What is a hillfort?

Considering my research topic, maybe I should start off discussing what a ‘hillfort’ is. Easy, right? The name gives it away – a fort, on top of a hill. Done. Except, not really. Hillforts were first built in Britain in the Bronze Age (2500 – 800 BC), but they are most associated with the Iron Age (800 BC – 43 AD), and the majority were built during this period. They are “the symbol” of the Iron Age in Britain, and as such have been heavily researched.

The study of hillforts is (although fairly recent in the grand scheme of history), extremely diverse and varied. Thomas Hardy had a go - in 1885 Hardy published a short story in the Detroit Post called A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork, where he writes of “Mai-Dun, the Castle of the Great Hill … with an obtrusive personality that compels the senses to regard it”.

He was talking about Maiden Castle, arguably the most famous, and most easily identifiable hillfort in Britain. It’s situated in the Dorset countryside, and has an area of around 18 hectares. It’s a huge structure, obvious even today, and one can only imagine what influence it had over people in the Iron Age.

Maiden Castle ^a

So regarding hillforts, let’s break the name down into its three main parts: 1) a defensive 2) structure 3) on a hill.

2) Is fairly simple, and really the only part anyone can definitively agree on. A hillfort is a structure that is formed primarily from earth ramparts – i.e. a bank and ditch. Hillforts can have one rampart (univallate), or multiple (multivallate) – Maiden Castle has four. These earth ramparts can be reinforced with timber and/or stone (although the former is much more common). Although some hillforts have now been ploughed out, the vast majority in Britain are still present in the landscape today – making them an almost complete dataset in terms of archaeological settlements.

3) "On a hill" is a little more problematic. Whilst it is true that a typical hillfort is, quite obviously, on a hill, it seems as though this is not a necessary requirement. Some areas of Britain, such as East Anglia, don’t really have any hills. And yet, in the Iron Age, they still built “hillforts”. Everyone built hillforts. Just because they didn’t have hills didn’t stop them, and it doesn't make sense to exclude these low-lying sites just because of geography.

Stonea Camp in Cambridgeshire, situated at a height of 2m above sea level^b.

1) “Defensive’ is the real kicker, and much debated amongst hillfort scholars. In the 1980s the first scholars^c started to question whether hillforts really were forts. Their conclusion was that no, the style and structure of some hillforts heavily suggests that in all practicality, they could never have been defensible. Alternate suggested uses range from cattle enclosures, through storage facilities, to glorified “villages”, but the message is clear – hillforts don’t have to be “defensive”.

So really, hillforts are structures that are maybe on hills, but not necessarily so, and some were used for defence (i.e. as forts), but not all of them.

And I don’t think that this lack of definition is really a problem – if we attempt to define something too rigidly, then we end up left with nothing at all, and what use is that? 

                                           

a - image from http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/newsletter/issue17/natinv.html

b - image from Archaeology: a Framework for the Eastern Counties, 2. research agenda and strategy, ed. N. Brown & J. Glazebrook.

c - for further reading start with Bowden & McOmish, 1987. 'The Required Barrier' in Scottish Archaeological Review, 4(2), pp.76–84.