Freebrough Hill
hill in North Yorkshire, England
Freebrough Hill is a small peak south of the village of Moorsholm, in Redcar and Cleveland, England. The hill sits just south of the A171 road and when viewed against the landscape, it has a conical-shape effect akin to Roseberry Topping. Suggestions have been put forward that the hill is man-made, but geologists state that it is a natural hill despite its appearance.
Location and description
Freebrough Hill (also Freeburgh Hill or Freeborough Hill), is a conical hill 1-mile (1.6 km) south of the village of Moorsholm in Redcar and Cleveland, previously County Cleveland (and before that, it was in the North Riding of Yorkshire), and is just within the North York Moors National Park, being at its northern boundary. John Leyland suggests that the name stems from a Danish inflection of Frith-Borh meaning a meeting place (frank pledge), and that the Angles gathered at Freeburgh Hill, much like people did at the wapentakes in the later Middle Ages. The Frith-Borh was a court of ten men who gathered at the site to settle disputes. Others state that the name is of Viking origin, being named after the Norse god, Freya, or that it means a fairy meeting place.
Many writers have postulated that the hill had some sort of druidical or Viking burial connection and that the hill was man-made. According to Ord, the area and height of the hill is proof that it is not man-made, as that would mean it would have taken "...many thousands of Britons, hundreds of years [to build]." However, geologists assert that the hill was naturally sculpted by ice during the Devensian period, and shares a similarity with nearby Roseberry Topping in that it is of a conical shape, and is hard rock (oolitic) which has been eroded to form the shape that it is now. Its conical shape has led it to being described as a "..visible outlier in the landscape with a similar shape [to Roseberry Topping]." Whilst its origins have been debated between natural and man-made, it has been suggested that it was still part of religious ceremonies through time; a cup-marked rock on the moor 800 metres (2,600 ft) to the south-west, points to the summit of the hill.
“Freebrough Hill” enters the record as hill in North Yorkshire, England. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Freebrough, Hill and hill can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Freebrough Hill” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.