Savage 1988: 8. The Round House Village

A return, with thanks to Richard Savage and the Crickley Hill Trust, to the second hillfort as described in Richard's 1988 booklet:

"8 The Round House Village 

In the sixth century BC, after an interval which may have been short, a village was established on the site by a community with quite different traditions of housebuilding.  Just inside the entrance stood a great  round house, 15 m in diameter.  It was a type whose successful construction attests the highest standards of carpentry and engineering attained in south Britain at the time, for the peak of its thatched conical roof stood eleven  metres high or more, with no central support.  It was accompanied by a number of smaller round houses.  This village too was provided with four-post granaries.  There is no reason to doubt that the community was broadly the same kind and size as its predecessor.  

Substantial progress was made in rebuilding and strengthening the defences in the vulnerable eastern sector.  The old wall, much of which had slaked to a powdery mortar-like aggregation, had already been patched with lengths of walling hastily built from the rubble of its destruction.  Now it was covered and extended with new stonework, quarried from pits immediately behind it in the interior and from extensions of the old ditch outside it.  The new defence was ambitious; perhaps 5 or 6m high, with a walkway along the top and another platform, whose purpose in defence is not clear, part way down the front.  It may be structural, the result of an attempt to build a high wall Crickley on a broad, firm base, in order to make a visually impressive and bristling series of battlements towards the eastern approaches.  The old entrance was protected by new features: a bastion on either side and a hook-work which compelled the visitor to turn his unshielded right side to the north bastion, and its guards, as he entered.  The construction of a second, outer wall was begun. 

[Photo: the largest round house.  This reconstruction gives it the greatest practicable height; it may have been lower.  Part of the roof is unthatched to show the construction J. Eltham] 

The village was destroyed before the re-fortification could be finished.  Was the work undertaken in response to a threat?  Or was the attack intended to root out an over-mighty power before it became impregnable?  It is unlikely that we shall ever know.  The hill-fort at Leckhampton hill, 3 km away, may have been occupied at the same time as the second hillfort at Crickley, and it, too, was destroyed by burning. 

The destruction of the second hillfort seems to have in place no later than 400 BC, and at present there is nothing to suggest that the hill was occupied again before the Roman conquest, although evidence of later Iron Age occupation may yet be found.  There were burials of the late Iron Age less than 1 km away on Barrow Wake, including that containing the Birdlip mirror and other fine metalwork of the last decades before the Roman conquest, which can now be seen in Gloucester Museum.  We do not know where their occupants had lived.  The stonework of the defences crumbled slowly.  It was still at least partly standing four centuries later, in Roman times. 

[Photo: the final Iron Age wall and illustration: the round house village, c 500BC R. Morgan]"

The photograph on the second page, showing the final Iron Age wall, also appears at page 118 of "Crickley Hill: The Hillforts Defences" (Dixon and the Crickley Hill Trust 1994): from the examination of the full-page photograph there I can identify Anna Collinge and Bernie Dawson silhouetted against the skyline, with, just below them, Paul Noakes, a woman I can't identify, Mike Taylor, and John Parry.  Just out the right, throwing a shape, Dave Southwood.

Savage 1988: 7. The Long House Village

65 years ago this morning were the Allied landings in Normandy, warfare on a scale unimaginable to the men and women who inhabited Crickley Hill more than 2500 years ago. Doubtless war then was as terrifying but necessary to endure as it was for our parents and grandparents.  The destruction of the Iron Age ramparts of the longhouse village described in the following section from Richard Savage's 1988 booklet must have been a frightening sight. Thanks, as ever, to Richard and the Crickley Hill Trust for permission to reproduce the abstracts from his booklet.

"7 The Long House Village 

The First Hill-fort c. 700 - 600 BC 

At a time when the climate had deteriorated - it seems to have become very like our own - the hill was permanently occupied again in the 7th or 6th centuries BC.  This was the time of the development of a full iron-using economy in Britain; indeed we cannot at present be certain whether the new community at Crickley was iron- or still bronze-using.  It is hard to see any continuity of tradition between the builders of the hillfort and the worshippers who had gone before.  Even the final Neolithic wall, almost as far in the past to them as they are to us, was scarcely visible. 

The newcomers built long timber houses, aligned upon a street running east west along the top of the saddle at the eastern part of the hill.  Four-post structures, some of them at least for grain storage, lay in a ring outside the houses.  The bridge was defended by a stone wall, reinforced with timber lacing, which ran right around the promontory enclosing 9 acres.  The wall was most substantially built to the east, where attackers could approach across level ground, and an imposing appearance would have most effect.  Here it may have reached 4m high, with the ditch outside it, from which the stone was quarried, adding to its effective height.  A walkway along the top, with a bridge across the entrance, allow the defenders to keep watch, to parade their valour, and to cluster where they were most needed during an assault.  Deposits of sling stones lay near to hand, useful for discouraging animal and human predators alike.  Timber towers, arranged at intervals behind the rampart, seem to have provided viewing or fighting platforms for the slingers. 

[Photograph: the largest longhouse.  Part of the roof is unthatched to show the construction.  There is a smoke hole in the gable. J Eltham] 

[Illustration: The long house village, c 700 - 600 BC K. Hajichristou] 

The village housed, perhaps, a hundred souls.  We can imagine them a little more clearly than their Neolithic predecessors, because in later centuries Greek and Roman writers describe barbarian societies like theirs, which shared much with the literate Mediterranean world; a cart made in Greece or Italy could be mended without difficulty -- perhaps improved -- in Gaul or Britain.  They are likely to have thought of themselves as members of the great family, with relatives in other settlements, and many of them will actually have been more or less closely related to one another, although there are likely to have been "foreigners" among them.  The power structure of their society may be guessed at.  They were probably governed by the dominant member of a single kindred.  Such a man or woman must decided the arrangements of the settlement at Crickley; the site has very long and strong defences in comparison with a few houses inside it, and the granaries are too numerous merely to hold the produce of the occupants of the houses.  The site seems to be a citadel for the elite of the society most of whose members lived outside, some of them perhaps in the Vale. 

We do not know what language they spoke.  It is possible that it was already one of the Celtic family of languages, to which modern Welsh and Irish belong. 

Like most hill-forts, Crickley lacks an internal water-supply.  The spring line is 60 m below the settlement, and there is no evidence for well-digging or pond making on the site.  The cattle will have been watered at springs outside, where also the human community will have done most of its washing and only a minimum of water needed to be carried up.  The village could not have stood a siege; sieges are almost unknown in primitive warfare, which is centred about the raid and the short campaign, even when it is set reassuringly within a hereditary feud. 

The new community farmed the surrounding land, probably in small squarish fields whose boundaries, obliterated by modern agriculture, we do not now know.  Their animals and crops were fundamentally those of their Neolithic predecessors - wheat, barley, cattle, sheep, pigs - though in improved breeds and probably using improved methods. 

It is likely that there were undefended Iron Age settlements nearby; they are not always easy to find.  A sight of this kind in the lowland is suspected Sandy Lane, Cheltenham, that we do not yet know certainly of any near Crickley. If we knew how these undefended sites and the adjacent hillfort worked together, much of the character of late Bronze Age and Iron Age society would be clear.  At present we do not know whether they were occupied by members of the same rank in society nor how far their functions were different.  In most cases we do not even know whether they were in strictly contemporary use. 

The settlement was attacked, captured, then thoroughly and expertly destroyed.  In a strong west winds the rear facing of its wall was torn down and brushwood piled against the expose structured to fire the reinforcing beams.  So intense was the heat is that much of the limestone of the wall was turned to quicklime. 

[Illustration: section through the final Iron Age defences: the core of burned and slaked limestone, with the remains of vertical timbers just visible, and the new wall, in two tiers, built over and in front of it]"

The BGAS 1989 report

A further abstract from the transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, this time from the 1989 season as follows:

"COBERLEY/BADGEWORTH, Crickley Hill, SO927161. During the 20th season of excavations a straight line of burnt hearths was found below the long mound, surrounded by very large number of finds, pottery, flint and bone.  The area is interpreted as a communal kitchen, of the final phase of the Neolithic settlement.  To the south of the entrance it was found that the buildings of the round-house settlement were confined to a strip about 15 m broad behind the rampart.  To the west lay two rows of square structures, their post holes containing barley grains, which seemed to be an extension of the zone of granaries of the hillfort settlement.  Towards the south of the excavated area, two-face hearth was dated by remnant magnetism to 1 BC +/- 2 years.  Nearby a penannular brooch and smooth, black, late-looking pottery were found.  Within the ramparts a quarry hollow, used as a rubbish tip during the last occupation of the hillfort, produced quantities of pottery and animal bone.  The hollow had ultimately been utilised as the floor of a small hut, walled in stone.  The structure resembles the sub-Roman/Dark Age buildings found 80 m to the south in the lee of the rampart.  Several sherds of Roman greyware were uncovered immediately to the west of it."

The date seems curiously, nay perhaps even spuriously, precise...  one suspects a typographical error?

Cunliffe on Crickley Hill

I remember being taught to sing a ditty by David Southwood with the following lyrics: "When this bloody dig is over, no more trowelling for me: I will go and put my feet up and watch Barry Cunliffe on TV."  I'm afraid that I can't provide a TV clip of Professor Cunliffe on the blog but I am grateful to the Secretary of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society for permission to reproduce this extract from the presidential address that Barry Cunliffe gave the Society in 1984:

"Gloucestershire and the Iron Age of Southern Britain

By Barry Cunliffe

Presidential Address Delivered at the Council House, Bristol, 24 March 1984

But these hilltop enclosures, whatever their function, were not the only defended sites of the Earliest period.  The excavation of the strongly-fortified promontory fort of Budbury just over the border in Wiltshire has produced a mass of contemporary occupation material including highly-decorated pottery of All Cannings Cross type.  In Gloucestershire, Crickley Hill with its substantial stone-built and timber-laced rampart (Crickley period 2) must belong to this period, for it has produced three radio-carbon dates suggested of construction in the eighth century BC (Dixon 1972; 1976).  Philip Dixon's large-scale excavation here is an outstanding importance for the evidence it is providing of the Earliest and Early phases of the Iron Age in Gloucestershire. Inside the gate of the period 2 fort he has discovered a number of four-post buildings together with several long rectangular structures which are either houses (as the excavator prefers to see them) or rows of four-, five-, and six-post "granaries", some of them in fenced enclosures.  At any event the massiveness of the Crickley 2 defences and the density of buildings within, combined with a comparatively small area closed, serves to distinguish Crickley from the broadly contemporary hilltop enclosures, suggesting that the fort was occupied by a community of some status.  Thus we can begin to see a pattern emerged with a few very strongly-defended forts like Crickley and Budbury possibly representing the residences of the elite, while the larger hilltop enclosures may have been pastoral structures serving larger communities.  That the period was one of some stress is shown by the destruction of Crickley 2 by fire and its partial rebuilding in period 3a.

It was during the Early period in Wessex that hillforts seem suddenly to have proliferated.  This may well have been the case in Gloucestershire but the evidence is rather less clearly defined. At Crickley however, in period 3b, there is dramatic evidence for the massive rebuilding of the defences with complex outworks to protect the entrance.  A single radiocarbon assessment suggests the construction date may have been in the sixth or fifth century BC.  Excavations within the fort showed that the layout of the settlement had changed, the exclusively rectangular structures giving way to a new layout dominated by a very large roundhouse sited just inside the gate.  The nearby hillfort of Leckhampton, defended by a timber-laced rampart with stone fronting-wall, is thought to have been built at about the same time; it too could boast an entrance of monumental proportion."