Rare 5,000-Year-Old Neolithic Monument in Northern England Granted Protected Status

The Dudderhouse Hill long cairn is one of the oldest known sites built by humans in England. It now has the highest level of heritage protection available in the country

Sarah Kuta - Daily Correspondent

July 30, 2025

England is ramping up protections for the Dudderhouse Hill long cairn, one of the country’s oldest visible manmade structures.

The Neolithic burial site has been designated a “scheduled monument,” which gives it the highest level of heritage protection available in England, according to a statement from Historic England, the government agency responsible for maintaining the country’s historic environment. The recognition makes it illegal to alter or damage the site, which is located inside the Yorkshire Dales National Park in northern England.

Archaeologists think early farmers constructed the Dudderhouse Hill long cairn between 3400 and 2400 B.C.E. It likely served as a symbolic final resting place for the dead, although archaeologists don’t think entire bodies were interred at the site, reports the Guardian’s Mark Brown. Instead, they suspect deceased community members were first left to decompose naturally before certain body parts were transferred to the Dudderhouse Hill long cairn for burial.

The Dudderhouse Hill long cairn likely served other purposes, too. It may have been positioned to signal the changing of the seasons, or it may have been used to designate a community’s territory. Whatever its primary function, the site was obviously important to the individuals who used it.

“Building a structure like that would have taken a lot of people a significant amount of time,” says Paul Jeffery, national listings manager for Historic England, to the Guardian. “They would have had to be fed by others, there would have been specialist stonemasons and engineers—a lot of effort would have been invested into those structures. They are a statement of ‘this is us,’ [and] ‘we are here.’”

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/rare-5000-year-old-neolithic-monument-in-northern-england-gets-protected-status-180987073/