Hillforts in Britain

[4] Various archaeologists operating in Britain have criticised the use of the term "hillfort" both because of its perceived connection to fortifications and warfare and because not all such sites were actually located on hills.

[8] By contrast, Professor Ronald Hutton wrote in the English Heritage Members Magazine in March 2020 "It now seems that they were assembly places where farming families would meet seasonally..." The spellings "hill fort", "hill-fort" and "hillfort" are all used in the archaeological literature.

Archaeologists Sue Hamilton and John Manley believed they were a part of "...substantial landscape and social reconfigurations at the start of the first millennium [BC]", that coincided with the change of three characteristics of British Bronze Age society: "...disappearance of an archaeologically visible burial rite, ... increased deposition of prestige metalwork in rivers, ... and the demise of a middle Bronze Age settlement format of groups of round houses set within enclosures.

"[15] There was "immense variation subsumed within the class of monuments called hillforts",[16] and those of the British Iron Age have been characterised as belonging to four different types.

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.

[17] 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.

Commenting on their distribution across southern Britain, Forde-Johnston stated that "roughly one-third of the Iron Age forts in England and Wales have multivallate defences, the remaining two-thirds being univallate.

One school of thought, dominant amongst archaeologists in much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, holds that they were primarily defensive structures built in an era of intertribal warfare.

[21] Taking a similar stance, archaeologist Niall Sharples noted that "It is clear from [my] analysis of the sequence [of construction] at Maiden Castle, and by comparison with other sites, such as Danebury, that hillforts do not have a single function.

"[24] Another archaeologist to hold a similar viewpoint, Barry Cunliffe, a specialist in the Iron Age, believed that hillforts from this period were defensive settlements.

I believe that the bulk of the evidence for warfare in the archaeological record [which included hillforts] is created as a deterrent, or to symbolise the nature of the conflict rather than actually the physical act.

"[28] In this manner, hillforts would have in many respects been symbolically defensive rather than practically so, in a period when warfare was primarily about being threatening to your enemies rather than entering into open conflict with them.

Mark Bowden and Dave McOmish, writing in 1989, noted that "The idea that some hillforts performed ceremonial functions is not a new one but discussion has concentrated on the possible existence of shrines and temples within the defences."

The Roman Empire never occupied northern Britain (which at this time was largely the geographical equivalent to the later nation-state of Scotland), and as such a native British Iron Age culture was able to continue here with less imperial interference.

[30] In the Early Medieval period, which began in the fifth century AD, much of southern Britain (comprising much of the area that later became the nation-state of England), adopted a variant of Germanic culture from continental Europe, likely due to migration from that region.

"[32] Several similar promontory forts of Cornwall, as well as in neighbouring Brittany, show signs of occupation from this period and are often associated with so-called 'Celtic Christian' hermitages and/or chapels such as at Rame Head, St Ives, St Michael's Mount, Mont Saint-Michel, Burgh Island and Looe Island excavated by Channel 4's archaeological television programme Time Team.

According to archaeologist Leslie Alcock, "warfare" was perhaps the "principal social activity in Early Historic northern Britain", playing a major part in "contemporary prose and poetry", and for this reason many hill forts of this period have been commonly thought of as defensive structures designed to repel attack.

[34] Hill forts occupied in the Early Medieval period appear to have primarily been settlements for the social elite, the ruling classes who governed society.

[31] The northern British peoples who constructed hill forts knew of various forms of the monuments, leading Alcock to note that "the three Celtic peoples of northern Britain [Britons, Picts and Gaels] were fully aware of the potential of different types of fort, and used them variously, taking account only of local terrain, building materials, and politico-military needs.