31 



without much hope of finding any valid surviving evidence, for 

 Cleveland had had several describers of its history and antiquities, 

 and none of them had said a word of this castle. While believ- 

 ing that an earthwork must once have existed there I fully 

 expected to find that no trace was left ; that agriculturalists, who 

 usually set little or no value on these remains of the remote past, 

 who would have levelled the mound, filled in the ditch, and 

 ploughed over the whole. It was therefore with as much surprise 

 as pleasure that I found that the castle still survived in an 

 excellent state of preservation. 



In my last note under this head I referred to the '• Castle " 

 which once existed on the Easby Bank. But it must not be 

 supposed that it was a castle of the usual modern kind. It dates 

 from a time when strongholds were of a much simpler description. 

 What remains at present is simply an earthwork consisting 

 mainly of a raised mound enclosing a horse-shoe shaped piece of 

 ground. Of course the figure of a horse-shoe does not enclose 

 anything, but in this case the enclosure is completed by what I 

 have elsewhere described as "an almost perpendicularly falling 

 bank." The sides of the shoe are parallel instead of being some- 

 what convergent as in an ordinary horse-shoe, and the toe of the 

 shoe is, of course, the part furthest away from the precipitous 

 bank-edge. On the outer side of the mound there is a ditch 

 which must once have been deep. The mound, too, must origin- 

 ally have been of considerable height. A year or two ago, with 

 Mr. Emerson's kind permission and help, an excavation was made 

 in the interior of the earthwork, not far from its centre, and it 

 was found that there was an accumulation of about four feet of 

 soil over the original surface of the ground. Most of this must 

 have formed part of the original mound. Perhaps that is not 

 quite a correct statement, for this ancient strength may have been 

 in use possibly for at least a century or two, and as the soil 

 became denuded it may have been replaced time after time with 

 fresh soil brought from outside. This will explain why there 

 is apparently a much greater quantity of soil fallen into the 

 interior than into the ditch, which of course would be kept open 

 so long as the strength was in use. On the occasion of the 

 excavation referred to a flint scraper was found on or near the 

 original surface of the ground, some four feet below the present 

 surface. This was of a type which I have often found on our 

 moors, and which is plentiful in connection with the burial 

 mounds with which the higher points of our moorland are 

 usually studded. We know that these were the tombs of the men 

 who lived during the bronze age, that is from say 1,500 B.C. 



