York Historic Environment Record

A large linear cut which probably acted primarily as a boundary ditch. As this feature is on the line of the Skelton/Rawcliffe parish boundary marked on the Ordnance Survey maps, it is suspected that the ditch was once the parish boundary. The villages of Skelton and Rawcliffe are regarded as having been established prior to the Norman conquest and it is possible that it was the original boundary, dug in the Anglian or Anglo-Scandinavian periods. The large curvilinear earthwork lies immediately west of the parish boundary as marked on the 1967 Ordnance Survey map; it could mark the position of a further length of an original, pre-conquest parish boundary ditch.