Strongholds of the chiefs

Stone forts or brochs have already featured in Chapter 3, as a special form of defended settlement found only in the north of Scotland and on the Scottish islands. Elsewhere in Britain and Ireland, banks and ditches were most often used to form the defences of the many thousands of hillforts which must have been built over the centuries, several thousand of them still surviving in good condition. Most hillforts date from the Iron .Age, that is after around 600 BC, though the earliest hillforts were being built in the late Bronze - Age. Even further back, in the. New Stone. Age around 3500 BC, causewayed camps were constructed which may have been the early precursors of the hillforts. Banks and ditches broken by causeways were constructed on hilltops, the best known example being Windmill Hill near. Avebury (Wiltshire). From evidence found there, in the form of more than 1,300 Neolithic pots, objects of flint and stone, and animal bones, some having been deliberately buried in the ditches, it would seem that the camp was used for some kind of ritual gathering rather than as a defensive settlement.

It was to be another 2,500 years before hilltop earthworks were used as defensive sites, though in the meantime small settlements and individual farmsteads must surely have been constructing some form of protection for themselves, against raids by wild animals on their livestock and the occasional bandit. Being small in scale, and often in lowland areas which have since been intensively cultivated, the remains of such humble fortifications as a bank, ditch and wooden stockade fence are scanty, only the earthworks having survived if at all. Such remains are now being discovered through tell-tale crop-marks, photographed from above, and it is becoming evident that in early ages the river valleys and other lowland sites were heavily settled and farmed, to a degree not before imagined, since all the visible remains so far found have been in upland areas. In Ireland, 30,000 or 40,000 of the so-called ring-forts were erected in the 2,000 years up to around AD 1200. They

The fort on Ham Hill (Stoke-sub-Hamdon, Somerset) is one of the largest in England, but it has been much damaged by quarrying. Here tee see one of the outer ditches and ramparts.

Were also called raths, and consisted of a farmstead protected by a simple water-filled trench.

With the passage of time, the people must have felt a more urgent need to band together in settlements which could be defended in periods of danger. The earthworks of the averagesized hillfort could not have been thrown up overnight. Planning was needed, and many thousands of man-hours of labour. Maiden Castle (Dorset) covers around 45 acres and the inner circumference is H miles, though admittedly that is a particularly large fort and developed in several phases. The big forts like Maiden Castle were skilfully designed and constructed, and were successful in keeping out invaders. Maiden Castle only falling about AD 44 to the might of a Roman army under Vespasian. Traces of huts inside many hillforts show that they were used as settlements, though whether continuously or intermittently is not known.

There are nevertheless some puzzling features if the hillforts were to be successful militarily. Some of them do not appear to have had wells, which would surely be necessary for the survival of the occupants in siege conditions. Also, the larger forts like Maiden Castle, with its circumference of U miles, would have required a great many men for its defence, as a lookout would constantly have to be kept for raiders. Some of the forts.

The so-calleti contour forts, follow the contours of the land and thus enhance the natural lines of a hilltop so effectively that it has been suggested that what appear to be defences may in fact have had entirely another purpose - landscape architecture for aesthetic reasons, or as a system for controlling and channelling the How of natural earth energies. (This is a subject we will return to in Chapter 19.) .Although it would appear that hill-forts were built with defence in mind, it must not be forgotten that we in the twentieth century view these sites in the light of our own experience, which has in the last few centuries involved almost constant warfare. People may not have been so belligerent in the time before the Romans arrived in Britain. In fact, as we have already noticed, there is no evidence for large-scale defences at all in the pre-iron. Age years, except for causewayed camps, and these were probably not built as defensive structures anyway. Perhaps we should think of these sites, whose common name ‘hillfort’ tends to prejudge the issue, more as tribal gathering places, where the people would meet regularly to trade, to follow religious rituals, to socialise. When danger threatened, which may have been rarely until the advent of the Romans, they would congregate at their local gathering-place, and unite to defend themselves against their common enemy. Some hillforts may also have been used as grain-stores.

Local gatherings at hillforts continued into recent times in some places. .A fair was held at Yarnbury hillfort (Wiltshire) until early this century; and at Burrough Hill hillfort (Leicestershire) an annual event was still popular in the sixteenth century as noted by antiquary John Leland: ‘To these Borow I lilies every year on. Monday after White Sonday come people of the country thereabout, and shoot, run, wrestle, dance, and use like other feats of exercise.’ There are many other similar examples on record.

The ruined stone tvall which once protected the north side of Craig Rhiwarth hillfort above Llan-gynog (Powys); to the south is a steep cliff.

In addition to the most frequent hilltop ‘forts’ in which the earthworks or defences follow the contours of the land, there were several other kinds of fort to suit other types of terrain. In low-Iving areas, plateau forts would be constructed, employing one or more sets of banks and ditches. Promontory forts were projections of land with steep slopes only needing the addition of banks and ditches across the strip of land linking the promon-torv to the surrounding land. By the sea, where steep cliffs were the main defence, promontory forts are known as cliff-castles. These are most numerous in Ireland, where the dramatic coastline of the south and west is ideally suited for fortification. .Around 200 such forts can be identified, and the defences were

Massive drv-stone walls. Because of the ease with which it could be obtained, stone was very widely used in Irish forts, and stone-wall defences were the Irish equivalent of the banks and ditches used elsewhere. Some of the walls still contain staircases and chambers. Four Irish forts included cheraux-de-frise among their defences - a ‘paving’ of stones laid sharp end up so that the attackers’ horses could not cross to the ramparts. A few examples of this have also been found in Wales and Scotland. 'Fhis svstem of defence may have been more widely used, employing pointed sticks of which no trace now remains.

Timber was widely used in the construction of defensive ramparts in those areas where it was plentiful, and one result of this is the so-called ‘vitrified forts’. 'Fhese are the subject of considerable controversy, some people believing the vitrification was accidental, others that it was deliberate, d'he latter theory is that ramparts were constructed of stone with a timber filling, the wood then being ignited and the resulting intense heat causing the stone to melt, thus forming a solid rampart of fused stone. Other archaeologists feel that the ramparts would have been vulnerable to fire, perhaps because of a drier climate, and the burnings were initiated either by attackers or accidentally by the defenders. However the fires began, there is no doubt that a very intense heat would be needed to cause the stone to melt. Vitrification has occurred too widely for anyone to deny that it could happen, but how it came about is still not really understood.

.ound 2,500 hillforts survive in good condition on the British mainland, and visiting them is a healthy pursuit strongly recommended to the more energetic of our readers. W e can only give a small sampling in ‘Places to Visit’, but about 150 of the most interesting forts on the British mainland are described in detail in.. H. .. Hogg's Hill-Forts of Britain which is also a good general introduction to the subject, and the best of the Irish forts feature in. Anthony Weir’s Early Ireland: A Field Guide.