LAST week, we told how 13 places in the North East and North Yorkshire had been added to Historic England’s Heritage At Risk Register, including four sections of the trackbed in south Durham of the Stockton & Darlington Railway – it is hoped that these will have been improved enough to remove them in time for the bicentenary celebrations in 2025.

READ MORE: FOUR SECTIONS OF THE HISTORIC S&DR "AT RISK"

Most of the new additions to the register are ancient, earthen sites in remote parts of Northumberland, although between Guisborough and Eston Nab, on the edge of the Cleveland Hills, a Bronze Age bowl barrow has been included on the register.

There are about 10,000 bowl barrows across the country, and they are funeral monuments and burial places. Like this one, which is described as being near High Court Green, many of them are at risk of being ploughed out.

What makes this one so interesting is its context. This is where the very first Teessiders, or Clevelanders, lived up to 8,000 years ago.

There is at least one other bowl barrow near the one at High Court Green, and there is the remains of another which seems to already have been lost to the plough.

Most impressively, right on the cliff edge with the panorama of the Teesside river mouth and sea spread out below, is the Cleveland Hills’ only Iron Age hillfort.

The Northern Echo: How Eston Nab Bronze Age settlement may have looked in 700BC in a painting by Andrew HutchinsonHow Eston Nab Bronze Age settlement may have looked in 700BC in a painting by Andrew Hutchinson

Man has been living up here for millennia – worked Mesolithic flints, perhaps from 6000BC, have been found in the area.

The Eston Nab hillfort – the word “nab” comes from the Saxon “cnaep” meaning “summit of a hill” – was probably inhabited around 700BC. It is 794ft (242 metres) above sea level, and its lofty location provides a fabulous look-out over the Tees saltplains and the North Sea below (it is, though, in the shadow of Roseberry Topping, which is to the west at 1,050ft, or 320 metres, above sea level).

The Northern Echo: A Victorian engraving of the beacon tower that Thomas Jackson built on Eston Nab to look-out for NapoleonA Victorian engraving of the beacon tower that Thomas Jackson built on Eston Nab to look-out for Napoleon

Indeed, the nab is such a good look-out location that at the start of the 19th Century, when fear of a French invasion led by Napoleon Bonaparte so gripped the nation that the people of Hartlepool mistook a monkey for a foreign spy and hanged it, farmer Thomas Jackson, of Lackenby, built a sandstone beacon tower inside the hillfort so he could get early warning if there were an armada swarming off Redcar.

The Northern Echo: The look-out tower at Eston Nab in 1956, just before it was demolishedThe look-out tower at Eston Nab in 1956, just before it was demolished

His beacon became a house for early ironstone miners, and it was pulled down in 1956 although some of its stones were used to create the existing tower which is such a landmark for Clevelanders.

The Northern Echo: Charity runners go past the tower in the Eston Nab Iron Age hillfortCharity runners at the tower in the Eston Nab hillfort

Friends of Eston Hills bought the hillfort for £15,000 so that it is in public ownership, although not all of the public use it respectfully – earlier this year, a car was set ablaze up there, its flames visible across the saltplains.

But the “at risk” bowl barrow is part of the wealth of history on top of the nab, suggesting that 3,000 years ago, this lofty location was really the place to be.