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Wilderness is rarely as empty as it looks

Walkers in the British uplands often assume that the high ground above the intake wall is a landscape that has always been wild. It very rarely is. Large areas of Dartmoor, the Pennines, the Cheviots, Snowdonia, the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands were farmed, lived in and worked for centuries or millennia before the climate turned wetter, the soils soured, and people moved down to the valleys. Because these slopes were never ploughed by modern machinery and never built over, the traces they left behind survive remarkably well.

Once you know what you are looking at, a dull trudge across a tussocky moor becomes a piece of detective work. The trick is to stop thinking about summits and start reading the ground beneath your boots.

Hut circles: the homes under the heather

Hut circles are the most rewarding find for a beginner, because they are distinctive even when badly overgrown. Look for a low ring of stones, perhaps three to ten metres across, with a hollow centre. The wall has usually collapsed and spread, so it appears as a circular bank of mossy humps and tussocky grass rather than a neat wall, and it is often no more than knee-high.

• Level ground — huts were almost always built on a natural terrace or cut into a slope, with the downhill side revetted by a bank of stone.
• An entrance gap — usually a clear break in the ring, often facing downhill, south or south-east, away from the prevailing wind.
• A greener interior — the floor of a hut often holds better soil, so the grass inside can be noticeably lusher than the surrounding moor.
• Company — single huts exist, but you will more often find two or three together, or a scattered village of a dozen or more across a sheltered shoulder.

Many date to the Bronze Age, roughly 2500 to 700 BC, but these sites were reused for thousands of years, and some upland rings are later shieling huts used by summer herdsmen. If the ring is convincing, take a photograph with a rucksack or walking pole for scale and note a grid reference.

Banks, walls and lynchets: the shape of old fields

Ancient field boundaries look different from the drystone walls you see around modern intakes, which are usually straight, well-built and uniform. Older boundaries tend to be rubble banks — low, spread ridges of stone and earth, sometimes with larger stones set on edge along the line — and they often run boldly across contours, over ground no modern farmer would dream of fencing.

Where several of these banks run roughly parallel, you may be looking at a prehistoric field system. Look also for lynchets: cultivation terraces formed when soil crept downhill over centuries of ploughing, producing a series of broad, gentle steps across a slope. They are wider and smoother than sheep terracettes, which are narrow, closely spaced and follow the contour like a staircase for livestock. A hut circle with a bank running away from it is a strong hint that you are standing in someone's old garden.

Clearance cairns and other piles of stone

Farmers clearing stony ground for cultivation had to put the stones somewhere, and the result is clearance cairns: irregular heaps, usually one to three metres across, made of mixed sizes of stone, often clustered in groups or strung out along a boundary. They are rarely pretty and rarely symmetrical, and that is the point.

Distinguish them from burial cairns, which tend to be larger, more carefully built, sometimes kerbed with set stones, and often placed on a false crest or skyline where they would be seen from below. Also look for the opposite of a cairn: patches of ground that are conspicuously stone-free, where a field was once cleared and worked. Charcoal platforms, small level scoops cut into hillsides for burning wood, and bloomery mounds from iron smelting are other traces worth noticing, though they take a more experienced eye.

When and where to look

Light matters more than anything else. Low, raking sun — early morning or late afternoon in winter — throws long shadows from banks and cairns that vanish completely under a high summer sun. The best season is late autumn to early spring, once bracken has died back and before the grass grows tall. A light dusting of snow or a hard frost can reveal outlines you would otherwise walk straight past, and freshly burned or closely grazed moorland is often the clearest of all.

Before you go, check the historic environment record for the national park or county you are walking in; these are public records of known sites, and they will point you towards the interesting ground. A 1:25,000 map shows some scheduled monuments, and lidar imagery of your area is freely available if you want to plan a route around earthworks. Walk the same hill in three different seasons and you will see three different landscapes.

Reading a hillside well — and leaving it be

Most of these remains are legally protected as scheduled monuments, and all of them are fragile. The stonework you see has survived because nobody has moved it.

• Do not move, rearrange or remove stones, and never build your own cairn on or near an ancient one.
• Do not dig, and do not use a metal detector on scheduled land — it is a criminal offence.
• Keep boots and dogs off the interiors of huts and off the tops of cairns and banks.
• Report damage, or a find you think is new, to the relevant national park archaeologist or the local historic environment record.

Do all that, and you can enjoy the quiet thrill of standing in a doorway that has not had a door for three thousand years. Take a bearing before you start staring at the ground, though — it is surprisingly easy to lose your route while your eyes are fixed on a ring of mossy stones.