Oil Drum Lane

  H illforts pepper our hills, maybe around four thousand across the country. At least we  have called them hillforts. But are they? It seems that they not always on hills and probably not usually forts. The label was pinned on them by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, one of the most revered pre-history pundits of the 20th century and a former Brigadier in the Army so he might just have seen what he was programmed to see!  Sir Mortimer Wheeler Gandalf in the City?   In my own search for a sound basis for generalisation, I drew on lots of visits, slogged my way through a fat tome on hillforts generally, waded through archaeology papers in the British Library, scaled a mound of local landscape history books and tiptoed into the prehistory nerd websites. After all that, they remained inscrutable.  Some do seem to have seen conflicts. We are confident that Cadbury in Dorset saw battles with the Romans.  Others were clearly built with defence in mind, for instance by ...

  This is a series of posts loosely draped around my interest in our practical, emotional, legal and very often delusional relationship with land as property, and its origins.  Each of them can also be read as a 'standalone' piece, but although they come at the story from different angles, some overlap with others. Sorry. Can't be helped.  The Lib Dems' anthem, sung in a boozy session at each conference, is ‘The Land Song’. The chorus finishes with the declaration that ‘God made the land for the people'. The old hippies among you might recall that Woody Guthrie expressed a similar sentiment in secular terms. “ This land is your land, this land is my land…….This land was made for you and me”.       The Glee Club Song  In real, tangible terms, how can you own something that will be here for aeons to come? In what sense is the land yours, mine, or ours? Ill-defined rights to ownership are frequently claimed which on examination prove to be nebulous, a bit...

An ordinary distinction is between who owns the land and who gets to use it. In olden times and still in many places today, the former was usually a despot claiming a title underwritten by whatever Almighty he subscribed to. The latter was the individual, family, community or tribe who farmed it. Their interdependence was reflected in undocumented reciprocal commitments, with the farmers paying either a share of the bounty of the land or offering service in return for protection from rogues, thieves and invaders and sometimes more general assistance.  Farming as a team sport  Moving forward from the time of the Old Testament to the New, the Romans had proper, written laws. Because their hobby was nabbing other people’s territory, they had one set of rules for their home turf and another for captured lands. In their heartlands, the citizens got more protection and there were periodic and fraught attempts to frustrate venal exploitation and to redistribute land to the poor. In t...