Harden Quarry

Harden Quarry is an active hard rock quarry operated by Tarmac, located north of Biddlestone, within Northumberland National Park. The site produces a rare decorative Red Felsite aggregate known as ‘Harden Red’ which is used for surface coverings, as for example at Buckingham Palace, Horse Guards Parade, Pall Mall and many other Scheduled and Listed buildings across Britain, especially in North East England. To ensure a sustainable supply of the mineral, the quarry needed to extend northwards and this required careful archaeological assessment. Once planning permission was received in 2022, archaeological excavations to mitigate the impact on remains on Bleakmoor Hill took place.

During the assessment phase various works were undertaken, including a desk-based assessment, a field survey and evaluation excavation trenches. Some of this work focused on the palisaded enclosure, a Scheduled Monument, that had never been investigated before. Other trenches targeted a clearance cairn and what turned out to be a burial cairn of ‘ring cairn’ type. This work has been published and links to the reports and the publication are provided below. The palisaded enclosure has been scientifically dated to the Early Iron Age. The hut circles evidenced within it are multiphase and indicate an unenclosed settlement on the site prior to the construction of the substantial timber defensive palisade. It was abandoned, perhaps after a few generations, and the question remains as to where these people re-settled. Did these groups coalesce together to build and live in one of the nearby larger hillforts? Given the Scheduled status of the palisaded enclosure, this was excluded from the quarry extension area and remains preserved in the landscape.

Following the granting of planning permission the quarry extension area was subject to archaeological monitoring and excavation, together with wider survey around the extraction area to place the archaeological remains in their landscape context. The survey work included a high resolution Lidar survey which, together with follow-up ground survey, helped identify additional archaeological features not previously recognised. This included platform settlements, clearance cairns, historic quarrying, boundary features and another possible burial cairn, as well as areas of prehistoric cord rig cultivation. A sediment core was taken from the deep gully that circumscribes the site to the north to retrieve evidence of ancient plants and trees to help reconstruct how this upland landscape was used and farmed in prehistoric times. A geochemical survey was also undertaken across the wider landscape, together with more intensive sampling inside the palisaded enclosure. High chemical readings consistent with human activity were identified that correlated, for example, with the platform settlements, and within the palisaded enclosure a courtyard area was identified as having been a location where tethering of animals and kitchen processing may have taken place.

This work was undertaken throughout 2025, where the ARS Ltd team, together with local volunteers, excavated the remains of what is believed to be the remnants of a fossilised Bronze Age landscape. Features excavated included a ‘platform settlement’, a ring cairn that overlay two earlier, small, circular cairns, stone field boundaries, clearance cairns and prehistoric pits. The platform settlement had been terraced into the hillside and the stone quarried from the back face was spread in front to create a flat apron on which a timber-built roundhouse had been constructed on a wide stone rubble low wall. The field boundaries were typically constructed from stone rubble comprising the upcast from adjacent parallel ditches, although one such feature at the west side of the site was made from mounded soil and turf. An entrance area with associated possible stock pound and clearance cairns was associated with one of the stone boundaries suggesting that livestock control, as well as agriculture, was practised on the hilltop.

The ring cairn was located on the highest point of the Bleakmoor Hill hilltop, adjacent to an equally high rock exposure that had been quarried for stone to build the cairn. Two cremation burials, one with a collapsed Encrusted Urn pot, had been placed in a quarried pit and fissure on this outcrop. The ring cairn contained a group of human cremation burials, some of which were buried within pottery vessels whilst others had a pottery vessel placed above or next to them. One of the pottery vessels was recovered fully intact and is a superb example of a ‘tripartite Food Vessel’ that had been buried in a pit inside the ring cairn in an upside down position. This pot contained a human cremation of a juvenile individual. The individual’s age at death was estimated to be between 11 and 13 years if female, or between 11 and 17 years if male. Inside the ring cairn were two large pits that may have predated the ring cairn. They may have contained a skeletal burial but the remains have since decomposed as unburnt bone does not survive as well as burnt bone in this environment. In one of the pits a plano-convex flint knife was found which is a typical kind of ‘grave good’ associated with Bronze Age burials. Under the ring of the cairn itself two small, circular cairns were discovered, both of which had small cists inset below them. Again no skeletal remains survived, but these are burial features typically associated with ‘Beaker’ period burials. Tantalisingly, some sherds of All Over Cord Beaker were found in a disturbed context immediately adjacent to one of the early pits providing further indications that the Early Bronze Age burial monument may have been predated by a Beaker period cemetery. Further evidence for Beaker period origin for the early farming and settlement on this hilltop is provided by a radiocarbon date of around c.2450-2000 BC from below one of the clearance cairns that was investigated during the previous assessment phase.

Scientific analysis of the remains from the archaeological excavations is underway and we will report more of the findings as the project progresses. We are awaiting a new suite of radiocarbon dates and Optical Stimulated Luminescence dates, together with analysis of the human remains, the ceramics and flints, and also the environmental and plant remains. Once these results are obtained a more detailed picture of early Bronze Age life in the Cheviot Hills will come to light.

The archaeological work at Harden Quarry features in an episode of BBC’s ‘Digging for Britain’ airing on 28th January 2026. You can find it on BBC iPlayer here.

You can find and download the published Archaeological Journal article here, summarising what we learned about the landscape, palisaded enclosure and burial cairn from the initial evaluation trenching.

The following Harden Quarry reports are also available for download:

• Harden Earthwork Survey Report © ARS Ltd 2025
• Harden Evaluation Report © ARS Ltd 2025