The Tor Terraces

The claim

The Tor has seven visible terraces spiralling around it, cut into the sandstone at regular intervals. The popular story is that they are a processional labyrinth, walked as a spiral path by Neolithic or Iron Age people, and that the number seven links the hill to a whole set of traditions — the seven-circuit classical labyrinth, the seven planets, the seven stars of the Pleiades.

It is a good story. The problem is that the excavation evidence points somewhere much more ordinary.

What the evidence actually says

When the terraces were examined in the twentieth century, the material recovered from them included medieval pottery and, more tellingly, the terraces follow the contours rather than forming a continuous spiral. A processional labyrinth has to be walkable from end to end without leaving the path. The Tor terraces, on a slope this steep, do not do that: they run around the hill in bands that are interrupted by the ridge and by the modern path.

The accepted reading now is agricultural: strip lynchets, formed by ploughing across a slope along the contour, which over generations builds up a flat strip and a step below it. There are thousands of them in southern England. The Tor's are unusually well preserved and unusually high, which is why they get the story.

That does not make the hill uninteresting. It makes it a place where medieval farmers worked a very steep slope with ox teams, which is its own kind of remarkable.

The puzzle

The listing gives a sequence of seven numbers, one for each terrace, in the order you would meet them walking anticlockwise from the gate. Each number is a claim about that terrace, and each claim is either supported by the evidence described above or contradicted by it.

Work out which claims are supported and which are not. The pattern of supported claims, read as binary with supported equal to one, gives you a three-digit number. Apply it as a bearing in tens of degrees from the published coordinate and walk that line until it meets the third terrace.

The final

Where the third terrace meets the modern path, there is a low stone wall footing on the downhill side. The container is a small clip-lock in the footing, behind the second stone from the left where the wall ends. It is tucked under the top course rather than buried.

Replace the stone so the line of the wall reads true. This wall is on a scheduled monument and is inspected.

Access and terrain

• The Tor is a scheduled monument. Do not dig, do not remove stones other than the cache stone, and do not walk on the terraces where erosion is active — the top terrace has bare patches that are getting worse.
• The main path is steep in its final section and becomes a stream in wet weather. The stone steps are slippery.
• The summit is exposed in all directions and there is no shelter except the tower, which has no roof.
• Livestock graze the lower slopes in summer.

After the find

The view is the reason most people come. On a clear day you can see the Mendips, the Quantocks, the Blackdowns and, on the horizon, the Bristol Channel with its two islands. The tower itself is the surviving fragment of a fourteenth-century church, and the bell chamber is worth ten minutes.