Reasons for Designation
Moots were open-air meeting places set aside for use by courts and other
bodies who were responsible for the administration and organisation of the
countryside in Anglo-Saxon and medieval England. They were located at
convenient, conspicuous or well-known sites, often centrally placed within the
area under jurisdiction, usually a hundred, wapentake, or shire. The meeting
place could take several forms: a natural feature such as a hilltop, tree or
rock; existing man-made features such as prehistoric standing stones, barrows
or hillforts; or a purpose-built monument such as a mound. Moots appear to
have been first established during the early medieval period between the
seventh and ninth centuries AD. Examples are recorded in the Domesday Book and
other broadly contemporary documents. Initially, moots were situated in open
countryside but, over time, they were relocated in villages or towns. The
construction and use of rural moots declined after the 13th century. The
normal form of purpose-built moot was the moot mound. These take the form of
large, squat, turf-covered mounds with a flat or concave top, usually
surrounded by a ditch. Occasionally, prehistoric barrows were remodelled to
provide suitable sites. It is estimated that there were between 250 and 1000
moots in medieval England, although only a limited number of these were man-
made mounds and only a proportion of these survive today. Moots are generally
a poorly understood class of monument with considerable potential to provide
information on the organisation and administration of land units in the Middle
Ages. They are a comparatively rare and long-lived type of monument and the
earliest examples will be amongst a very small range of sites predating the
Norman Conquest which survive as monumental earthworks and readily appreciable
landscape features. On this basis, all well preserved or historically well
documented moot mounds are identified as nationally important.
Despite truncation of the monument's southern edge, the moot at Fell Foot Farm
survives reasonably well. It is one of only three known moots in Cumbria and
is a good example of this class of monument.
Details
The monument is a moot mound or medieval meeting place, known as the Ting
Mound, located at the rear of Fell Foot Farm, Little Langdale. It includes a
flat-topped rectangular earthen mound with rounded corners which is up to 3m
high with maximum dimensions of 50m by 40m. There are two terraces, each
approximately 4m wide, on the mound's north and east sides, and three on the
west side. The south side of the mound, where originally there were four
terraces, has been truncated by construction of concrete loading bay. The
monument is similar in construction to Tynwald Mount, the Scandinavian Law
Ting on the Isle of Man.
All walls, fencing and gateposts surrounding the monument are excluded from
the scheduling although the ground beneath all these features is included.
MAP EXTRACT
The site of the monument is shown on the attached map extract.
