Moot mound at Fell Foot Farm, Little Langdale

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.

Legacy

The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.

Legacy System number:

22557

Legacy System:

RSM

Sources

Other
Dennison, E., MPP Single Monument Class Descriptions - Moots, (1990)
SMR No. 3013, Cumbria SMR, Terraced Mound at Fellfoot Farm, (1987)
RCHME, Westmorland, (1936)

End of official list entry

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