The
Iron Age
Towards the end of the Bronze Age a new class
of monument began to be constructed. These
were the hill-forts, which in the later Iron
Age were to develop into very impressive structures
indeed.
The
Ramparts of Capler Camp, a medium sized
hill-fort overlooking the River Wye |
The hill-forts were the ‘towns’ of the
Iron Age, settlements on hills
surrounded by massive ramparts, which
would have taken many thousands of
man-hours to build. There are over
thirty hill-forts in Herefordshire,
which must imply a sizeable local
population. These vary in size from the
comparatively small, to the impressively
large, with Credenhill, at 20 hectares,
having a greater area than Maiden Castle
in Dorset. The earliest of these
structures date from the middle of the
6th century BC (Croft Ambrey), while
others (Sutton Walls, Credenhill) are a
little later. |
|
The Herefordshire hill-forts are almost
all covered by recent woods, which means
that they are not readily visible from a
distance. Only if you actually walk up
to them can the scale of these monuments
be appreciated.
Herefordshire’s largest hill-fort at
Credenhill is currently covered with
conifers. This tree-cover is very
recent – there is much more woodland in
the county now than there was two
hundred years ago when Credenhill
hill-fort was clear of trees. The
monument and a large area around has now
been purchased for the public and there
is a great opportunity to clear these
trees from the site and make it possible
for people to properly appreciate the
scale of the county’s largest ancient
monument. Credenhill was occupied from
about 400 BC until the Roman Conquest. |
Hill-forts
around Hereford - Large and smaller
hill forts: the triangles are other
Iron Age sites. But by the end of the
Iron Age the area was thick with small
settlements. |
[Back
to top]
We do not know exactly who the people who
built and used these hill forts were but
their culture, like that of most of
pre-Roman Western Europe, was Celtic. The
tribe which inhabited central Herefordshire
in the mid first century AD has often been
identified as the Silures, whose power base
lay to the west. There is however no firm
evidence for this and it is possible that
the local tribe was the Dobunnii (modern
Gloucestershire) or the Cornovii (modern
Shropshire) or even the Deceangi (North
Wales).
Several Herefordshire Hill-forts have been
excavated, although none very recently.
Fifty years ago, the archaeologist Kathleen
Kenyon investigated the hill-forts of
Aconbury, Credenhill, Dinedor and Sutton
Walls. At Sutton Walls male skeletons
showed signs of violent death. Croft Ambrey
was excavated between 1960 and 1966 by S C
Stanford who found streets of regularly
spaced houses within the ramparts.
Farming was the major activity of these people
and their livestock included cattle, sheep
and pigs. Hunting was only a marginal source
of food. Pigs would have been kept in woodland,
and the high proportion of pig bones (about
a third of the total) at Croft Ambrey might
suggest that some of the surrounding area
was wooded. Sutton Walls produced few pig
bones: over 50% of the bones were cattle,
suggesting a much more open landscape with
a great deal of pasture.
Iron Age Herefordshire was capable of supporting
a relatively large number of people. At Sutton
Walls the average height of the adult males
was 5 ft 8½ inches - this was actually
taller than the average height of adult British
males in the 1950s, when the site was excavated.
[Back
to top] |
Powered by
Irie Computers 
