The History Of Ingram Valley.

The Breamish Valley contains an amazing concentration of prehistoric hillforts. These enclosures, made of earth and stone ramparts around a central area, were built by ancient Britons 2,300 years ago. They were built in a landscape already rich in the monuments of the people who had lived here before. Each hillfort seems to sit in its own territory, separated from its neighbour. In many of the hillforts, including Brough Law, Middle Dean and Wether Hill, you can see faint circles on the ground that are the remains of their timber roundhouses. The surrounding hillsides are covered in cultivation terraces on which our ancestors grew crops, and also scattered over the hills are burial cairns that date to the Bronze Age (4,000 years ago). Surprisingly there had been very few archaeological excavations here before the 1990s when Northumberland National Park Authority set up the Breamish Valley Archaeological Project.