Ram tracking on March Hill

March Hill Marsden Moors hike Hiking Yorkshire Walking rambling

I’ve been reading up (* see some sources at the bottom of the post) on the mesolithic hunter gatherers who spent some of their time on March Hill on Marsden Moor and this weekend seemed a good time to walk back up there for a mooch about.

I wasn’t planning on doing any digging, from what I gather there was enough well-intentioned disturbance in the 20s and 30s, so much so that it made for a trickier research challenge for latter day archaeologists.  Best leave that to the professionals. I’m fascinated though by this hill that I can see from the front of our house, away in the distance . But not in a Close Encounters Of The Third Kind way, I haven’t started sculpting it in mashed potato or anything.

When you stand on March Hill and look around at what is now pretty much a 360º vista of moorland it’s compelling to imagine the valleys and ‘moors’ covered in a forest some 7000-5000 years ago, sheltering aurochs (wild cattle), boar, deer etc before it all transitioned to peat.

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March Hill and Cupwith Circular – a hike to the wild north

Views across to Pule Hill from Buckstones
march Hill and Cupwith hike route map
March Hill and Cupwith hike route – via viewranger App. I started bottom right on the map in Marsden, heading to March Hill across the moors and back around to Cupwith Hill and reservoir.

The Wild North is a bit tongue in cheek .. head south from Marsden, up Wessenden and over to Black Hill on a winter’s day and that’ll give any kind of wild a run for its money. But the moors area north of Marsden, to my mind, feels a bit wilder than the areas I normally walk across, to the south and west.  I fancied a bit of a change and wanted to have a mooch around March Hill and also to check out Cupwith a bit as it’s the planned home for a couple of wind turbines at some stage.. so I combined the two with a circular walk last Sunday.

8.3 miles over 5 hours or so, according to viewranger. At that pace you can see that some of the going was a bit slow, as Brodie and I picked our way across large grassy knolls and semi- bog in the area south of Cupwith Hill. But other than that it was a good day for a walk, with some excellent views across the upper valley and the sun finally came out in the last two hours.

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