Grisly Find on Fin Cop Hill
| Maiden Castle | 50 41 41.77N 02 28 11.06W | The multiple lines of banks and ditches can be clearly seen and the numerous photographs give a good impression of the site. The people visible in some of those photographs give an idea of the enormous scale of the defences, which surely had a more desperate purpose than keeping cattle in! |
| Oswestry Rings | 52 52 18.88N 03 02 5.65W | The complex pattern of ditches and banks on the west of the fort are believed to be some form of fortification for the main entrance. |
| Pen y Cloddiau | 53 11 54.03N 03 18 19.29W | Now that you know what to look for, just about every summit on this side of the Vale of Clwyd, near my home, is topped by a hillfort. |
| Bryn y Gaer | 53 12 21.97N 03 52 22.86W | The steepness of the slope meant that defences weren't necessary to the east. Stone walls took the place of banks and ditches, while the almost level ground to the west was seeded with pointed stones to keep chariots from racing up to the walls. |
In another article on this site I have described the excavations taking place in Fin Cop hill fort. Now a new discovery is laying to rest one of the enduring myths about hill forts.
Academics are far too fond of pontificating in defiance of commmon sense or even of life experience - I dare say it has to do with living in ivory towers. Many years ago some "expert" came to the conclusion that hill forts had nothing to do with fortification; they were simply cattle pens.
For those of you not privileged to live in Britain (or, indeed, in Europe) I should explain what a hill fort is. During the Bronze and Iron Ages, people equipped with nothing more elaborate than wickerwork baskets for carrying and the shoulderblades of deer for digging, took it into their heads to dig out enormous circular ditches and pile the earth up in banks on the inside of those ditches. In those cases where the banks have been investigated, it turns out that their creators then went out into the forest with their primitive axes and laboriously chopped down trees - some of them quite massive - which they dragged back to their bank and set upright on the top of it to make a formidable palisade.
All this work, mind you, to keep their cattle from straying!
What makes the stupidity of this claim all the more galling is that Britain is divided up into fields by hedgerows. It is true that a well-made hedge is not simply a matter of sticking a few seeds in the ground. That - or cuttings rather than seeds - is the essential first step, but a few bushes are never going to keep a determined cow in, even if they are prickly hawthorn.
Once the bushes have grown to a certain height - four or five feet usually - the hedge has then to be laid. The hedger comes along with his billhook and a stick and first of all trims the bushes, then with a swift stroke he all but cuts through the stem at ground level. That enables him to lay the stem over at a 30 degree angle to the ground, where it is woven in and out of vertical stakes. When the whole hedge has been treated like this, the result is an impenetrable barrier that not even the most determined cow can defeat.
There are different styles of laying the hedge. One style has all the stems laid in the same direction; another style has half of them laid in the opposite direction and woven in and out of the others. Some counties weave a neat topping of binders to the finished hedge while others leave it rough.
The big advantage of a hedge is that once it is laid, the cuts in the stems quickly heal and the bushes continue to grow, making a thicker and stronger barrier with every year that passes. It is true that a hedge needs to be trimmed every year or so, but that is far less labour than required to maintain a dry stone wall or even a timber fence.
Although a well-made hedge can defeat the most ingenious sheep, the one thing it cannot do is keep a man out. So long as he doesn't mind a few scratches and a bit of pulled hair, a human being can, without too much difficulty, push, cut and wriggle his way through a hedge. It follows, then, that if you want to keep your cattle in, you plant and lay a hedge; if you want to keep your enemies out, however, you need something more substantial - a hill fort.
Of course, cattle were kept in hill forts; when raiders were abroad you rounded up all your moveable possessions and took them into the safety of the fort. It is certain that the forts were made much larger than was required for the people alone for just this reason. Nonetheless, the purpose of the fort was to keep people out not animals in.
Many of the hillforts were constructed with two or more concentric circles of banks and ditches and with elaborate defences around the entrances. These have led the ivory tower brigade to grudgingly admit that the hillforts may have had a defensive purpose, though they imply that these defences had more to do with personal aggrandisement and ostentation than any real threat for - and this is their clinching argument - the Iron Age was a time of peace and prosperity, when noble savages lived in harmony with nature and each other, guided by wise druids who knew the secrets of mistletoe and oaks and never, ever dreamed of offering human sacrifices as those vile, aggressive Romans reported.
Exactly how people can make these claims and keep a straight face I simply cannot imagine. The discovery of various bog bodies who had died a gruesome death before being dropped in the peat that preserved them, was one indication that the Bronze and Iron Ages were no sylvan idyll. The fact that the dead were buried with a panoply of weapons - daggers, leaf-shaped swords, and spears - is another pointer.
And let no one persuade you that those weapons were purely ceremonial and decorative. Julius Caesar disproved that idea with two hard-fought campaigns in southern Britain and Boadicea underlined the lesson when she wiped out a Roman army and destroyed three of the greatest cities of Roman Britain - Colchester, London and St Albans (Camelodunum, Londinium and Verulamium) - and quite apart from such struggles against the invader, even before the Romans cast their greedy eyes on Britain, the country was famous for its exports of corn, dogs (the British bulldog?) and slaves.
Another argument that the scholarly wiseacres use is the undoubted fact that hillforts are not always situated on the tops of hills. Some of these ditch-and-bank enclosures extend half-way down the slope of the hills on which they are built while others nestle cosily in the valley bottom. All that proves, however, is that the ancient Britons hadn't developed siege engines and catapults. Although the English longbow was a fearsome weapon, and the Welsh shortbow not far behind, it is likely that Bronze Age bows were altogether less powerful and while a hilltop was undoubtedly a stronger position, its defensive qualities might well be outweighed by the problem of getting water to the summit or even of climbing down and up again just to tend to your fields.
More persuasive is the fact that out of the 3,000 or so hillforts known in Britain and Europe, hardly any have been found with evidence of violent overthrow before the Romans arrived. That is why the most recent discovery at Fin Cop is setting the history hives humming!
It appears that the defenses at Fin Cop were never finished and the impression the archaeologists have is that the first ditch and bank were constructed in great haste, perhaps by people who had moved into the area and were eager to get their defences up before anyone arrived to move them on. Work had begun on a second ring of ditch and bank when disaster overtook the new settlement.
Part of the excavation, therefore, has involved an investigation of these defences. Here the people had not raised a wooden palisade on top of their banks but had erected a stone wall and it appeared that the wall had toppled down into the ditch - most probably tipped in deliberately by someone with hostile intent. As the archaeologists cleared these fallen stones away, hoping to uncover the bottom of the ditch and get some pollen samples that would tell them the time of year when the ditch was dug, they discovered a human bone.
Of course, where there is one human bone, another is almost sure to follow, so no one was surprised then another bone appeared and then another. After a couple of hours work, however, the archaeologists sat back and stared at each other: they had found what amounted to a mass burial - the bones of nine individuals!
It took a while for everything to be sorted out and a good deal of care to be sure that the individual skeletons were kept together and person A didn't get person B's leg or arm, but once the careful excavating and recording had been done it was time for the forensic analysis. The experts examined the bones and concluded that nine people had been tumbled carelessly into the ditch - three adults, at least two of them women, a fifteen year old boy, a two year old toddler and four babies, one of them still in its mother's womb - in other words, one of the women had been pregnant.
This wasn't the result of a battle, for there were no men among the bodies - presumably they had been either killed in battle or rounded up to be exported as slaves. Neither was it a plague or other catastrophe, for the bodies had been stripped of simple possessions such as finger rings or necklaces and were dumped without grave goods. It would seem that for some reason these people were surplus to requirements and were callously disposed of by the people who had attacked their hillfort.
From the fact that one of the women was pregnant, we can perhaps guess at why they were "surplus"; pretty women could be sold as slaves, just as readily as healthy men, but a heavily pregnant woman would simply hold things up as the line of slaves was marched away, as would a toddler (who might have been related to one of the women). The others may have been old or handicapped in some way - a mental handicap might render the person unfit for sale as a slave but leave no marks on the skeleton.
Exactly why Fin Cop hillfort was attacked we do not know. It may have been a dispute over land - and the fact that the fort was being built so hurriedly and was attacked before it was finished may point in that direction - or it may simply have been a raid for slaves and other plunder. The fact that the attackers had to overcome a 13' high stone wall, as well as the bank and ditch, indicates that whatever the motive, they were pretty determined to get in and do whatever it was they wanted to do.
The horrifying thing is that only a small section of the defences has been excavated so far and archaeologists - admittedly with one eye on publicity - suggest the possibility that these nine were not the only ones murdered in the attack. Press reports speak, with bated breath (though perhaps in this case the misspelling of "baited" may be more appropriate), of the future discovery of dozens or even hundreds of bodies. Given the utility of slaves, I think that unlikely, but time will tell.
In the meantime, the picture of the Iron Age as a time of peace and prosperity has taken a substantial knock. As the archaeologists point out, few hillforts have had more than an investigative trench dug across their defences and there may be similar mass burials to be found elsewhere. Or possibly not: the soil up on Fin Cop is alkaline, which tends to preserve bones. In other places, where the soil is acidic, the bones would decay fairly rapidly and even if we excavated the entire ditch, we would never know of the scenes of horror that once took place in it.
before the Romans arrived A number of battlefield casualties were found during the excavation of Maiden Castle in Dorset, the greatest of Britain's hillforts (though in this case the "hill" is misleading, as the fort is not really on top of a hill, just a slight elevation above the surrounding countryside. A number of bodies were found that had been hastily tipped into a disused granary or cistern, including one with the head of a balista bolt embedded in his spine, thus identifying the aggressors as Roman. Return
© Kendall K. Down 2011
