File:How Tallon trig. point - geograph.org.uk - 1597315.jpg

English: How Tallon trig. point. As a large cairn, How Tallon must have been an obvious landmark to which to tie the parish boundary between Barningham and Newsham, now followed by the post-1974 boundary between County Durham and North Yorkshire. We know that at least eight marked rocks were incorporated into the burial mound. The boundary wall incorporates some of these cup-marked stones, and there may be more which have not been recognised. Archæologists believe there is a good case for demolishing the wall, removing the marked rocks to a museum and rebuilding the wall.

In 1897, the Reverend Reginald Alfred Gatty was sitting on the mound eating his lunch during a day's shooting (some things don't change much) and recognised his picnic site as a burial structure. Together with his host Sir Frederick Millbank, he called for spades and picks, and the next two days were spent digging. Burials, pottery and flints emerged and were taken away. Marked rocks were left on site unnoticed and only recognised (now built in to the wall) when the reports and finds were reexamined in 1980. There were five burials and a central empty cist (a stone-lined box in a pit) which is believed to have contained the first burial to be made, and the others, from the pottery, would be somewhere around 2000 BC (late Neolithic or early Bronze Age). Some of the marked rocks are clearly not removed outcrop or earthfasts, but deliberately selected cobbles, some marked on more than one surface. Of the eight known, seven are cupped, but one has elaborate designs on all faces. The 13 flint implements from the mound include broken barb-and-tang arrowheads, a plano-convex knife, earlier leaf-shaped arrow points, scrapers and other worked flints, all of which fit the same context as the pottery. The finds which were removed now form a fine display at 1410960.

To the west lie other prehistoric sites, including a settlement on the terrace just below, and close to a hundred marked rocks, with the strong probability that others are still to be found and recognised (they really are hard to spot!).