Star Carr

Star Carr is a Mesolithic archaeological site in North Yorkshire, about eight kilometres south of Scarborough. It lies under farmland at the eastern end of the Vale of Pickering, close to where a large lake once stood. During the Mesolithic period the area was a mixed forest of birch, aspen and willow beside a shallow lake fringed with reeds and water lilies. The lake and surrounding peat bogs preserved organic materials that normally decay, giving archaeologists an unusually clear picture of life nearly ten thousand years ago. The site is regarded as the most important Mesolithic site in Great Britain. Excavations began in 1948 after John Moore, an amateur archaeologist, spotted flints in newly dug ditches. Professor Grahame Clark led further digs from 1949 to 1951, recovering bone, antler and wood as well as flint tools. Among the finds are Britain’s oldest known structure, nearly two hundred red-deer antler harpoon points and twenty-one red-deer skull-caps that may have been worn as headdresses. Visitors today walk across farmland above the buried remains, but the landscape still hints at the past. The former lake bed is now flat peatland, while nearby woods echo the mixed forest that once grew here. Excavated posts and a sunken floor show where a hut stood, and a large wooden platform on the old lake shore is Europe’s earliest known example of carpentry. Finds from the site are kept in museums across northern England, including Scarborough’s Rotunda Museum.