern flank and the low but neatly stone-reinforced western wall. A huge northern rampart completely seals off the natural plateau. Despite the tough conditions during the survey, the team were able to cover a large area within and around the enclosure.

As expected, the rocky geology has affected the data, but not too badly. They've successfully located the trenches explored by Simpson in 1950. But like Simpson, they haven't managed to locate any of the trenches. to locate any obvious remains of buildings or other archaeological features. It's still a huge leap forward in research into Carl Wark, and the data will hopefully help with future archaeology. But the results have brought up some unexpected points. We've also got some linear features that seem to cross from one side to the other, but

they're not definitive as in of a definite ditch. So there's some sort of linear aspect to that, as if there's something there's something there, but we don't know whether it's man-made or whether it's natural. It could be just a cleft in the natural rock. So again, it's nothing positive. Perhaps most interestingly, the mag has revealed some surprising data. We've got these really weird anomalies where it looks

to be heavily magnetic with a sort of a halo of white rounders. Now some of these are definitely magnetic, or rather ferrous metal iron anomalies. The distribution is similar to surveys Tim's scene of some battlefields. We know that iron doesn't survive in the ground here from ancient times, due to the acid soil. If so, what else has been going on at Carwalk from more recent periods? Over the last few centuries or even decades, different activities may have left ferrous metal in the soil. Quarrying, millstone working, even climbing and tourism have probably left their traces.

During his work in the area, Bill Bevan noted some strange marks on boulders. They're all over Karl Wark. No one seemed to know how they got there. I'm trying to think, well, what could have made that? It clearly hasn't got the nice form of crested rock art. It didn't look like it was deliberately made by hand, but it clearly wasn't natural either. It looked a bit like, well, when I first thought, it looks like a fossilized bomb explosion, what could be creating that? When he interviewed older people from the area, Bill found out what had gone on on the Moors here around 80 years before. The whole area had been a training ground for the Army in the Second World War.

One of the guys I spoke to had trained in the area and he talked about fire and mortars from Burmage Rocks towards Kalwa. What they would do, they would try and target a big Earth Favile. boulder and try and hit that with the mortars. And that's when it struck me that these are the scars of a mortar shell explosion. It's hit the rock, it's gouged out some of the boulder and left this, you know, random pattern. And when I realized that, everything started to fit into play. British and Canadian paratroopers trained here before the D-Day invasion of 1944.

Major Paul Oldfield served with the British Army for 25. years. He's a rider and battlefield guide. He can help interpret the way the army use the area in preparing soldiers for combat. Well, it's quite a small area, but actually it's perfect for low-level infantry training. So if you are live firing in this area, anything that misses the targets is going to disappear into one of those hillsides, so you can actually stop it. Is this sort of training you would have undertaken when you first started out? Yeah, and it's very much the same as basic recruits will do nowadays. The bullet-scarred rocks are all around the valley, evidence of the intense battle training.

The whole area was one big shooting range. It's not just rocks that the troops were firing at. Beneath Karawar, it seems that Burbage Valley's historic packhorse bridge made a useful target. And amazingly, there's still evidence here. We've got the evidence, we've got the physical evidence on the bridge, we've got the pot marks where the bullets have been hitting, we've got the actual bullets. It's unbelievable, I can't believe it.

And it's only recently because it's washed out with the rain and nobody's ever picked them up. Inside Carl Wark, Tim shows Paul some of the many scars left by the mortar explosions. There are many bullet holes around the entrance, which suggest it was used for a practice assault. Just meters away inside is the area where Simpson excavated his oddly zigzagging trenches.

Could some of these have been left over slit trenches from the Second World War training? Simpson was here just five years after the war. It would explain the unusual layout. Remains of the training up here were noted for some years after the war. There's even a story about the wood that was planted at this time, known as the Great Britain Plantation.

Originally it was planned to be the shape of Great Britain. And the bit of the bossy is missing on the map, the bit that would be Devon and Cornwall, because it was sticking out onto this spur. And apparently they didn't plant there because there's so much unexploded ordinance, they felt it was too risky.

Well, that's interesting. Yeah. Now whether that story's true or not, I don't know, but that is what I understand to be the case. From the recent past to time immemorial, soldiers have passed in the shadow of Carl Wark. But whether any fought or died here across the defenses no one knows.

The place, its origin, and its purpose retain across the centuries a cloak of silence. There's no doubt, though, Karl Wark sat astride of frontier for many years and in between many tribes and kingdoms. Just a couple of miles away, at the village of Doer, two armies certainly came this way. way, recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It was here in the year 829 AD that the Northumbrian King Aenred submitted to King Eckbert of Wessex, who thus became the first overlord of all Anglo-Saxon Britain. And mercifully, for once, the armies left without ever fighting a battle. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to

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