After leaving the stone circle we headed for the Barrow.
Something no doubt all visitors do.
I didn’t realise until reading the information board that the mound sits on top of a much earlier (2000 years earlier) Long Barrow.
Once it is pointed out you can just about make out some of the contours of the Long Barrow. The Long Barrow being the oldest part of the site.
The weather was beautiful with not a cloud in the sky – as it had been all day.
The views from the top of Gib Hill are extensive.
What a cool place. Even sitting on the banks of the henge at Arbor Low, surveying all the great monument's glories, Gib Hill's little head kept catching the corner of my eye. It has a very graceful shape, and proportionally (height/width/angle of slope) really does remind you of Silbury.
It still has some nice stones lying exposed on it too.
If the excavations by Bateman were anything near like the drawing it is difficult to believe that the stones or anything else are in situ. A nice landscape to catch the sunset, I recommend that this is your last visit of the day
Still smiling we walked over to Gib Hill.
This place..........The henge, the circle, the cove, the avenue, the half-a-henge, it's just too much for an unsophisticated lad like me.....
I'm still smiling!
Gib Hill is thought to have been built in two stages, an early Bronze Age round barrow sits on top of a neolithic oval barrow. Inside the fence that surrounds the 'hill' traces of a ditch can be made out, dug to form the oval barrow.
There are 4 long stones (around 4ft ) that lay round the base of the round barrow that Barnatt suggests to be gateposts, quarried from Arbor Low II.
The stone visible on top of the mound is the capstone to a Bronze Age cist; returned to Gib Hill after serving time as a garden ornament at Bateman's house. When first returned the cist stood proud of the mound, but vandalism to it, soon saw the cist reburied.
What a position to see out the rest of time, and to remind all those left of their mortality. It seems building graveyards on top of hills is not a new idea. [See my notes on Arbor Low also.]
Further to Rhiannon's notes below the name Gib Hill refers to the local story of the barrow once being a gibbet site, although the name 'gib' is an olde english word for mound.
On the other hand the name Bunkers Hill, a name given to a number of features here in the Peak that includes hills, a plantation and a rock shelter, comes from the famous victory or is it defeat never too sure which and we did loose in the end, for the British in the American war of independence at Bunkers Hill.
There is a barrow or tumulus called Bunker's Hill, otherwise Gib Hill, near Youlgreave, in North Derbyshire. It is mentioned in Murray's Handbook, but the origin of the name is not given.
I notice the name in old English characters on the one-inch Ordnance map, which I suppose simply indicates that the place is marked by ancient remains. The contents of the barrow are described in Ten Years' Diggings, by Thos. Bateman.
0. F. H.
"Gib Hill, adjacent to Arbour Low. The original focus for ceremonial activity at Arbour Low, high on a ridgetop south of Monyash, was not at the large henge monument, but here at this mound. Carefull examination of this mounds profile shows that it is a long barrow with a large circular mound superimposed at the south western end. The round barrow is Bronze Age in date, one of two built at this time overlying the main ceremonial monuments of the complex. This one contained a burial in a stone cist, placed at the surface of the original mound, which fell through the roof of Bateman’s tunnel when he dug here in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the earlier mound underneath, probably built several centuries before the henge, early nineteenth century excavations appear to have found cremated human bone in layers. " Peak District, John Barnatt and Ken Smith.
In the back of The Silbury Treasure Michael Dames writes that the name 'Gib Hill' is modern. Apparently it was called 'Llewing Low' in the eighteenth century. Dames' source is the Derby Archaeological Society Journal (1908 & 1911).
The neolithic oval barrow according to J.Barnatt was probably used symbolically somehow, no burials were found in the mound.
Excavations did show it's complex construction. Four mounds of red clay are covered by burnt layers of bone, flint and hazel twigs. And then covered with earth and stones.