The feature at Force Gill, on the north-eastern flank of Whernside in the Yorkshire Dales, lies in upland moorland at around 410m OD and is recorded in proximity to a post-medieval aqueduct serving the Little Dale catchment. Despite the "Aqueduct" classification in the Pleiades record, there is no firm evidence that this structure is Roman; the visible water channels in this area relate to the 19th-century Settle–Carlisle Railway construction and earlier farming/industrial water management rather than Roman engineering.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
If genuinely Roman, it would be a notable outlier, as no confirmed Roman aqueduct is known in this remote stretch of the central Pennines, far from the nearest military sites at Bainbridge (Virosidum) to the north-east and Lancaster to the west. As currently understood, however, the site has no demonstrable Roman significance, and its classification likely reflects a misattribution or conflation with the adjacent post-medieval water-management features.
The cairn itself is one of several small stone cairns scattered across the Whernside flanks, most of which are interpreted as prehistoric or as clearance/boundary markers; no excavation has demonstrated a Roman date. I am not aware of any published fieldwork at this specific cairn, and the Pleiades entry carries no descriptive content to corroborate the aqueduct identification.
The feature at Force Gill, on the north-eastern flank of Whernside in the Yorkshire Dales, lies in upland moorland at around 410m OD and is recorded in proximity to a post-medieval aqueduct serving the Little Dale catchment. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a aqueduct site from the Roman period in Britain.
Cairn at Force Gill, 80m SSE of Little Dale aqueduct is classified as a Roman aqueduct — a infrastructure site in the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer. Roman Britain's archaeology encompasses thousands of sites ranging from legionary fortresses and marching camps to villas, temples and towns.
Several Roman sites lie within a short distance, including Prehistoric, Romano-British, medieval and early post-medieval settlements, field systems and a deer park at High Park, east of Bindloss Farm (12.3 km), Gawklands Romano-British farmstead 200m east of Yewtree (12.7 km), Romano-British enclosed hut circle settlement 375m ENE of Collingholme (13.9 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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Research the area around Cairn at Force Gill, 80m SSE of Little Dale aqueduct