Conclusion: A Sense of Place

It has often been supposed that the Anglo-Saxon poet lamenting the passing of an heroic society was referring to the ruins of Roman walls, for some reason decorated with serpentiform designs. But it seems more likely that the walls in question were those of an older order altogether, the grass-covered ramparts of a long-abandoned hillfort, winding serpent-like around the contours of a conspicuous local landmark like the Lambton Worm of Wearside folklore. However derelict, such sites must have retained a sense of place that heightened in collective memory the importance of people and events that were associated with them. Archaeology by convention characterizes ancient societies on the basis of the artefacts that they leave behind, whether structural and monumental, or portable and ephemeral. What survives will depend in significant measure upon the durability of material or construction, and upon a variety of taphonomic and environmental factors relating to the deposit or residual context. It will also self-evidently depend upon what communities chose to create and to leave behind, since artefacts are essentially proxy expressions of what they regarded as important, reflecting not just a basic utility but something of the identity and social values of the makers. As hillforts are the most substantial, monumental constructions of Late Bronze Age and Iron Age communities in north Alpine Europe, exceeding in scale even funerary monuments of those local groups that created lasting memorials to the dead, we may infer that they were the most potent expression of what mattered to the communities that built them. One of the recurrent frustrations of archaeology is that for periods or regions in which settlement remains are well represented, burial sites can prove elusive, and vice versa. What appears to be an exasperating demonstration of Murphy's Law nevertheless must have a significant explanation. In effect, some communities leave a mark predominantly in terms of settlement remains and others predominantly in funerary monuments. Diepeveen- Jansen (2007: 385) observed that in the Iron Age of the Marne-Moselle region, ‘the use of hillforts alternates with the employment of increasingly ostentatious burial practices’ (my emphasis), with the implication that this must reflect a meaningful shift in social expression.

Anatomy of Hillfort Enclosure

The most conspicuous element of a hillfort is generally its perimeter works, whether rubble wall or degraded bank and ditch. Their excavation in cross-section is a means of disclosing the structural sequence, which need not correspond to the occupational sequence of the site. The next most notable feature of the enclosure is its entrance, marked by a gap or inturn in the wall or bank, and a natural causeway across the ditch. Many hillforts are the product of a complex structural sequence, reflecting successive periods of occupation and building activity. Their perimeter works may range from relatively simple palisaded enclosures to more elaborate double or multiple earthworks that may occupy as great an area as that enclosed. Though a succession of occupational phases may result in progressive enhancement of the enclosing earthworks in both scale and complexity, it would be facile to assume a progression through time from the simplest form of construction to the most elaborate. There is no a priori reason why any given configuration, univallate rampart, bivallate, or multivallate, or method of construction, palisade, wall rampart, dump rampart, could not have been chosen at any given stage of a site's use. Though there are instances where a palisaded enclosure has been superseded by a timber-framed box rampart fronted by a ditch and subsequently by a dump rampart created by enlarging and deepening the ditch, in principle there is no reason why simple dump or glacis ramparts should not have been as early as or earlier than more elaborately constructed timber-framed ramparts, being less demanding of resources and requiring no greater manpower or effort to build. In practice, however, it would be difficult to replace a dump rampart, or a timber-framed rampart that had fallen into disrepair, with a timber-framed structure without labour-intensive clearance, because of the problems presented by the horizontal ties. This doubtless accounts for the apparent absence of horizontals from rampart B at Cadbury Castle (Alcock 1972), as a result of which the structure was fatally weakened. The only practical option would be to clear out and enlarge the ditch to create a heightened dump over the debris of the earlier wall.

Defining Issues

‘Hillfort’ is a term of convenience. It is widely recognized that the monuments in question are not restricted topographically to hills, and that their role may not have been primarily, and certainly not exclusively, for military defence. Nor are they restricted chronologically to the Iron Age, though during that period they are particularly prominent. The term came into general currency following the publication in 1931 of Christopher Hawkes’ paper, simply entitled ‘Hillforts’, in Antiquity, which also established their predominantly Iron Age date in Britain. Prior to that, Christison (1898) in Scotland had discussed ‘fortifications’, and Hadrian Allcroft (1908) for England had classified ‘earthwork’, both extending their studies into the Medieval period. But ‘hillfort’ for all its limitations has remained in general usage in Britain. Chronologically, this study is concerned with the ‘long Iron Age’; that is, including the post-Roman Iron Age in northern Britain especially, and with later Bronze Age antecedents. Geographically it is concerned with regional groups throughout Britain, but with further reference to Ireland, and in the wider context of relevant sites and developments in continental Europe. The key element of the sites under consideration is enclosure, physically or conceptually demarcating an area to which access is restricted or controlled. This may be achieved by rampart and ditch, stockade or fence, or by the incorporation of topographical and natural features such as cliff-edge or marsh. The scale of enclosing works may range from a relatively modest barrier to massive earthworks that reshape the landscape, and in structural morphology, from single palisade or bank to multiple lines, variously disposed. Topographically they may be located around hilltop contours, on cliffedge, ridge, or promontory, on spurs or hill slopes, in wetlands or spanning river bends, or across variable terrain. In area enclosed they may range from well under a hectare to 20 ha and more, with the territorial or terrain oppida of the late pre-Roman Iron Age attaining 300 ha or more. From size alone, therefore, we may infer a great diversity in the practical, social, and symbolic purposes that they may have served. At the smaller end of the scale, the distinction between hillforts and other enclosed settlements is sometimes a matter of subjective assessment, but otherwise their size and scale suggests that they were community sites, serving a social unit larger than a single family or household.

Inside and Outside of Hillforts

By the 1960s, a greater interest in the social and economic role of hillforts demanded more extensive excavation of their interiors. Whilst fieldwork was still dependent on volunteer labour and limited research funds, the expense of large-scale stripping by hand would have been prohibitive, and only with public funding of ‘rescue’ or ‘salvage’ excavation in advance of development was it practical to contemplate large-scale area excavation. Hillforts that were extensively excavated included Balksbury (Wainwright 1969; Wainwright and Davies 1995; Ellis and Rawlings 2001) and Winklebury (Smith 1977; Robertson-Mackay 1977; Fisher 1985) in Hampshire. Whilst large-scale examination of hillfort interiors is plainly essential to an understanding of their economic and social functions, there is a high probability that ephemeral features, the foundations of which did not penetrate into subsoil or bedrock, will be destroyed by mechanical stripping, if they have not already been damaged beyond retrieval by ploughing. So the question remains: how partial and therefore potentially misleading are the surviving plans of hillfort interiors thus exposed? Hillfort exteriors, arguably equally important to an understanding of the role of the enclosure as its interior, have been even more neglected, first because of an implicit assumption that the earthworks defined the area of the ‘site’, and second, because the logistical problems of excavating outside the limits of the ramparts increased exponentially with distance from the enclosure. The possibility, indeed probability, of activity contemporary with the occupation of the hillfort having extended beyond the limits of the rampart need not necessarily imply a social division between acropolis and polis on the eastern Mediterranean model. It simply requires a redefinition of the concept of what constituted the ‘site’ in which the enclosure earthworks are not the definitive criterion. The issue was identified more than thirty years ago (Harding 1979; Hingley 1980), and excavation and survey at Battlesbury Camp, Wiltshire (Ellis and Powell 2008) and Castle Hill, Little Wittenham (Allen et al. 2011), has shown its importance for future research. There are three principal, non-intrusive ways of investigating hillfort interiors and immediate exteriors. The first is by surface survey, not in itself as simple as may appear at first sight, since detecting and meaningfully depicting the highly fugitive traces of prehistoric occupation requires an experienced eye, sensitive to the residual surface signs of constructional activity.

Ethnographic Models

Evaluating the contribution that a study of ethnographic models can make to an understanding of the role of hillforts in Iron Age society is as fraught with difficulties as is a critical assessment of documentary sources. Divorced in space and time from the Iron Age in Britain and north-western Europe, there can plainly be no direct cultural association or expectation that the social, political, economic, or belief systems that governed behaviour were necessarily comparable. Nevertheless, the basic requirements of providing food, shelter from the environment, and protection from hostile threat are universal, and communities widely separated in time and space may respond independently to similar situations in ways that may potentially illuminate the archaeological issues under review. As with experimental archaeology, we cannot say as a result of studying ethnographic analogies, that Iron Age communities in Britain built hillforts for such-and-such purposes or in the process believed this or that; only that these possibilities might be examined as potentially satisfying the available evidence. When it comes to social reconstruction, it may be possible to identify broad categories of social structures in which patterns of behaviour are recurrent, and more tentatively the same might be inferred for cognitive systems. The fact that we may never know what Iron Age communities believed is no reason for failing to address the question, which is not the same as simply asserting what they believed without presenting evidence or due qualification. Modern or early modern ethnographic models suffer from the inevitable disadvantage that they derive from contact between the native communities and European colonists. In consequence there is the probability that, as with Roman records of contacts with Gaulish or British Iron Age communities, native behaviour will in some measure have adapted to the alien cultural presence. This would apply even if the nature of contact were peaceable exploration, commercial, or evangelical, since the introduction of new technology and novel goods and practices would inevitably impact on local conventions. In the context of any defensive sites or protected settlements, the introduction of firearms plainly will have transformed any established convention of warfare that pertained in the pre-colonial era. Establishing the native tradition from earlier periods is not an easy or wholly reliable exercise, especially given that practices may have changed significantly if slowly over generations.

Documentary Sources

Prehistorians like to think of prehistoric archaeology as the ‘purest’ branch of the discipline, in that interpretation and reconstruction of prehistoric societies is solely dependent upon the principles and techniques of archaeology, untainted by the predisposition of history. The unfortunate polarization of attitudes was only too evident at a recent International Congress of Celtic Studies, at which some younger archaeologists were utterly dismissive of any argument that was based upon classical sources, an intolerance that was only comprehensible in the face of the equally irrational faith placed in these sources, irrespective of context or chronology, by some of their senior colleagues. This kind of uncritical use of texts doubtless underlies Hill's (1989) exhortation that Iron Age archaeological studies should become more like the Neolithic. For others, the present writer included, the challenge of the Iron Age derives largely from the fact that it does span the threshold of history, and that Britain and Europe are therefore populated by named individuals and known communities, not just by inanimate pots and stone artefacts. The age of hillforts is substantially protohistoric, though Christopher Hawkes’ (1954) term parahistoric is probably more accurate for much of the British Iron Age, for which the relevant texts derive from literate neighbours rather than from even a minority literate group among the native community. Archaeologists since Hawkes have sometimes talked about such periods as text-aided, as opposed to prehistoric periods that were text-free. It may be arguable whether the presence of textual sources is an aid or a complication, but the phrase text-free implies a measure of relief that for these periods at least the archaeologist is free to interpret the evidence uninhibited by possible contradiction from historical records. The problem with text-aided archaeology, of course, was that it tended to be text-led; that is, that archaeology was seen as a means of ‘proving’ or at least illuminating history. The subordination of archaeology to history that was implicit in this approach is well illustrated by the way that Sir Leonard Woolley's excavations at Ur were popularly heralded as proving the flood of Genesis, or Kathleen Kenyon's excavations at Jericho were presented as discovering the walls destroyed by Joshua, notwithstanding the fact that the Neolithic town with which she was primarily concerned pre-dated Iron Age Joshua by several millennia.

Function 2: Social, Economic, Ritual

In southern England, in terms of prevailing environmental conditions most hillforts could have been occupied or used on a permanent rather than seasonal basis. With the exception of Exmoor and Dartmoor in the far south-west, none are located above the 300m contour and therefore could potentially have sustained a mixed agricultural regime. In northern England, Wales, and Scotland, on the other hand, there are hillforts at altitudes that make seasonal use more likely, although even with some of the larger hillforts in southern Scotland and Northumberland, like Eildon Hill, Hownam Law, and Yeavering Bell, higher altitude may not have precluded occupation on a significant scale. We have already seen that some hillforts in southern Scotland and the Cheviots show ample evidence of occupation in the form of house stances, so that a residential function as a primary purpose is hardly in doubt. Sites like Hayhope Knowe or Camp Tops may be categorized as protected villages, and though some might seem scarcely to qualify as hillforts at all (Frodsham et al. 2007), others like Sundhope Kipp boast defensive earthworks, which seem almost disproportionate in scale to the area of the internal settlement. Sometimes the houses are so densely arranged within the interior as to exclude the possibility of division into different activity zones, unless some of these seemingly identical roundhouses actually served as workshops or stores rather than just for domestic occupation. Despite their relatively high altitude and exposed locations, there is every reason to believe that some sites were permanently occupied, since evidence of cord-rig agriculture often lies in immediate proximity to the enclosure. Even so, these cultivation plots must have been on the margins of viability in the Iron Age, and it is possible that these Borders upland sites by the later first millennium BC were used only seasonally. Indeed, progressive environmental deterioration may be a reason why the earthwork phase of enclosure at Hayhope Knowe was never completed. Archaeologically it is hard to point to evidence that might distinguish seasonal from permanent occupation. The number of buildings may be indicative of the intensity of use, but might stake-wall construction with numerous episodes of rebuilding indicate seasonal construction, as opposed to more permanent post-built houses? On the other hand, stone foundations could have been renovated seasonally in a manner than might be hard to distinguish archaeologically from permanent use.

History of Hillfort Studies

Popular perception polarizes opinions, and archaeology is no exception. Instead of complexities and paradoxes, we instinctively prefer simplification and certainties, even if this distorts the truth, except, of course, where academic compromise affords the comfort zone of indecision. Accordingly, Stukeley and the early antiquarians are regarded as eccentrics, concerned only with druids and ancient Britons painted with woad, whilst General Pitt-Rivers has been portrayed as the pioneer of modern, scientific archaeology in an era of dilettante barrow diggers. In Scotland, Daniel Wilson has been acclaimed for his first use in English of the term ‘prehistoric’, yet as far as hillforts were concerned he was scathingly dismissive of their significance. David Christison is widely cited as the excavator whose work at Dunadd on behalf of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland so appalled Lord Abercromby that he misguidedly transferred his bequest, originally in favour of the Society, to the University of Edinburgh for the foundation of the Abercromby Chair of Prehistoric Archaeology. Yet Christison's Early Fortifications in Scotland of 1898 was an authoritative survey of hillforts that was acknowledged as a model in Hadrian Allcroft's Earthwork of England (1908). Every generation likes to imagine that it has advanced the frontiers of knowledge to a degree that allows it to look upon earlier achievements with the benefit of better informed if slightly self-satisfied hindsight, but progress is seldom without its setbacks and sidetracks. Each generation hopefully builds upon the advances of its predecessors, and the questions posed by pioneers will necessarily appear facile to later researchers. Early antiquarian investigations had to address fundamental issues of basic site identification and dating, and it is salutary to recall that even Pitt-Rivers’ initial investigation of Sussex hillforts (Lane–Fox 1869) was primarily designed to advance the case for their being pre-Roman. We might also note that he was in no doubt that their function was as defensive sites, against one alternative view, current even then, that they were used for ritual purposes. Serious study of hillforts, notwithstanding the dilettantish curiosity evinced by landed gentry or leisured clerics, began effectively with the topographic descriptions and surveys of sixteenth-century antiquaries like William Camden, whose Britannia was published in 1586. This monumental work was revised and re-issued in several editions over a period of two hundred years, and was notably extended in Gough's edition of 1789.

Function 1: Defence

For much of the past two hundred years, a basic assumption has been that hillforts had a primarily defensive function. That they served also as settlements or for community gatherings, perhaps even for ritual or ceremonial activities such as seasonal festivals or inaugurations of kings, has been variously inferred, but it was not until relatively recently that the purpose of community defence within the framework of a hierarchical society was so fundamentally challenged. The reasons, however, were often based upon individual site circumstances, from which generalization hardly seems justified. At the Chesters, Drem in East Lothian (Figure 5.2a), for example, it was argued (Bowden and McOmish 1987) that the hillfort's defensive capability was compromised by being overlooked from the south by higher ground, from which missiles might have been projected into the enclosure. Tactically this seems odd, since the fort's multiple lines of enclosure, especially at its northwest- and east-facing entrances, makes it on plan one of the more complex multivallate hillforts in Britain. Whether these had realistic defensive capability or were intended primarily for display and status remains open to debate. Whilst it is certainly true in individual cases that hillforts were not sited topographically with tactical advantage as a paramount consideration, or that a regional class like the hill-slope forts of the south-west were apparently at a disadvantage from higher ground, or that the area enclosed by some hillforts was so great as to make their defence logistically impractical, equally we could cite hillforts where the enclosing earthworks by any standard would have been a very formidable barrier to assault. Every generation reads its archaeology in the conceptual context of its own time, and it is hardly surprising that a generation brought up with two world wars should have interpreted hillforts in terms of ‘invasions’. Wheeler's (1953: 12) description of Bindon Hill, Dorset, as a ‘beach-head’ could hardly have been conceived by anyone other than the brigadier who had fought through North Africa and the Salerno landing in Italy. Nevertheless it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the current challenge to the defensive role of hillforts stems not so much from individually anomalous sites as from a more general objection to the concept of conflict in prehistory, and is one facet of what has been noted earlier as the ‘pacification of the past’ (Keeley 1996: 23).

Hillforts in the Landscape

Landscape in common usage refers to the physical landforms of hills, valleys, rivers, and lakes, together with vegetational cover that may have changed significantly over the centuries depending upon environmental factors as well as the impact of human settlement. It may also refer to the man-made landscape of buildings and settlements, roads and boundaries made by human occupation over the centuries. Although field archaeologists tend to focus their attention upon ‘sites’, it has long been recognized that individual settlements cannot have functioned in isolation from their environment, nor from their neighbours in the landscape. Equally important, although at the limits of archaeological inference, is how later prehistoric people viewed their own environment, which can hardly have been a matter of ignorance or indifference. The fact that a Neolithic long barrow extends down the spine of the hillfort at Hambledon Hill, or that a causewayed enclosure lies concentrically within the circuit at the Trundle in Sussex, may not have determined the hillfort's location, but it is hardly likely that Iron Age builders were unaware of their antiquity and significance. Landscape archaeology is often wrongly regarded as a recent contribution to field archaeology. Following the long-term excavations at Danebury of the 1970s and 1980s, the Danebury Environs Project still stands as one of the most significant advances in hillfort studies, together with landscape surveys around Maiden Castle, Dorset, and Cadbury Castle among others. A pioneer in this field was Christopher Hawkes, encouraged from the 1920s by O. G. S. Crawford. In the St Catharine's Hill report, Hawkes had stated explicitly that his purpose was to show ‘the place occupied by the hill settlement in the life of the contemporary countryside’ (Hawkes et al. 1930: 6), and in his Hampshire hillfort excavations of the 1930s he demonstrated this principle, notably at Quarley Hill (Hawkes 1939), where his excavation was designed to elucidate the relationship between hillfort and those linear features that physically linked it to its surrounding landscape. The Danebury excavation was the ultimate sequel to Hawkes’ Hampshire hillfort campaign, and with its Environs Programme, extended the study of the hillfort in its landscape context on a scale never previously practicable. This entailed a study of documentary sources and air photographs as well as field survey with selective excavation.