The Iron Age

Towards the end of the Bronze Age a new class of monument began to be constructed. These were the hill-forts, which in the later Iron Age were to develop into very impressive structures indeed.

The hill-forts were the ‘towns’ of the Iron Age, settlements on hills surrounded by massive ramparts, which would have taken many thousands of man-hours to build.  There are over thirty hill-forts in Herefordshire, which must imply a sizeable local population.  These vary in size from the comparatively small, to the impressively large, with Credenhill, at 20 hectares, having a greater area than Maiden Castle in Dorset.  The earliest of these structures date from the middle of the 6th century BC (Croft Ambrey), while others (Sutton Walls, Credenhill) are a little later.

Capler Camp, a medium sized hill-fort overlooking the River Wye

The Herefordshire hill-forts are almost all covered by recent woods, which means that they are not readily visible from a distance.  Only if you actually walk up to them can the scale of these monuments be appreciated. 

Herefordshire’s largest hill-fort at Credenhill is currently covered with conifers.  This tree-cover is very recent – there is much more woodland in the county now than there was two hundred years ago when Credenhill hill-fort was clear of trees.  The monument and a large area around has now been purchased for the public and there is a great opportunity to clear these trees from the site and make it possible for people to properly appreciate the scale of the county’s largest ancient monument.  Credenhill was occupied from about 400 BC until after the Roman Conquest.

Hill-forts around Hereford - Large and smaller hill forts: the triangles are other Iron Age sites. But by the end of the Iron Age the area was thick with small settlements.

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We do not know exactly who the people who built and used these hill forts were but their culture, like that of most of pre-Roman Western Europe, was Celtic.  The tribe which inhabited central Herefordshire in the mid first century AD has often been identified as the Silures, whose power base lay to the west.  There is however no firm evidence for this and it is possible that the local tribe was the Dobunnii (modern Gloucestershire) or the Cornovii (modern Shropshire) or even the Deceangi (North Wales).

Several Herefordshire Hill-forts have been excavated, although none very recently.  Fifty years ago, the archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon investigated the hill-forts of Aconbury, Credenhill, Dinedor and Sutton Walls.  At Sutton Walls male skeletons showed signs of violent death.  Croft Ambrey was excavated between 1960 and 1966 by S C Stanford who found streets of regularly spaced houses within the ramparts.

Farming was the major activity of these people and their livestock included cattle, sheep and pigs. Hunting was only a marginal source of food. Pigs would have been kept in woodland, and the high proportion of pig bones (about a third of the total) at Croft Ambrey might suggest that some of the surrounding area was wooded. Sutton Walls produced few pig bones: over 50% of the bones were cattle, suggesting a much more open landscape with a great deal of pasture.

Iron Age Herefordshire was capable of supporting a relatively large number of people. At Sutton Walls the average height of the adult males was 5 ft 8½ inches - this was actually taller than the average height of adult British males in the 1950s, when the site was excavated.

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