In this extract from his new book Upland: A Journey through Time and the Hills, Ian Crofton visits a Neolithic axe factory high above Langdale, and explores how our ancestors interacted with the hills many thousands of years ago. 

In pondering this book, I had a sense that walking or climbing over the hills, as I had done all my life, might provide a physical frame for my imagination to work within, perhaps releasing some fraction of the essence – or at least a whiff – of the lives lived in these places long ago. Placing my feet, swinging my legs, taking a breath, lifting an arm, grasping a handhold, as many had done in the past – such efforts might present an almost physical link with those who had been there before.

The relationship of people with the hills through time has been complex, rich and varied – from awe and wonder, to fear and loathing, to spiritual longing or peaceful acceptance. Hills have been sites of worship, spaces of elemental hostility, places where people have found ways to live amid harshness, their beings shaped by the shapes of the hills, the wind and the rain, a passing glimpse of sunshine on a summer's day.

As I began to retrace my own walks and climbs over the decades, I became more and more aware that I had been following in the footsteps of the dead – Neolithic axe-makers high on the Langdale Pikes, legionaries marching the Roman road along the ridge of High Street in the Eastern Fells, Mercian warriors guarding Offa's Dyke down the spine of the Welsh Marches. Later came the miners and quarrymen, the shepherds and the drovers, the poets and painters, the geologists and botanists, seeking profit or inspiration or enlightenment. More recently, people came to the hills simply to refresh their bodies and their minds by testing their muscles and their nerves in high places, places that raised them above the gloom and graft of their daily lives. For the hills are beyond all else places that unleash the spirit, sharpen our sense of beauty and potential, even as we pant up their flanks, struggle through sleet and storm, gaze through space as ridge recedes behind ridge into an ever-enticing, unfocused far horizon.

For the most part, our higher hills have not been places to live, or make a living. Scores of dead generations dwelling in the lowlands saw hills and mountains as distant, dangerous, unproductive places, inspiring nothing but dread. A few defied the hostile upland environment, with its thin soils, its treacherous crags and frequent storms. Farmers scraped a livelihood from hardy breeds of sheep and cattle that could survive on the scant hill grazing. Desperate to provide for themselves and their families, miners braved the dangers of flood and rockfall to hack at veins of metals such as copper and lead that ran through the rocks, while quarrymen drilled and blasted mountainsides for slate and limestone.

Thousands of years ago, a small band risked their lives to venture up onto the rugged heights in search of one of the most sought-after materials of their time. This material may have derived much of its value from the perilous place it came from, a peak poised between heaven and earth, a conical summit high above Langdale in the Lake District, where on summer nights lightning might strike and briefly light up the darkness. Pike o' Stickle was the location of one of Britain's earliest industrial sites, busy turning out product more than 5,000 years ago. The product of this factory was the key tool of the Neolithic, a tool that helped to clear the forests for agriculture: the stone axe-head. The axe-heads from Pike o' Stickle were made of greenstone – what geologists describe as 'epidotized tuff': volcanic ash that has been compressed into a dark rock as hard as flint. These greenstone axe-heads were so valued that they were traded across Britain, from Scotland to the south coast of England. Many were never used, but preserved in their pristine, polished state as symbols of status and prestige.

When, on an inclement autumn day, I set off to find this early industrial site, I found myself just below the rocky cone of Pike o' Stickle, peering down a gully that steepened as it descended so I could not see its foot. The gully was hedged in on either side by broken crags. Far below, Mickleden Beck wandered lazily through the level meadows of Langdale's valley floor. Down there it was a place of pastoral peace. Up here, with the wind whipping my face, it was a savager, more provisional world; a place to visit but not to settle.

Tentatively I began to descend the gully, my boots kicking up rushes of dust and gravel. On either side of the pale, worn line down the middle of the gully there were piles of larger, darker stones, mingled with smaller, sharper shards. I cautiously stepped among them, my eyes scanning the confusion of countless chaotic shapes. Amid the entropy of a disintegrating hillside, I was looking for a tell-tale sign of intent, of human handiwork. I knew I was surrounded by the remains of a prehistoric axe factory, and with that knowledge I could just make out the stepped terraces made by the Neolithic miners as they quarried blocks of greenstone from the steep crags and toppled them onto the screes below. Here they were broken up, and likely pieces roughly hewn into the shape of an axe-head. The air would have been thick with the thud and crash of collapsing rocks, the sparks and sulphurous smell of stone falling on stone, the clack and tinkle as craftsmen knapped and chipped.

Langdale greenstone is no more effective than flint as a material for axe-heads. So why did it acquire its enhanced status? Perhaps it was its place of origin that gave it such prestige. This was a rock carved out of mountains that reached up into the sky, mountains of no use to people who sustained themselves by farming, mountains rent by cliffs and battered by storms, where humans only ventured at their peril. Was there some sense that up there, on those savage heights still touched by the sun when the lowlands were plunged into darkness, that up there the human world of daily struggle and seasonal routine somehow interpenetrated and drew strength from an otherworld, a timeless space inhabited by ancestral spirits and unknown powers?

A hilltop could be a place where you might encounter a bolt of lightning or a god, witness a celestial conjunction, bury your dead. From a high vantage point, you will be the first to see the sun rise, the last to see it set. The sun gives life; the dark brings cold and the threat of predators.

The top of a hill is a place to spot game on the plains below, or an approaching enemy. It can become a place to take refuge, where you can defend yourself and your kin with ramparts and ditches and the one-way pull of gravity. Once you are surer of your power, it is a place from which to command and control the surrounding lands, sending out your warriors to coerce and destroy. There is always a downside, though. On a summit you will be more exposed to the elements, to rain and wind and storm.

The top of a hill is not necessarily a climax, a dead-end. It may be the way to somewhere else. In the days when the low ground was either impenetrable forest or impassable marsh, a ridge of well-drained hills provided a means of travelling long distances, without becoming tangled in undergrowth or mired in mud. Upland ridges were a key component in the network of ways by which communities made contact with each other, both for trade and for cultural and social exchange. In southern England, such prehistoric routes as the Ridgeway, or the ancient tracks along the South Downs, are lined with sites that may be expressions of spirituality or power or both, from stone circles and burial mounds to giant figures of men or horses carved out of the chalk. Such monuments suggest that journeys were made for reasons other than mere commerce.

The people who followed these ways and built these monuments were not just passive dwellers in the landscape. These people helped to shape the terrain, both physically and in the collective imagination. Hills and hollows, streams and rivers, woods and wetlands, lakes and shores, all held meanings that we can now only guess at. For our predecessors, these forms and features became the ground of their being, wired into their minds, woven into their lives. Without this shaping, the land would have remained untamed, other, hostile, dangerous, without meaning, frighteningly limitless.

One such shaping is found a few miles northeast of the site of the Langdale axe factory. Castlerigg Stone Circle was constructed about 5,000 years ago, on a low plateau of glacial till surrounded by mountains, near the present-day town of Keswick. Castlerigg acts as an amplifier and a lens, its large stone uprights both echoing and focusing the great peaks that ring it – Grasmoor and Grisedale Pike, Skiddaw and Lonscale Fell, Blencathra, High Seat and Helvellyn. Here we are, the stones seem to say, in the heart of the mountains, a circle in the centre of a circle of hills, themselves surrounded by the great circle of the sky. Walk around us as you look, look around you as you walk. The stones form a frame, directing you towards the quiet power of nature: the rocky musculature, the solidity and permanence of the fells. Castlerigg, at the junction of several valleys, may have marked the intersection of trade routes, but it must have been more than just a marketplace. Our modern financial centres, from Manhattan to Singapore to Canary Wharf, might be as showy, relatively speaking (in relation to the wealth available), but their material function outweighs their show, display being a by-product of buying and selling.

At Castlerigg and other such megalithic sites it is difficult to see why our predecessors would have gone to the enormous effort of erecting arrays of such massive stones merely to mark the location of the equivalent of a shopping mall or a trading floor. Such sites must have possessed a greater significance. They would have been places where different groups met and intermingled, perhaps a neutral ground where people could celebrate what they shared, whether it be a range of beliefs or myths or stories, or a sense of time past, present and future, or a feeling for spaces beyond the human – the depths of lakes or the heights of mountains, or even the dreamscapes of stars. And as the Earth turned through the light of the sun, the shadows of the stones, like the shadows of the mountains, would rotate together, all pointing in the same direction, shortening and lengthening in unison. Perhaps in such constructed landscapes people could tread out the pattern of their place in the cosmos. We are here, their footsteps said, marking time, and while we are here, we are at the centre. And even if this generation ages, dies and returns to dust, we leave our monuments to tell of the permanence of our presence, our claim to this space. To this, the mountains around bear witness. A circle – whether of stones or fells, or the sun's disc or the pupil of an eye – has no beginning and no end. Neither has time...

About the author

Upland: A Journey through Time and the Hills (Birlinn Books, May 2025) is, according to author and mountaineer Stephen Venables, "A fascinating and lyrical exploration of what the hills mean to those who have lived and worked among them, and to those who walk and climb among them today. … A beautifully written celebration of a lifelong passion."

Ian Crofton's books exploring the interplay of landscape, nature and history include Walking the Border: A Journey between Scotland and England, rated by both The Guardian and Trail magazine as 'excellent'. His Fringed with Mud and Pearls: An English Island Odyssey was described by the BBC's Countryfile as 'really engaging', and by Coast magazine as 'a fascinating study about what it means to exist on the fringes'; it was selected by the Telegraph as one of their top twenty travel books of 2021. Ian Crofton is a regular contributor to the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, and in 2015 was awarded the club's W.H. Murray Literary Prize.