Hillforts ??

Britain's hillforts are not the prehistory you see in museums. They are the kind you can climb on. It is the difference between meeting the King in real life, or in Madame Tussauds. 

John Constable said that his painting of Stonehenge was intended to capture something in the air that "carries you back to beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period". That is where I wanted to go, so I visited dozens of them, waded through dense archaeology papers in the British Library (did you know that fossilised snail shells were used to date these things!),  scaled a mound of local landscape history books and tiptoed into the prehistory nerd websites. 

Stonehenge: Constable: 1836 

This is a much-revised version of an earlier post I wrote to accompany my notes on the chalk hills and my bike routes on pootler.co.uk. In it, I prioritised their individual histories and characteristics over the wider story, and my snapshot descriptions took little account of how they might have changed over time. Looking back, it was like asking you to make sense of one of Seurat's paintings by studying the paint dots. 

Seurat : Seascape

I want to rectify that, but it's challenging. The largest are monumental while the smallest are little more than bumps in the ground. The former prompts us to cloak the quiet, breezy hilltops they occupy with battles, rituals and legendary heroes like King Arthur and Cymbeline. Some might have witnessed all of that at some point, but it's just fragments of a much longer story. We tend to see what we want to see, and overlook a lot by focusing on events rather than the changes they witnessed over millennia.  

What I want to do here is chart our puddle of knowledge and sea of ignorance, before taking a closer look at two of the most physically impressive and storied examples, Cadbury and Maiden Castles. If you want finer detail on individual (and less visually impressive) places around south east England, this has been relegated to 'Geek Notes' at the end of the post.  

In the map below, note how many sites there are to the West and North, with fewer in the east. Maybe that is because the land in the east is flatter and thus provides fewer sites on high ground, or because of cultural differences among tribes.  

See (Link) British Hillforts

Many don’t look like much now; many of the banks and ditches wouldn’t have deterred the in-laws, let alone the outlaws. Some might also have been more vulnerable to centuries of erosion and later ploughing and levelling or, like Tadmarton Camp in Oxfordshire, bisected by a road and incorporated into a golf course!  But some remain impressive, and you would be surprised how few have been properly excavated and studied. 

More questions without answers! A key issue here is ignorance, and not just my own. The builders didn't leave us written records or a user's guide, and in any event those users came and went. In trying to understand them, we bring our own predilections; we want an epic, we like some mystery. 

Thankfully, some science exists to bring us down to Earth. Archaeologists and others find things the occupants left and have techniques to date them, so they are often better at telling us 'when' than 'why'. Was the two thousand year old ditch to keep animals out or the rubbish in?  Is the knife for defence or just cutlery? Were the mounds of pebbles just debris or stores of slingshot? And what date do you attribute to something that might have been constantly modified and mucked about over a thousand years? 

The term itself is loaded. Hillforts are not always on hills and quite probably not always, or even often, forts. That label was pinned on them by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, one of the 20th century’s most revered pundits on pre-history, the times before we have written records. As a former Brigadier, he might simply have seen what he was trained to see! As the saying goes, a man with a hammer looks for a nail. Here he is, doing a Gandalf impersonation. 

Sir Mortimer Wheeler MC Etc. 

Some do indeed seem to have been built with defence in mind. You can find what appear to be additional fortifications at what might otherwise be a weaker entrance. In most places, no evidence of conflict has been found, but there are exceptions, and some are horrible. At Fin Cop in Derbyshire, the remains of many women and children were dumped next to a hastily built fortification. 

Elsewhere, an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but there is also no reason why we have to assume that every bank and ditch we see was built for defence.  In most cases, the banking wouldn’t have deterred the in-laws, let alone the outlaws. Maybe it was to keep animals in, or to provide a point to extract a toll on people coming to trade? 

There are other potential explanations for some, for instance, as trading centres with guarded entrances to check (and maybe tax) what was going in and coming out. The grander efforts might have been some chieftain's status symbol, a swaggering construction like the faux castles you see today.

Some of them don't appear to have been lived in at all; the smaller ones were probably simple enclosures. The most common evidence of occupation is the post-holes of typical Iron Age roundhouses, perhaps taking advantage of good farmland, water or a trade route. You still see the sites of larger medieval farms surrounded by moats, probably only dug as status symbols. It is fair to assume that prehistoric people were equally keen on a bit of built bling! 

Chyauster : Cornwall : Recreation

In terms of defining when and why they were built, if a place has been standing for thousands of years, isn't it likely that the owners might occasionally have applied to the town planners for a 'change of use', perhaps from fort to farmyard or the reverse? Many do appear to have been used, abandoned and reused later. Maybe people then were as relaxed about flattening what went before as the people of Tadmarton are today.

Evidence-based settlement model

But we do know that, while there are lots of ringworks that date back to the Bronze Age in England (i.e. 4500 years ago to 2800 years ago), or even earlier, most of what is readily visible today originated in the Iron Age, and specifically between 800 BC and the visit of Julius Caesar in 55 BC. In Southeast England, few were used after that. 

To put that in context, the Bronze Age saw waves of immigrants from Europe bringing horses, cattle and copper, remodelling the existing monuments at Stonehenge. When the so-called 'Beaker People' arrived, the earliest ringed enclosures already existed, but they added a lot. 

The Iron Age saw waves of immigrants from Europe bringing iron weapons and tools (obviously!) but also more sophisticated farming supporting a much larger population. And Southern England was not a cultural and economic backwater when the Romans turned up! To really achieve Brexit, you have to turn the clock back a long, long way. 

Galician Hill Settlement

Many of the early hillforts were on higher ground. Maybe people got fed up lugging water up hills, because by the late Iron Age, there were also much larger (and less obviously defensible) enclosures in the lowlands. These 'Oppida' were the nearest thing that the tribes had to urban living and hadn’t been around for long when the Romans arrived and, in some cases, took them over. A good example is Silchester, where a few low mounds are the remains of Calleva, a major settlement of the Atrebates tribe. It was not on a hill and not particularly defensible. Now what is left is barely visible and dwarfed by the scale and remaining walls of the Roman town that followed and absorbed it. 

Calleva

It doesn't help that both thoughtful and imaginary explanations have grown over these places like weeds.  Not knowing for sure, many people have done what Wheeler did, and supplied a meaning that fitted in with their prior beliefs. A particular bugbear of mine is some researchers' habit of squeezing sacred symbolism out of anything that can’t be readily explained; every big flat rock is an altar. 

But we also have to accept that these hillforts didn’t exist in a cultural vacuum and that some ceremonial or religious shenanigans might have had a role. Nearby, you often find ancient long barrow tombs, monuments, field patterns and boundaries, as well as causeways, cursus and whatnot, whose purpose is even more mysterious. The landscape surrounding Stonehenge is a good example, best seen from your helicopter. The map below is expandable.

Stonehenge Landscape

It is best to see them as part of an entire functional landscape which provided sustenance, security and, it seems, partly from evidence elsewhere, connections with the otherworld and the afterlife. The archaeologists have certainly found more strange stuff left lying around than you might expect after a solstice swingers party. For instance, possible votives and the arranged remains of ravens or horses and odd corpses, some of which might have been exhumations or sacrifices. 

On a less frivolous note, there does seem to have been a preference for entrances to be aligned on an east/west axis. Famous monuments like Stonehenge and Newgrange in Ireland, both of which date back to the Stone Age, show that solar alignments were important. But does that necessarily or always indicate worship of a Sun God? In the smaller settlements, it might reflect a simple effort to extend the hours of useful daylight. Take druids, for instance. Odds on they were a thing. But do we actually have any real idea what their role was? 

Solstice at Newgrange

In our ignorance, we leap to 'interpretations'. My view is that what is presented to us as fact is very often based on guesswork and that there is a general tendency to try and fit the thin evidence to the theory rather than the reverse. Arthur has been associated with Cadbury and the Battle of Baden, where the Britons are reputed to have routed the Saxons, but there is no compelling evidence for either, and they are both similarly associated with a myriad of other places. 

Badon

It is a bit like the 'Grim's Ditch' embankments you see in many places. Grim was Woden. You can choose whether or not to believe he had anything to do with them. The example below is in Oxfordshire and will be damaged by HS2. You'd think that Woden might take a dim view of that!  But, more likely, they simply marked boundaries. 

Grim's Ditch Nuffield

The two huge hillforts I referred to at the beginning of this post do seem to have seen conflicts. Two of the largest were Cadbury Castle in Somerset and Maiden Castle in Dorset. Neither started life as a fort.   

Cadbury is much the older; the site was being farmed over 5000 years ago, but the first fortifications came very much later and were roughly contemporaneous with those at Maiden Castle. There is evidence of a battle against the Romans here, and the ringed enclosure was still in use in Saxon times more than 4000 years later, when at one stage there were several substantial houses and a mint. It has been claimed that there were also small temples there.  My earlier comments apply. How do they know that the scanty remains were a temple rather than (say) an Iron Age pub? 

Cadbury Castle 

This is an atmospheric video of Cadbury. Link:  Cadbury From The Air   And if you are gagging for real detail, here is a report with more detail from the History Hit podcast. Link: Cadbury Archaeology

In contrast, Maiden goes back about 600 years. In its heyday, it had a 'ditch to bank' height of over 25m, maybe once with a palisade to add more height. Imagine the work involved, especially since they are unlikely to have wanted to waste precious iron on making shovels! I like to think that the pre-eminent God for the people who built it was the one who could be summoned to appear at the wheel of a JCB. 

There is evidence of a tribal spat here, which Mortimer Wheeler, a Roman fan, mis-identified as a battle with Vespasian's legions. After the Romans left, it fell out of use.  It is hard to see how it could be defended anyway. It doesn't have a water supply, and it takes a lot of people to defend a site the size of 50 football pitches. 

Maiden Castle, Dorset

Maiden Castle Ramparts
(English Heritage) 

Similar enclosures can be found across Europe. Again, England was essentially a European nation. You can see the evidence provided by Asterix's village in the pic below. But the stylistic timeline differed. What was being built in England in the Iron Age seems to have already disappeared on the other side of the Channel. Further afield, the Bilsk hillfort in Ukraine covers 10,000 acres and has 20 miles of ramparts. Londoners, that is 15 times the combined area of Kensington Gardens and Richmond Park!

La Ville d'Astérix

 I am very conscious that if you were reading this in the hope of getting a definitive explanation of what these structures were and who lived in them, you will be disappointed. Treat the mystery as an attraction. Think about how the builders and occupiers organised their lives and saw their landscape. It was a very different world, where the unseen and unexplained played a far greater part. 

Recalibrate. There are two ways of thinking about time here. Remember that more centuries elapsed between the early hillfort builders and the Romans than between the Romans and us. Look on these places as time machines to be used to explore the deep past. But also that in some ways it wasn't that long ago. We are not talking dinosaurs here! If you could line up all of your ancestors since Cadbury Castle was built, the queue would be less daunting than you might find at St Pancras for the Eurostar or for Wembley tickets. 

So when you see the hillforts, don't try to imagine and pic siege or battle, but rather the sheer amount of changes those ancestors of yours have witnessed. These histories might be hazy, but like the stories of the hillforts and settlements themselves, they are real. 

GEEK NOTES 

This is a truncated version of the notes on my earlier blog post, which can still be found here. Link: Hillforts on Pootler. They cover visible examples of hillforts and ring works in the part of South East England. There is even more detail in the waypoints on the individual bike routes. 

There is a string of hillforts along the North Wessex Downs section of the Ridgeway, between Swindon and Goring, which illustrate the variety. They are Liddington, Uffington, Rams Hill and Segsbury. 

Liddington Castle might have been started in the late Bronze Age, and was deserted and then reoccupied in Roman times and added to again after the Saxons arrived. There is no sign of military use even though the impressive ramparts appear to have once been revetted with timber. 

Liddington Ramparts

Uffington, which is next to the famous White Horse, is also an impressive size. It would have had two timber retaining walls, separated by a ditch filled with earth and rubble. It appears to have been in continuous use until shortly before the Romans turned up. 

Between Liddington and Uffington, in a hollow in the hills, there is a small enclosure called Alfred’s Castle, which is unlikely to have had anything to do with Arthur and presents a homely contrast with roundhouses, pits for grain and evidence of metal working and pottery. It lasted from the late Bronze Age, and the Romans later used the site for a villa/farm.
 

Uffington, in the background

Rams Hill had a single timber-framed wall, and although it seems to have started life as a defensible space, it might have been superseded by nearby Uffington and ended up mainly an enclosure rather than a fort. It sits amid a larger-than-usual collection of burial mounds. Maybe that is significant. Perhaps the food was really bad. Who knows. Now it falls into the ‘blink, and you will miss it’ category.

Segsbury seems to have been enclosed by a ditch before the ramparts were added and seems to have declined while nearby Uffington was still in use. Maybe they were built by the same people for different purposes. It has been suggested that it might have fallen out of use because people started to raise cattle rather than sheep, while Uffington retained a wider religious or ceremonial role.  There is more information and a very short flyover video of it here: Link: Segsbury Castle.

To the North, Membury Camp sits on a small plateau below the scarp and is presumably located to make good use of access to Membury Services on the M4. While it is wooded, the earthworks are impressive once you find them, even though they have been damaged in places by the adjacent RAF base. 

Facing these, on the limestone hills across on the other side of the Vale of the White Horse, were some much smaller enclosures, possibly just banks with a fence on top and used on an occasional basis, perhaps in connection with the sheep farming.

On the Southern side of the Wessex Downs, Walbury near Inkpen Beacon covers 33 ha. It hasn’t been researched and only has a single bank, but it is spectacularly located and well preserved. 

Walbury

In Buckinghamshire, there are quite a few, more varied and scattered. Desborough in West Wycombe and Cholesbury near Tring were built in the late Iron Age and seem to have still been in use when the Roman Galleys appeared on the horizon. Cholesbury is a 6 ha enclosure with wooded ramparts on high ground in the village. I assume that, if the enclosure was intended for defence, the ground must have been open when it was built. Or maybe it simply served to mark the settlement or to keep animals in or out. Although there is some evidence of iron working, it doesn’t generally seem to have been made much use of, maybe because of the lack of a water supply. This must have been a common problem on the chalk hills.  

Cholesbury

In contrast, enclosures at Ivinghoe, Taplow, Boddington and Medmenham might date to the late Bronze Age, almost a millennium earlier.

Tree cover is an issue with many of these relic settlements, not just because they now hide what’s there, but also because the growth can damage the ramparts. Desborough Castle (in Wycombe) is an example. Pulpit Hill above Great Kimble and Boddington near Wendover are others. In each case, once you get into the trees, the banks are visible but not very impressive. 

Incidentally, if you are walking the Ridgeway between Wendover and Princes Risborough, or dropping in on the Prime Minister at Chequers, don’t be fooled by Cymbeline’s Castle near Pulpit Hill. It looks like it should be a hill fort, and the legend is supportive: Cymbeline is associated with the Iron Age British chieftain Cassivellaunus, who the Romans fought and defeated in AD 54, but it is actually the site of a medieval Motte & Bailey. Nearby Pulpit Hill is the real McCoy, but although marked, it is small and wooded.

To the East, bits left by the inhabitants have been found in most places, but only Ivinghoe has really been studied intensively, maybe because of its location. The view is good, and some useful information was gleaned about the physical features. But the remains were unimpressive, just a sword and a few bits of skull. Here is a link to the English Heritage Report in case you want more. (Gimme sympathy! In preparing this blog series, I have gone through hundreds of these!!)  Link: Ivinghoe Beacon Archaeology

One plus is a good view of the place where the Death Star crashed. Baffled? See my post here: Tinseltown.  

Ivinghoe Beacon

As you go east into Hertfordshire, the chalk hills shrink away, and the number of prominent sites diminishes with them. Ravensburgh (north east of Luton, and which sits on private land) is about 9 ha. with a single bank and ditch. It was a comparatively late effort; the site had been farmed until it was built around 400 BC and refortified around 50BC. There are signs that there might have been conflict there, and it is one of several candidates for the location for Cassivellaunus' supposed ‘last stand’ against the Romans. 

I have already referenced Cymbeline's Castle in this connection, and a settlement at Wheathampstead also lays claim to this ignoble comeuppance. It reminds me of the numerous claims to be the original Camelot, and wouldn’t you just know it, some associate Cassivellaunus with Arthur. His ghost was photographed there. Or maybe I lifted the graphic from the 'Assassin's Creed' video game.....You decide. 

Other spots that have been thought of as hillforts are less impressive and demonstrate how legend can supersede the facts. ‘The Aubreys’ (Redbourn) was in use in Roman times, and while the name might mean ‘fortified place’, there is no evidence that there was any fighting there. The site has been mangled by subsequent development. Sharpenhoe is close to Ravensburgh, but this might not be a hillfort, but just a result of the proliferation of rabbit warrens!   

Many of the known settlements are now thought to have been, not so much forts, as loose and sprawling centres for artisans and traders.  Danebury in Hampshire was thoroughly explored fifty years ago. It isn't very imposing. The evidence points to its lengthy role as a settlement for a few hundred people, maybe trading their agricultural produce for metals and taking advantage of the proximity to the River Test. 

Many of the sites have similarly limited defensive potential, and the extent of Iron Age trade is often underestimated, so perhaps routes of travel and trade dictated their location. St Albans is an example, and the Atrebates settlement at Silchester and the Catuvellauni at Wheathampstead might be others. The pic below is the Dyke Hills on flat ground next to the Thames at Dorchester, which was the late Iron Age border between those two tribes. It was hardly impregnable! 

Dyke Hills: Dorchester on Thames