Lord Stones Country Park – owned by the Urra Estate – sits on land with an ancient pedigree, where a set of prehistoric stones forms part of a spectacular moorland panorama. The familiar local name – Lord Stones – tells a slightly misleading story, for although there are several stones here, the tale is actually of several lords and one significant stone, the so-called ‘Three Lords’ Stone’.

It’s typical of the ancient waymarkers and boundary stones found across the North York Moors, and the name is said to derive from three landowning lords whose estate boundaries met at this point on Carlton Bank. Marked with prehistoric carvings (cupmarks), the stone itself is one of a number of large kerbstones defining the perimeter of a Bronze Age burial mound – part of a small cemetery in a place where traditional boundaries, routes and meeting places have been established for many thousands of years. Indeed, before the
nearby café was developed, the hillside used to be covered in numerous ‘hollowways’ – ancient routes worn down into deep, roughly parallel, trenches by the passage of countless of feet and hooves over the centuries.

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