The Hod Hill survey revealed the outline of over 200 ring-ditches surrounding Iron Age round-houses, whose diameter was about 10–15 metres (11–16 yd); they mostly feature a single entranceway, which often faced south-east, towards daytime sunshine. I know from round-houses I have reconstructed myself that you need an outer ditch to catch run-off from the conical thatched roofs, which would otherwise wet the mud-plastered walls and cause them slowly to collapse (waterproof plaster was not introduced in Britain until Roman times). The geophysical data also showed clear evidence for storage pits and/or hearths within each building – which would suggest they were used by people rather than animals.
One of the most striking features at Hod Hill (and also at Maiden Castle and other sites in the survey) was the clear evidence of roads heading towards the entranceways through the defences. A few smaller lanes can be seen to branch off them. Houses and other structures cluster along the roads and lanes, frequently overlapping with each other. This would suggest that many were rebuilt and that the site was occupied for quite an extended period. Each of the 200 or so round-houses would have been large enough to have accommodated a family of perhaps six to ten people, but we know they could not all have been occupied at the same time. If we also include the many smaller houses and other possible structures that were revealed, we might well be looking at a population certainly of hundreds, if not of a thousand or two, at certain times.
The geophysical plots at Hod Hill revealed some fascinating details that provide hints that the settlements were probably controlled by a centralized authority, or authorities – most likely tribally based. For example, some of the roads and lanes appear to have been bounded by ditches along their edges. On closer examination of the plots, these ditches can be seen to have been formed by joining up a series of neighbouring house ring-ditches. This new ditch would also help the houses stay dry, it would clearly edge the road – and also help reduce mud. As we would say today: a win-win situation, brought about by close co-operation and a positive attitude. But it didn’t happen in only one instance, which is why I think it was about more than just happy coincidence and friendly neighbours. I am convinced it was symptomatic of something far more profound.
At some points along the edges of Hod Hill’s internal roads, the ring-ditches of houses are replaced by a series of four-post structures, which have been interpreted, very convincingly – and helped by experimental work – as raised grain storage silos. Inside houses, grain was stored in pits, possibly lined with basketry or fabric, but the family’s top-up supply would have come from the line of raised silos further along the road. It is hard not to see such a short supply chain as being organized collectively by the tribal authorities, on behalf of the people who would have both consumed and grown the grain. When Barry Cunliffe’s excavations started to reveal grain storage silos at Danebury, I can remember being fascinated by the discovery; there was something very immediate about it. Throughout my childhood I had lived in an agricultural village in north Hertfordshire, surrounded by grain stores and combines. The Christmas turkey came from my uncle’s farm and after the festivities we cut sprigs of hazel from a nearby wood for the next season’s peas and runner beans. Our ‘supply chains’ were all very local and they were still largely family-run.
There is a tendency to see local, or family-based, networks as being just about economics, but there was also another side to them. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, for example, my grandfather helped organize the digging of a large pond, which still exists today and is home to a huge population of vociferous frogs in springtime. The creation of that pond gave employment to many men in the village in wintertime, when rural work was hard to find. Socially altruistic schemes such as this were not confined to the 1930s; in late Victorian times, a soup kitchen was built in an outbuilding on one of the farms near the centre of the village. Our village wasn’t unique: similar rural soup kitchens were built elsewhere to help feed the hungry in hard times.
The emergence of more centralized systems of governance, as witnessed by the organization of hillforts in the Iron Age, was not just about command and control. A gradual centralization of local governance will not necessarily give rise to powerful chiefs or egotistical Big Men – Iron Age equivalents of ex-President Trump. Yes, powerful individuals would sometimes have taken advantage of the system, but there were always checks and balances, because the system was based on family ties and family values, which have always included a strong element of social care for the elderly and vulnerable. I strongly suspect these very ancient and deep-rooted traditions of local supply and demand, of social control and humanitarian welfare, will be fundamentally important in the third decade of the twenty-first century.
*
When we think about hillforts and defensive sites in general, we naturally tend to focus on their military aspects: the ramparts, entranceways, strategic positioning and so forth. People also get rather excited about the discovery and location of weapons and ammunition: swords, spearheads, arrowheads and slingstones. The bodies and graves of fallen warriors are treated with enormous care and possible wounds are studied under the searching beam of high-powered microscopes. Such things may provide us with glimpses of how people conducted the brutal business of hand-to-hand fighting in the ancient past, but do they really tell us very much about how people might have viewed defensive sites such as hillforts and, later, castles? It’s worth bearing in mind that imposing structures have also to be seen and thought about when the local people are living their daily lives and the community is not at war.
Fighting is an expensive business and very disruptive; anthropological research has shown that in many tribal societies the actual process of killing, or being killed, was sometimes limited to certain individuals – ‘champions’ who would represent a particular powerful person, or community.13 The biblical fight between David and Goliath (a Bronze Age memory?) is a good example of this. Another way to minimize the economic impact of conflict was to confine it to times of the year when younger men were less heavily occupied doing useful, productive tasks on the land and in the community. After harvest, in the autumn, is such a time and further economic and social damage can be constrained if attacks are limited to certain types of raids, such as rustling for livestock. Prehistoric people may well have talked or sung about wholesale slaughter and bloody battles, but very rarely actually engaged in such mayhem. Our ancestors were not stupid. We would do well to heed their example, in a modern era that has seen two blood-soaked and astronomically expensive world wars.
As people went about their daily lives below the towering ramparts of the local hillfort, did they gaze up at them as glorious symbols of military prowess? Maybe sometimes, just as some people might gaze on the White Cliffs of Dover as a symbol of Britain’s wartime resistance to the Nazi threat. But thoughts like that are relatively rare. Even when I see a Spitfire or a Lancaster bomber – and both iconic planes are quite frequent visitors to the skies above our farm, because the RAF Battle of Britain Flight is based at RAF Coningsby, on the edge of the Fens, a few miles to the north of where I’m writing this – I don’t see them as symbols of the Battle of Britain, nor of the carpet-bombing of German cities. I look at them as superb pieces of engineering and I thrill to the sound of their roaring Rolls-Royce Merlin engines. Other people may think of wartime personalities as the planes fly past: Churchill, perhaps, but more likely Vera Lynn or my mother’s huge favourite, Tommy Handley, the comedian star of the highly successful BBC Radio wartime show ITMA (It’s That Man Again).14 And then there are those unexpected thoughts and coincidences that arise when you think about any historical topic: the last episode of ITMA was broadcast on my fourth birthday, in January 1949.
So we should be very careful about attributing simplistic motives when we ponder the significance of certain sites and monuments to people in the past. Our own thoughts about such things can be complex, confusing and plain inexplicable – so why cannot theirs have been, too? This morning I woke
up at about 3.30 a.m. and soon I became conscious that my brain was worrying about – surprise, surprise – Covid-19 and the pandemic. As time passes, I find I am getting better at managing these early morning anxiety attacks – to such an extent that I now find I have nights of decent sleep, when I wake up feeling rested. These good nights happen about five times a week. This morning was one of the other two, poor-sleep nights. So I did what I always now try to do in such moments: I decided to think about this book, or my blog or possible garden improvements. Anything is better than anxious worrying. And this time my subconscious decided to ponder the hillforts of Cardigan Bay.
The previous morning I had been researching future topics for this book and those Welsh hillforts did seem very appealing. For a start, they’re not widely known and their landscape settings can be astonishingly spectacular. I had visited them during filming for Time Team, when I had stayed with our old friend and leading expert on henges, the late Geoff Wainwright. It was Geoff, incidentally, who played a major part in organizing the 1985 excavations at Maiden Castle. As I lay there trying to work out what I would write when I returned to the book after getting up in a couple of hours’ time, I realized that I had actually answered one of the questions that was intriguing me: namely, why did people build those extraordinary monuments? Yes, of course they were about defence and they were symbols of strength and tribal authority, but they also represented the community, the life and thoughts of the people living within and around them. You can witness something similar today, when religious belief has ceased to be relevant to so many people, yet our great medieval cathedrals are being visited by ever-increasing numbers of people. They are now regarded as symbols of local pride and identity, but also of something else: call it a sense of serenity or mysticism, but it’s something that we all need to help us manage the tensions, fatigue and sheer hard work of daily life. So to get an idea of why hillforts were built in the first place, I want to head west, to the port of Aberystwyth, midway along the westward-sweeping shoreline of Cardigan Bay.
There are about a hundred hillforts down the western side of Wales and their development doesn’t seem to have followed the pattern observed in southern England, which we saw, for example, in Dorset. They do, however, seem to have originated at around the same time (1100–800 BC), in the late Bronze Age. A recent study of the hillforts of Cardigan Bay by Toby Driver has clearly demonstrated that they were constructed to be seen in two different ways, probably by different groups of people: local residents and people either passing by or visiting the area from outside.15 This arrangement is very clearly seen at one of the most spectacular hillforts in Britain, at Pen Dinas, which lies on a hill immediately to the south of Aberystwyth.16
14.1 The hillfort of Pen Dinas, immediately south of the port of Aberystwyth. The hillfort is crowned by a stone monument to the Duke of Wellington (erected 1858). Just beyond the main ramparts, to the north, and joined to them by two extended banks of another enclosure, is a second, circular enclosure, which was probably an earlier version of the hillfort.
© Geoff Griffiths / Getty
The hillforts inland from Cardigan Bay seem to make no attempt to blend into the landscape. Everything about them is spectacular, with steep banks, often originally built up behind a high drystone wall. Incidentally, like plaster, cement or mortar wasn’t introduced to Britain until Roman times. The focus of these hillforts was always inland, away from the sea, and they were obviously constructed to impress people living across large tracts of the countryside, because visibility from a distance was plainly a dominant feature. They were also sited to overlook important features in the landscape that tribal leaders might want to control, such as the confluence of two rivers or the foothills of a mountain range. If the need to dominate from a distance was a primary strategic concern, they were also carefully sited and laid out to impress local people and to overlook the features in the landscape that affected their daily lives.
The massive ramparts at Pen Dinas, for example, dominate the river valleys and coastal lowlands behind the modern town, but there are also two attached – I am tempted to say subsidiary – enclosures beneath the main, or South fort. These comprise a large circular enclosure (the North fort) of comparable size to the South fort and another, the Isthmus enclosure, which linked the two with a substantial curved drystone rampart along its eastern side; the wall and rampart along its western, or seaward, side is much slighter and clearly not built to impress.
The North fort at Pen Dinas resembles some of the larger fortified farmsteads that were a feature of late Bronze Age and Iron Age Wales. It pre-dates the main South fort, but continued in use throughout its existence, attached to it by the Isthmus fort. The three enclosures were linked together by an internal road and there were houses, usually within their own smaller enclosures, in both the North and South forts. The whole complex was approached from the east (inland) by a road that entered an impressive gateway in the large drystone rampart of the central, Isthmus enclosure. Recent excavation has shown that the gateways and other components of the three enclosures were repeatedly modified and rebuilt. The layout of the Pen Dinas hillfort clearly shows this dual focus on both local people and the broader picture, but I don’t think that the two were competitive or non-complementary in any way. I believe it reflected the way that the Iron Age people of western Wales viewed their world.
We used to believe that much of the work of building hillforts was probably carried out by captured enemy warriors, essentially working as slaves. Indeed, a set of Iron Age iron slave collars to go around the necks of five slaves, which were linked together by lengths of chain, was found during preparation work for a wartime bomber airfield, in former lake deposits at Llyn Cerrig Bach, in Anglesey.17 The old lake had been used as a special place to make offerings for about five hundred years, starting around 300 BC. The slave chains dated to the first century BC. The presence of slaves, who may well have been prisoners of war captured from neighbouring tribes, does not necessarily mean they were used to perform tasks in Britain. They could equally well have been taken abroad and sold within the Roman Empire, where there was more wealth to pay for them.
The most reliable evidence from excavations suggests that the Welsh hillforts were generally constructed with some care and were regularly and well maintained, which might argue against the use of unwilling slave labour. There can be no doubt that they were built as military structures, since their gateways were frequently altered and improved and often featured robust timber walls and other structures. It also seems likely that the ‘military’ action did not involve fighting between rival armies, but skirmishing between raiding parties and defenders – and mostly in the autumn and quieter times of the farming year. Although the defensive works of these Welsh hillforts were clearly very functional and well-constructed, they seldom encircled a hilltop with the same completeness that we saw, for example, at Maiden Castle and other Dorset sites. This suggests that attackers were not expected to approach from the rear and that their assaults were as much displays of valour, to be witnessed by a frightened audience of local people, as they were attempts to capture the fort. These hillforts would not have been subject to prolonged, drawn-out sieges, as happened, for example, to castles in the Middle Ages.
For many years, archaeologists, like the general public in Iron Age times, were attracted by the obvious, spectacular military posture of these hillforts. But when they are examined closely, and are seen in the context of the settlements and landscape around them, they can be appreciated for what they are: symbols of power and stability. They would have provided much comfort and security for the people living in the area. I often think of them as emblems of civilization and civic life in an Iron Age culture that was about to be traumatized by the Roman conquest. I sometimes wonder to what extent their continuing dominating presence in the landscape ensured that Celtic culture was not destroyed, and continued to flourish in post-Roman Britain.
a Perhaps chieftain or ‘tribal leader’ wou
ld be a better term.
b Or geophys (geophysics).
Scene 15
And What Then? Daily Life in Roman Times (AD 43–410) and Later
Rural Roman Britain – West Stow – Canterbury – Brixworth
Few periods in British history have been misrepresented quite as much as the almost four centuries when we were a part of the Roman Empire, from AD 43 to about AD 410. It’s not that ancient historians and archaeologists have got things wrong: far from it, they have spent vast amounts of effort working out the dates of coins and in reconstructing details of when and how different units of the Roman army were moved from one fort to another. The main problem has been that the role of pre-Roman British communities – the Celts, or the native Iron Age British, call them what you will – has been greatly underestimated, leading to massive distortion. Furthermore, the way the period has traditionally been taught has led to an unhelpful separation of the incoming Romans from the native Iron Age Britons. Prehistory is considered to be a branch of archaeology and anthropology, whereas Roman archaeology has strong links with ancient history – and in most universities the two are taught in separate departments by staff who often have very different backgrounds.
The Romans undoubtedly brought to Britain some very important technical innovations, ranging from the first use of new ploughs that actually turned the soil over (earlier ones had simply cut deep channels in it), to the introduction of cement and plaster, bricks and tiles. The Romans also introduced writing and efficient systems of governance suitable for nation-sized populations. But the fact remains that the number of actual Romans who invaded was very small. Most of the troops who came to Britain were not Romans at all; they would have been recruited from other parts of the Empire. When the Roman army conquered a new territory, the forces that opposed them would subsequently be recruited into the army and then sent far away, to new areas of conquest. It was a simple but very effective method of avoiding rebellions in newly won territories.
Scenes from Prehistoric Life Page 28