The Hill Fort

Another portion of the synopsis chapter. A little overworked but again an attempt to describe time and place and the experience of being in a landscape with a sense of history. This is the oldest landscape I have written about, nearly the oldest artificial landscape I have seen.

The hill fort is the crown of the hill, surrounded by a silent wall of tall pines. The air is colder and wetter, cobwebs of mist, long grass. These trails are less well used, there is little to see here, nothing to do. The pines get older and seem thicker as they near the hill fort, as if the older ones have been laying siege to these ancient ramparts for much longer. An old guard of trees, an ancient stand-off. (There is something paradoxical about these pine forests. Their straight lines and regimentation suggests the Romans which may once have besieged this fort, but in their shagginess and darkness they are also suggestive of northern Europe, a Germanic gloom echoing the great Teuterberg forest where the Legions were massacred, the echo and hope of all these Iron Age peoples. ) At a junction of two paths is the triangular frame of an unused information board, heavy square timbers uncomfortably like a siege engine, abandoned or no longer needed. A stile and a whip-fence, and we are in the fort.

Immediately the landscape changes. The thick forest is gone, replaced by open ground and golden bracken. There are a few sentinel trees, birch and beech and young oak, and only the occasional fir like a hostage prince. The ground breaks in steep frozen waves of bracken, the first of the ditches built to defend the fort itself, the outer defences. The ditches are still ten, twenty feet deep, concentric rings deepening as they near the final rampart of the fort. The effort required to dig these long trenches, the man hours, the organisation; it is still astonishing. How long did it take them, how many people were involved? The ditches are still quite deep and half a mile long. Their military analysis, their intelligence; each ditch has two steep sides, making perhaps a complicated series of narrow ramparts and fall-back positions, making it more and more difficult for the exhausted enemy to overcome the defences. Eventually the last and deepest ditch is reached, still twenty vertical feet of wall to assail before the attackers can fight their way over the wall and into the fort. Today an open path winds carelessly over these worn ramparts and ditches, an echo of the structure beneath.

The hill fort itself is enormous, as big as a large village or even a small town. The rampart wall surrounds and defines a huge open space of bracken and sighing grasses, red-golden and bleached white gold, dotted with oak groves, solitary birch and beech trees. In the valley below they still tell newcomers ‘the village is gone’, as if it went within living memory. Were there stone houses here, streets, open market spaces? Perhaps it was only used in times of war, a safe place for surrounding villages, continually guarded by a skeleton ‘citizens’ army’ keeping it in readiness. The southern slopes, today under thick pine forest, are gentle and smooth, and were perhaps cultivated in terraces or strips, small patches of woodland kept for firewood and building materials. There is a gap in the ramparts here, thin evidence of an old track into the fort, and it is not difficult to imagine herds of sheep and oxen being driven up the slopes into safety, anxious men and women, excited, half-scared children.

The space inside the ramparts is wide and dramatic but the history is buried, and must be partially invented to breathe again. The mind leaps and is fired by this empty place. It is not difficult to imagine wooden ramparts and defences above the earthen walls, a stockade – or a series of stockades – within the ramparts. This fort is supposedly two thousand years old, the Iron Age, a time straddling the beginning of the Common Era, the time of the earliest Roman invasions. What would they have seen from these high walls? The spikes of pine trees destroy the view, and the connection with other hill tops is lost; perhaps as in other parts of Europe these hilltop sites were part of a complicated pattern of sanctuaries, fortresses, shrines, visible from each other and part of a huge sacred/defensive landscape. What was it like here, two thousand years ago? The land would have been partly cleared of forest for cultivation and animals, there would have been tracks connecting one small village with another; the fields would have been hard won and much smaller, there would have been more forest, fewer trails, smaller villages perhaps stockaded against wolves and bears, but perhaps it was not radically different from what we see today. From the hill fort perhaps they could see other forts on hills two, three miles away, wooden walls and earthen ramparts, the defensive centre for another handful of small settlements, tribal allegiances, petty kingdoms. Perhaps the sheer size of the fort means that the area needed a big fort, that it was quite densely populated, or that in times of trouble people came here from miles around at the first sight of thick oily smoke on the horizon, a sign of villages burned and crops pillaged, the signal to close the heavy gates and take stock of weapons and supplies. Where was the water supply on top of the hill? Is there a spring here still, hidden under the bracken?

Mysterious pits are guarded by fences and stern warnings; the site of forges, quarries, arsenals? But the mossed concrete looks twentieth-century, so perhaps it was a second-world-war observation post or a fire-watch station. Easier to fence off and let it rot than dismantle it. The northern side of the fort is almost inaccessible through the wet grass, but the curve of the hill can be seen as it starts to turn and then gather speed and momentum as it hurtles steeply down towards the distant road. The muddy paths lead back through the ramparts and into the forest.

There is nothing here today to show that people once lived here. The only fires are made by stray campers, druggies, hippies hoping to commune with the past, with nature, with the stars. There are groves of oak trees and sentinel beech trees and acres of golden bracken. The grass path winds through the bracken and the long grass, shadowing the ramparts before cutting through them at the western end and diving steeply down the hill towards distant Wales, a narrow sheep-track through the ramparts. The overriding colours are gold and bronze and deep greens; birch leaves and beech leaves and dead, golden bracken.

It is haunted by absence, this place, haunted by what is no longer there and cannot be seen or felt. Centuries ago there was a settlement of sorts here, but today there is nothing. The spikes of the pine trees stand around it like prison guards after visiting time.

How do forts die? Perhaps the fort or fortified village was never used in anger, perhaps the high walls never defended the inhabitants against anything worse than a winter wolf-pack. Or perhaps it fell to besieging Romans after months of starvation and siege warfare, the hill slopes scarred by campfires, the cultivation pillaged by hungry soldiers. It is impossible not to imagine the last to live here, the last to leave. What would they make of this open, brackened space? Were there groves of oaks here then, are these ancient trees the descendants of Iron Age sacred spaces? The surrounding pine forests would terrify them, this whispering, man-made darkness pressing on the walls of their fortified village. Walking down the muddied paths through the thick trees I wondered whether the last defendants were overcome by superior Roman technology, and led away to slave farms or markets, glancing over their shoulders as the soldiers torched their thatched roofs and the dark smoke rose into the sky, a signal to other forts, other villages to check supplies and weapons and take to the hills.