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 burning of the limestone

The piece which I posted last week from the Transactions of the Bristol & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society avers that there is no adequate explanation for the reddening of burnt oolitic limestone.  But that was published in 1925 and refers to the reddening of the limestone being mentioned in 1818 in the Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries.  An excellent explanation does, of course,  appear in "Crickley Hill: the Hillfort Defences" (Dixon 1994), in the geological chapter by R J Firman:

"An understanding of the mineralogical changes brought induced by heating limestone is thus of crucial importance in interpreting the archaeological evidence.  The most obvious indication of heating is the development of a brick red colour due to the dehydration of rust coloured ferric hydroxides leading to the formation of haematite.  It is important to note that the intensity of the red colour is unrelated to the intensity of the heating, being directly proportional to the concentration of ferric hydroxide, 'limonite', minerals in the original unburnt limestone. Moreover, in a conflagration, conditions may be sufficiently reducing, to preclude the formation of haematite: magnetite or less stable ferrous compounds forming instead.  These, when weathered, impart a grey or brownish yellow colour to the burnt limestones. Given a strong draught, limestone will calcine at temperatures of 800 to 900°C and, in still conditions 1050°C.  Masses of 'meringue-like' material in the prehistoric earthworks show that such calcination did occur, the resulting quicklime having reacted with water to form slaked lime, and this in turn wholly or partly, becoming carbonated as it reacted with atmospheric carbon dioxide.  Reddening and calcination are thus good indicators of burning and destruction by fire.  They must, however, be interpreted cautiously, because some of the red colour, particularly if associated with clays and sands, could be glacially derived from naturally released Triassic sediments."

Richard Savage's Prologue 1988

My thanks again to Richard Savage and the Crickley Hill Trust for permission to reproduce material from Richard's 1988 booklet "Crickley Hill: Village, Fortress, Shrine". If you click on the images they will enlarge, but for ease of reading I reproduce the text below.

"Between 210 and 135 million years ago, much of the area which is now Britain was covered by ancient seas.  In their warm waters were deposited the clays, sands and limestones that make up the Cotswolds we see today.  The plants and animals living in them are preserved as fossils in the rocks of the period, known as the Jurassic, which stretch obliquely across England from Dorset to Yorkshire.  The hard limestones end in a scarp on their western side which drops abruptly for several hundred metres to the valleys.  These rocks were lifted from the seabed by earth movements which also tilted them so that in the Cotswolds they sloped gently downwards towards the southeast.

Crickley Hill is a promontory of the Cotswold scarp, 8 km from Gloucester and 5 km from Cheltenham.  The nature of the limestone uplands has had a profound influence on the use of the hill in ancient times and our approach to studying it.  The Stone ("oolite") is permeable to water, providing a light well-drained soil with clear springs issuing at a lower level - 60 m below the summit of Crickley - where the limestone meets impermeable clay.  Much of the stone, especially that near the surface, splits easily into pieces of the size and shape suitable for building.  Post holes and stake holes can be made in it with simple tools, though the rock is hard enough to discourage casual digging.  It is easily and permanently discoloured by fire, and at high temperature (900 - 1,000°C) turns to quicklime, which, when slaked, forms a powdery mortar-like aggregation.  The Crickley stone is not of the best quality, so there has been only local demand for it as building stone, though it has been burned for line and used as road stone.  Accordingly the damage to the promontory by quarrying has been limited; it has removed several metres from the south side, and made both sides steeper.  They were always steep enough to make ascent troublesome and to prolong a climber's exposure to observation from above. (Illustration: Exposure of oolitic limestone in the Crickley Hill quarry)

Within 25 km of Crickley more than a dozen hill-forts take advantage of similar conditions.

Flint, on which everyday technology depended in Britain until after 2000 BC, does not occur in limestone, though small pieces of poor quality may be found in gravel deposits.  In this, the inhabitants of Crickley and their neighbours could never be self-sufficient, and they had to obtain supplies from areas of chalk to the south and east, none nearer than 50 kms away.  All flint found on the hill was brought by man.  

A natural hollow, 100m long and 25 m wide, runs beside the southern edge of the hill at its western end.  It represents a fissure in the rock which it will eventually break the mass to the south of it away into the valley, but it has been stable for at least 6000 years, since the neolithic period. The limestone along its bottom and has degraded to a matrix of small particles which is easy to dig into.  The traces of neolithic houses the best preserved here, where substantial postholes could most easily be made with the tools of time, and here, too, we can follow the small grooves and stake holes intended for wattle fencing. (Illustration: Typical fossils of the Crickley Oolite)

The soil on the hill is shallow, seldom exceeding 15 cms thick. Because of this the stratigraphy - the sequence of deposited layers which can be distinguished from one another and analysed to establish a succession of events - is severely limited.  There are substantial accumulations only in such large features as ditches and quarry pits, and not always there.  On the other hand, all but the most trivial ground-work has always had to affect the bedrock, in which its traces are usually permanent and unmistakable.

Since the stone resists erosion fairly well, and even the normal methods of building "drystone" (mortarless) walls make surprisingly durable structures, we can usually recognize even slight remains of walling, the residues of ancient demolition.  It is a feature of the site that the prehistoric walls have not been much robbed of their stone in recent centuries. Unofrtunately the Crickley soil preserves seeds, pollen, and other organic remains only when they have been carbonised by heat, and not always then.  On the other hand, it preserves snail shells very well indeed.  These can often be used as evidence of the nature of the environment during the snails' lifetime at the places where they are found; species can be identified which prefer grassland, for example, or shady woodland.  It also preserves bone, when this has been buried, and thus protected, in pits and ditches.

Crickley Hill may have had a key position in the prehistoric geography of the region, offering a near approach of the Cotswold upland to the lowest part of the Severn at which it could be crossed into Wales without much difficulty, perhaps on the northern side of Gloucester.  The hill has easy access eastwards to the Thames Valley and south-east Britain while any trade with running from south-west to north-east along the high ground of the limestone scarp must have passed close to it.  It is tempting to speculate that Crickley may have stood near, and at some periods on, a cross roads, where apart from the river crossing in the Vale reached the uplands and divided into north, south and eastward routes, and this was recurrent motif in its long story. (Illustration: Prehistoric use of oolite. The wall of the second hillfort"