Why Is There a Pile of Stones on the Summit? Marks People Leave for Each Other

The form is universal because the material is universal and the need is constant. A pile of stones is visible against a landscape of loose stone, survives weather that destroys anything built of wood, requires no tools and can be made by one person. That has made it the default marker for a wide range of purposes, including showing a route across ground with no path, marking a summit, indicating a boundary between holdings or territories, covering a burial, marking a place where somebody died, and commemorating an event. Which purpose applies is frequently impossible to determine from the structure alone, which is a recurring difficulty in interpreting old ones.

Conventions differ by region and several are widespread:

• •A line of them marking a route, each visible from the last
• •A large one on a summit or a pass, marking arrival
• •Directional forms with a longer stone indicating which way to go
• •Arctic figures built in human shape, used for navigation and for driving caribou
• •Boundary markers, frequently recorded in legal documents
• •Burial mounds, which may be enormous and thousands of years old

The tradition of adding one to a pile when passing worked well when few people passed, and it scales badly. In heavily walked landscapes, visitors now build large numbers of small decorative stacks that serve no navigational purpose, and several national parks have begun removing them systematically. The objections are specific rather than aesthetic. Stones lifted from streams and shores remove habitat for the invertebrates, amphibians and fish that live beneath them, which is measurable. Stones taken from paths accelerate erosion. And a proliferation of unofficial piles destroys the navigational value of the real ones, since a walker in poor visibility cannot distinguish a route marker from a tourist's stack, which has led people astray in genuinely dangerous terrain.

Route marking without stone uses whatever is available, and the alternatives are worth recognising. Painted blazes on rocks and trees mark long-distance paths across Europe and North America, with each route using its own colour and shape combination recorded in guidebooks. Posts with coloured tops mark moorland routes where stone is scarce. Snow poles standing several metres high mark road edges and mountain routes where deep snow buries everything else, and they remain in place year round. Arctic and alpine regions use tall wooden tripods visible at great distance. Waymarking with arrows on standard discs is the modern British arrangement and is legally distinct, since a waymark indicates a right of way rather than merely a route.

A large proportion of the stone piles in northern European landscapes are prehistoric burial monuments rather than markers, and they are protected accordingly. Bronze Age burial cairns cover much of the uplands of Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia, typically containing a stone chamber or a cremation deposit, and they were placed on skylines to be seen from below. Chambered tombs of the Neolithic are larger and more elaborate. Later periods added clearance heaps, made from stones removed from fields, which look similar and are not monuments at all. Distinguishing these types is a standard field problem, and damaging a protected one by removing stones or building on it is a criminal offence in most countries.

A pile of stones needs no tools, survives weather and is visible against stony ground, which is why it serves as route marker, summit marker, boundary, burial and memorial worldwide. Adding a stone works where few people pass and fails where many do, removing habitat and drowning genuine route markers among decorative ones. Many upland piles are Bronze Age burials and are protected by law.