Free Online at www.coastalviewandmoornews.co.uk The Community Newspaper for the Towns and Villages of East Cleveland, Redcar & North York Moors, telling the real news and views of the people of our region Coastal View & Moor News Issue 116 January-February 2021
●Picture by Peter Collinson
Freebrough Hill gains national recognition AGAIN By Councillor Steve Kay
I
’m absolutely delighted that Freebrough Hill is featured on one of ten Royal Mail stamps celebrating the 70th anniversary of the creation of the first National Parks. The enigmatic Hill sits inside the North York Moors National Park, but also within the bounds of my Lockwood ward and on the doorstep of my home in Moorsholm. Rising 200 feet above the Whitby Moor Road, it’s wondered at, close-up, by countless thousands every summer Lockwood ward is the most sparsely populated in Redcar & Cleveland, but we have some beautiful scenery, as Royal Mail has recognised. We are proud of Freebrough Hill which, in recent times, gave its name to Freebrough Academy, attended by many local Lockwood children. There are countless stories, old and new, about our unusual hill. But, apart possibly from the association with King Arthur, the new stamp is the most important, bringing us real national recognition for a second time. Once Covid is beaten, I’m sure the Royal Mail publicity will bring many more visitors both to the National Park and to the whole of Redcar & Cleveland. Freebrough Hill (summit: 821 feet above sea level) arouses our curiosity because its symmetrical, rounded shape makes it appear manmade. It’s probably named after the Norse goddess, Freya,worshipped by the Vikings.In the Norse pantheon,
Freya was the wife of the king of the gods, Odin. Odin’s Hill is now called Roseberry Topping. (You may remember Redcar & Cleveland Council’s son et lumiere ‘Odin’sGlow’ in 2009). Our 18th century forebears had various opinions about Freebrough Hill’s origins. John Cade, F.R.S. described Freebrough as “one of the greatest Celtic remains Britain can glory in”, praising its position “in an amphitheatre surrounded with hills” and believing it was “constructed on the same model as Silbury in Wiltshire.” Other ‘experts’ thought Freebrough was raised as a place of worship by the druids, or that it was a centre where legal disputes were settled. But the most extravagant claim for Freebrough Hill came from the pen of John Hall Stevenson, squire of Skelton Castle and a leading member of the notorious Hellfire Club. When Stevenson wrote of “Freebro’s huge mount, immortal Arthur’s tomb”, he raised speculation about its origin to a new level. No doubt, he wanted to publicise his own locality but he may also have thought that the largest, apparently man-made, mound in the country must be the resting place of the greatest of all kings; a king whose legend is central to English medieval literature and chivalric codes, and which has survived to this day. The Arthurian Legend probably
● Cllr Steve Kay brandishes 'Excalibur' at 'immortal Arthur's tomb'
originated from stories of a great leader of the Britons in the 5th century, who, after the Romans had left our shores, resisted the Anglo-Saxon invaders. The Legend of Arthur, ‘The Once and Future King’,in fact consists
of many individual but overlapping stories, written centuries later. Together, they form a romantic tragedy about the struggle between good and evil and the fallibilities of even the greatest of men. Unfortunately, modern geologists have quashed the theory of Freebrough as the tomb of King Arthur, explaining
that it is not even partially man-made. Instead, they conclude that the Hill is a lump of hard rock, smoothed into its ‘unnatural’, distinctive shape by a glacier in the ice age. But, in defiance of science, when I walk alone on the Hill, I sometimes pick out a faint voice on the wind: “Guinevere, Guinevere. Where art thou Guinevere? Guinevere, come home.”
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