Hill Forts of the Iron Age in England and Wales

Abstract

This very expensive book is the result of a study begun almost twenty years ago and carried out by the author with financial support from Manchester University and the Leverhulme Trust. The subtitle, 'A Survey of the Surface Evidence', is important. This is not a study of the excavated sites, nor of the artefacts found within them. The book is also limited to the area south of a line between Lancashire and north Yorkshire. It is not a corpus, and is based upon detailed examination of about a third of the 1366 surviving hill-forts in this area. This in itself is a prodigious piece of work, and one value of the book is the number of unfamiliar sites presented to the reader. After an introduction to the nature, location and distribution of hill-forts, the main part of the book is concerned with a number of different groups of site. Entrances and internal features are considered separately. The discussion of enclosure-plans leads to the construction of an elevenfold classification, which forms the basis for subsequent analysis. This typology is not radically new and incorporates groups of sites already distinguished by other workers. In some ways it is reassuring that this scheme should be consistent with earlier expectations; but this basic discussion relies too heavily on the Ordnance Survey's Map of southern Britain in the Iron Age, and the regional maps in the present book reproduce this outline almost unaltered. It is also a pity that the author's discussion of entrance-types was not fully integrated into this scheme, since the design of hill-fort gateways is probably susceptible to more regional variation than the total plan. This is very much a weighted typology in which certain elements have been given prominence at the expense of others. Such potentially important variables as absolute size, elevation or internal