Hillforts in Britain - Iron Age Hillforts

Iron Age Hillforts

The Iron Age hillforts have remained dominating features in the British landscape: as ethnologist J. Ford-Johnston noted, "Of all the earthworks that are such a notable feature of the landscape in England and Wales few are more prominent or more striking than the hillforts built during the centuries before the Roman conquest." He continued, describing them as an "eloquent testimony of the technical ability and social organization of the Iron Age peoples." On a similar note, the English archaeologist J.G.D. Clark remarked that " Hillforts are at once among the most impressive and informative of our prehistoric antiquities. They impress by their mere size, by the height of their ramparts, by the depth of their ditches, by the extent of the areas they enclose, and frequently by their commanding position."

There was "immense variation subsumed within the class of monuments called hillforts", and those of the British Iron Age have been characterised as belonging to four different types. The main two are contour and promontory forts, and the lesser two are hill-slope and plateau forts. Contour forts are those "...in which the defences cut off the upper portion of a hill from the ground below by following, more or less, the line of the contours encircling it." Promontory forts are typically defined by "...an area to which the approach is limited, to a greater or lesser extent, by natural features such as cliffs, very steep slopes, rivers etc. Where such features exist little or nothing in the way of man-made fortification is required." Hill-slope hillforts, rather than "enclosing the hilltop in the manner of contour forts, are situated on the sloping ground on one side of it, overlooked by the crest", whilst plateau forts "face level ground on all sides, regardless of their elevation above sea-level"; these final forts then are often, although by no means always, located in plateaus, hence their name.

Iron Age hillforts made use of both natural and man-made defences, with the former including such geographical features as cliffs, steep slopes, rivers, lakes and the sea, and the latter largely consisting of banks and ditches. There were actually two forms of banks built at such sites: revetted and glacis. Revetted banks present "a vertical or near-vertical outer face to the enemy. This outer face or revetment is normally of timber or dry stone walling, or a combination of the two, and retains the core of earth, chalk, clay etc., derived in most cases from the outer ditch." Glacis banks on the other hand "are usually triangular in cross-section and at their simplest consist of a single dump of the material excavated from the ditch." The number of these such ramparts differs in Iron Age British hillforts; some, which are known as univallate, are single-rampart only, whilst others, known as multivallate, are multi-rampart forts. Commenting on their distribution across southern Britain, Ford-Johnston stated that "roughly one-third of the Iron Age forts in England and Wales have multivallate defences, the remaining two-thirds being univallate."