Around three and a half thousand years ago, at a place now known as Mosley Height, a group of Bronze Age people came together to build a funeral monument. This was a large circular burial cairn, standing on the western facing edge of the Burnley moorland. The structure they created consisted of a central circular stony platform, encircled further out by a kerb of boulders. Into this monument were deposited a number of burials. At least three cremations in pots were dug in, and a further cremation without a pot was added. The burials would not have all been done at exactly the same time, but quite likely within living memory of the tribe. At the end of the Bronze Age the site was left undisturbed for many centuries.
In the 1940s it was decided that coal seams around Mosley Height should be dug out, using open cast mining. Accordingly, what would now be termed as ‘rescue archaeology’ was carried out on the cairn. This is where a site that is going to be destroyed is surveyed in detail, to record for posterity what was there. It is hopefully unlikely today that such an important site would be destroyed to extract coal, but attitudes in the 1940s were clearly different. In 1950 Walter Bennett and volunteers from Burnley Historical Society excavated the cairn.
They dug two trenches, three metres wide. One went north to south, the other east to west, crossing at the centre, and reaching the encircling kerb on each side. The team uncovered 18 boulder stones as part of the kerb, enclosing a monument of almost 13 metres in diameter. At the centre they discovered the rough stone platform. In the middle of the platform was a circle of some eight or nine stones, around one metre in diameter.
Four burials were discovered, dubbed A, B, C and D. The first three were burial urns, that had been placed in the ground upside down (called ‘inverted burials’). Burial D had no urn. Each of the burials was contained within a cist. This is a stone ‘box’ usually comprising of four walls, a lid and a base, made from individual stone slabs.
Artefacts were found in groups near the cists. These included thumbnail scrapers, flint knives, a barbed and tanged arrowhead, two shale objects and two carved sandstone discs. All the finds were deposited at Towneley Hall, Burnley’s town museum. The site was then left to the open cast coal miners and for decades afterwards it was assumed that the Mosley Height Cairn had been destroyed by the industry.
In the early 2000s Farmer Ken Tyson of Causewayside Farm, who owned the field where the ring cairn was, believed that the actual site of it might still be intact. He approached Dr Rick Peterson of the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) who agreed to re-excavate the site to see what, if anything, remained. Peterson and his team of archaeologists completed two successive summer digs. Both lasted four weeks and took place in August and September 2009 and 2010. They discovered that the open cast mining had not reached as far as the site, but unfortunately the cairn had been damaged by the landscaping that occurred after the mining clear up.
The first summer consisted of making test pits (small trial trenches to try to assess the spread of archaeology) and geophysics (land penetrating radar over a large area to identify underlying structures). The second season concentrated more on the cairn itself. An area of 20 by 30 metres had the turf machine-stripped off. Of this area about a third was subsequently looked at in detail. It was discovered that a large land drain had been cut through the cairn, and there had been considerable damage to all the surviving stones that formed its structure. However, the excavations allowed a much clearer picture into the way the cairn had been constructed.
The team found new artefacts and these were integrated into the collection that Walter Bennett and his volunteers discovered in 1950. These included a total of six small blades or blade fragments, three larger blades, five knives, fourteen scrapers, and one barbed and tanged arrowhead. Most of these originated in the Early Bronze Age, and flint was the preferred stone. Chert was also used, but less regularly. It is likely that the chert was locally sourced, but the flint had to be imported as it does not occur in Lancashire. The burial pots, cremated bones and the associated oak charcoal found within each burial, were also reassessed.
The Burial Urns
Urn A has a decorated collar. On it are two patterns- the upper created by impressing fine lines of twisted cords into the clay, and the below a row of chevrons. At the junction between the neck and the body, a snapped small bone shaft or a thick reed was used to produce a couple of rows of circles. Inside were the bones of an adult female and a child.
Urn B is a much smaller pot than Urn A, perhaps half the size. Urn B has a collar decorated with five lines of twisted cord, but no further decorations. There appears to be no surviving bones associated with this burial.
Urn C would have been a large pot but now only parts of the collar and rim remain. Once again this has twisted cord impressions. More intriguingly, this urn has a piece of bone baked into the pottery. It is not clear whether the bone is human- perhaps from a previous burial, or maybe from an animal consumed at a funeral feast. The inclusion of a piece of bone would have had cultural significance to the person that made the pot. What the ritual meaning of the bone inclusion had, is lost to us now. Urn C contained the cremated bones of a young adult female.
Burial D was a cremation without an associated pot. It was not possible to identify the gender and age of the bones.
The analysis of the bones dates them to being from around 3800-3600 years ago. The oak charcoal was dated from around 200 years earlier than the bones. This suggests that there was some activity on the site before the construction of the ring cairn, but what this was, Dr. Peterson and his team do not speculate on. It is difficult to know why this earlier charcoal was included, and what significance the wood it was made from had to those that placed it within the burials, but is fascinating, nonetheless.
Access
There is no direct public right of way to Mosley Height (and currently no ‘right to roam’ in England.) However, it is possible to get very close to the site. Near the summit of the field containing Mosley Height is a standing stone known as Stump Cross. This is at the Mosley Height field boundary wall on The Long Causeway. Standing next to Stump Cross gives good views into the field, and the surrounding countryside. Stump Cross itself is a Medieval waymarking cross- but is probably a reused Prehistoric Standing Stone associated with Mosley Height. The cairn circle was meant to be viewed on the skyline, so possibly could have been seen from this position after it was constructed. To see a similar view of the landscape to that when looking out from Mosley Height, visit the public car park a short distance away, along the Long Causeway. This gives good views of the hills to the north. By walking in the opposite direction on the public footpath into Coal Clough Windfarm, this affords good views to the top of Cliviger Gorge below, with Deerplay Moor in the distance. These views would be very similar to those seen from Mosley Height.
There is a pull in point for cars by Stump Cross, and the public car park for Coal Clough Windfarm is just a short drive further on down the Long Causeway. Take care when crossing the Long Causeway. Although the road is not especially busy, it has a derestricted speed limit and vehicles travel fast along it.
References
Mosley Height Cairn, Causewayside Farm, Cliviger: excavations in 2010 and a re-evaluation of the collections in Towneley Hall Museum, Rick Peterson (2025), with contributions by Ross Kelly and Sam Walsh. This pdf document is available for free online. It gives a very detailed account of the excavation and finds from the digs. Additional blog posts by lead author Dr Rick Peterson can be seen below-
shelteringmemory.wordpress.com/tag/cliviger/
shelteringmemory.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/it-fits/
shelteringmemory.wordpress.com/tag/collared-urn/