Danebury Hill Camp

Danebury Hill Camp, also called Danebury and earlier Dunnebury Hill, is an Iron Age hillfort in Hampshire. It stands in the parish of Nether Wallop, in the district of Test Valley, near Stockbridge, about 19 kilometres, or 12 miles, north-west of Winchester, and about two miles north-east of Nether Wallop. One measured point puts it about 3 kilometres north of the road that leaves Stockbridge toward the west. The hill rises to 143 metres, or 469 feet.

The country round it rarely rises above 100 metres, or 330 feet, and the hill stands more than 40 metres, or 130 feet, above the surrounding plain, so the ramparts command a wide view. The chalk soil is light and would have been easy to cultivate. The territory that the fort overlooked included woodland, upland pasture, and water. Wallop Brook runs to the west and flows south-east into the River Test.

The enclosed fort covers about 5 hectares, given as 12 acres and, in another statement of the same measure, as 7.5 acres. A further circuit of earthworks later added 5.3 hectares, or 13 acres, outside that ring. The hill itself is given as 12.8 hectares, or 31.6 acres. The Local Nature Reserve called Danebury Hillfort covers 39 hectares, or 96 acres, and is looked after by the Hampshire Countryside Service.

The scheduled monument sits inside a Site of Special Scientific Interest called Danebury Hill. The reserve and the scientific interest are not the same patch of ground as the 5 hectare enclosure, and a local nature reserve is a statutory designation made by a principal local authority under the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. There are now over 1,280 such reserves in England, covering almost 40,000 hectares. The declaring authority has to hold a legal interest in the land.

A reserve of this kind can also be a site of special scientific interest, and it cannot at the same time be a national nature reserve. Danebury is scheduled as a monument of national importance. The entry for the camp still lacks the fuller modern description that later records carry, and the grid point published with that entry is SU 32414 37668. Other placements on the Ordnance Survey National Grid are SU323376, SU 326 376, and SU 323377.

That grid is a British system, separate from latitude and longitude, which measures a place by its distance from an origin to the west of the Isles of Scilly. A six-figure reference of this kind picks out a square of 100 metres.

There is no written history of events at the fort in the Iron Age, so the sequence comes from excavation. Dates are harder to fix than the order of the banks and the gates. The British Iron Age is the span in Great Britain from about 800 BC until the Roman period in the 1st century AD. It followed the British Bronze Age and is marked by iron tools and weapons.

It excludes prehistoric Ireland, which had its own iron-using cultures. Another account of the same centuries, used for this hill, puts the Iron Age between the end of the Bronze Age and the start of the Roman period, from 700 BC to AD 43. In southern Britain the same span is also taken as from around 800 BC to AD 43. The Iron Age, as a wider archaeological epoch, is the last age in the three-age scheme of stone, bronze, and iron.

That scheme was used for the archaeology of Europe in the first half of the 19th century and was introduced in Scandinavia by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen in the 1830s. Smelted iron replaces bronze in common use at different times in different places. In Anatolia and the Caucasus, or in south-east Europe, the Iron Age began around 1300 BC. In the ancient Near East the change came with the collapse of the Late Bronze Age in the 12th century BC.

Northern Europe was not reached until about the 5th century BC. Meteoric iron, a natural alloy of iron and nickel, had been used for millennia before that. In central and western Europe the Roman conquests of the 1st century BC are often taken as the end of the Iron Age. In most of Britain the end is the Roman conquest that began in AD 43.

In parts of Britain that were not brought into that conquest, such as Scotland, the period is sometimes extended to about the 5th century.

Britain in these centuries took up some parts of the Hallstatt and La Tène material cultures from mainland Europe, though British objects adopted continental styles later than the Continent. Hillfort building increased sharply. In Scotland the same age produced brochs. The earliest surviving outside description is from the Greek geographer Pytheas, around 320 BC, who called the island Albion, one of the Pretannic isles, and called the people Keltoi.

Most of the Iron Age inhabitants were insular Celts, later called Celtic Britons, speaking Celtic languages. They were divided into many tribes and kingdoms and followed an ancient Celtic religion overseen by druids. Some southern tribes had links with Gaul and Belgica, minted coins, and there was some Gallic and Belgic settlement in Britain. Claudius Ptolemy later described Britain at the start of Roman rule, using earlier material, and still used the name Albion, although Strabo and Pliny already used Britannia.

The chalk country that would much later become the kingdom of Wessex was already an occupied landscape. From the Neolithic the downs were crossed by the Harrow Way. Avebury and Stonehenge were completed on Salisbury Plain in the Late Neolithic, and the final phase of Stonehenge belongs to the so-called Wessex culture of the Middle Bronze Age, about 1600 to 1200 BC. By the Iron Age, Celtic British tribes including the Durotriges, the Atrebates, the Belgae, and the Dobunni occupied the land that would become Wessex.

No account read here assigns Danebury itself to one of those named tribes. The kingdom of the West Saxons, also called the kingdom of Wessex, is a much later polity, placed from around 519 until around 927. The Anglo-Saxons believed it was founded by Cerdic and Cynric of the Gewisse. Alfred the Great, in about 886, took the title king of the Anglo-Saxons for those not under Danish rule, and his grandson Æthelstan, after taking York in 927, took the title king of the English.

That kingdom, the Danish wars, and the earldom of Wessex belong to the centuries after the hillfort had already gone out of use. They explain the later name of the hill, not the people who dug the first ditch.

Until the 19th century almost nothing was known from digging about hillforts, and their purpose had been forgotten. In the medieval period their building was credited variously to King Arthur, to King Alfred, to the Danes, to Julius Caesar, and even to giants. By the 18th century they were widely thought to be Roman. Interest was stirred by work at a hillfort on Worlebury Hill in the early 19th century.

In the second half of that century Augustus Pitt-Rivers carried out the first widespread investigation of hillforts. He was Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, born Augustus Henry Lane-Fox on 14 April 1827 and dead on 4 May 1900. For most of his life he used the surname Lane Fox. In 1880 he inherited from a cousin an estate of more than 32,000 acres in Cranborne Chase and was required to take the name Pitt-Rivers.

His collection of about 22,000 objects became the founding collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, and his English archaeological collection from the country around Stonehenge underlies the collection at Salisbury. He was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards in 1845 and, in a military career of thirty-two years, saw major front-line action once, at the Battle of Alma in 1854. His work on the hillforts of Sussex led him to conclude that most hillforts were built in the Iron Age, and that conclusion opened the way for later work. He did not excavate Danebury.

In the 1920s and 1930s British archaeology went through what has been called hillfort mania, and by 1940 about 80 hillforts had been excavated.

The first dig at Danebury itself was in November 1859, under the antiquarian Augustus Wollaston Franks. He was Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks, born at Geneva on 20 March 1826 and dead on 21 May 1897. From 1851 he was assistant in the Department of Antiquities at the British Museum, with the brief of building a collection of British antiquities, and from 1866 he was Keeper of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography. He was appointed director of the Society of Antiquaries in 1858, and he was in that office when he came to the hill.

The vicar of Nether Wallop, the Reverend Walter Blunt, a scholar of King’s College, Cambridge, invited him after villagers digging for rabbits broke into a pit that held bones and sherds of pottery. The workers cleared a bottle-shaped cavity with a narrow neck, 2 metres, or 7 feet, deep and 1.5 metres, or 5 feet, across at the widest point. They could not decide what the pit was for. Bad weather stopped the work.

Franks expected to come back quickly. He never did.

A century later Barry Cunliffe chose one hillfort and the land around it as a way to study Iron Age society, its politics, and its population. Sir Barrington Windsor Cunliffe, born on 10 December 1939 and usually known as Sir Barry Cunliffe, is a British archaeologist. Roman remains found on his uncle’s farm in Somerset, when he was nine, set him on that path. He read archaeology and anthropology at St John’s College, Cambridge, and while a student he won the presidency of the Cambridge Archaeological Field Club against his fellow student Colin Renfrew.

He lectured at Bristol from 1963 and, in 1966, became an unusually young professor in the new Department of Archaeology at Southampton. There he was already involved in the excavation of the Fishbourne Roman Palace in West Sussex, from 1961 to 1968. Danebury was the southern English site that led him away from the Roman period. He was Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford from 1972 to 2007 and has been emeritus since 2007.

The summer seasons at the hillfort therefore began while he was at Southampton and continued after he had moved to Oxford. One account places him as the Southampton professor who led the work. Another names him as professor at Oxford and dates the excavation from 1968 to 1989. The seasons usually cited run from 1969 to 1988, twenty seasons, and the dig is called the lengthiest investigation of any hillfort in western Europe.

Hampshire County Council owned the hill and gave permission. The council had bought it in 1958, when the earthworks were covered in beech trees. Many of those trees had become unstable through disease, and a long programme of removal began. Large beeches around the perimeter still make the earthworks stand out in the landscape.

The excavators examined the defences and a gateway and opened 57 percent of the interior. That share is also given as about 3 hectares out of the 5 hectares inside the ramparts. The remains of wattle and timber houses were found. The counts of what lay under the turf are given in more than one way, and they should be kept side by side.

One account records 73 roundhouses, 500 rectangular buildings, and thousands of deep storage pits, together with more than 180,000 pieces of pottery and 240,000 bits of bone, plus stone, bone, iron, and bronze objects. Another count, from the excavation archive, is about 2,300 pits, about 10,000 postholes, about 73 circular houses, and about 500 rectangular subsidiary structures, with 158,000 sherds of pottery and 241,500 animal bones. A third statement of the same digging gives some 10,000 postholes, another 2,300 pits, nearly a quarter of a million animal bones, and 14,000 kilograms of pottery. The circular houses were for people.

The rectangular buildings and the pits held grain. The pits were cut in the chalk with tools such as mattocks. They had a narrow neck and a wider base, were filled with grain, and were then sealed. The archive was one of the first large excavations to be put on computer, in the early 1980s.

Phasing rested mainly on pottery types together with a sequence of more than 70 radiocarbon dates. Ceramic phases were assigned to pits, postholes, gullies, and other features so that roughly contemporary plans could be drawn. The 43 percent of the hilltop that was left unexcavated was kept for a later time and for methods that did not yet exist.

Before the rampart there was already activity on the hilltop. In the early first millennium BC people dug pits and placed burials. The first rampart and ditch belong to the 6th century BC. The first phase of the defences is dated to around 550 BC.

When the hillfort was built, several other hillforts of similar size and layout were going up in the Wessex region. Figsbury Ring, Quarley Hill, and Bury Hill were probably established around the same time. They were generally evenly spaced and each commanded a territory and resources of a similar scale. Early in its life Danebury was a single ditch around about 5 hectares, with two gateways.

One account puts those gates in the south-west and the east, and says the south-west gate has not been excavated. Another puts the opposing entrances on the south-east and the west, and says the south-eastern entrance was the one excavated. A road seems to have run between the entrances, with zones of pits and rectangular post-built structures on either side.

The first rampart stood behind a ditch. Chalk rubble from the ditch, with some of the local clay, was held in timber, so the bank was a box rampart with a vertical face. On the account that describes an east gate, that entrance was at first a simple gap of 4 metres, or 13 feet, with a timber gatehouse. At least 50 years after the rampart was built, more chalk was added.

That has been read as maintenance, once the timber box began to rot and the bank to slump. Around the same time the east gap was widened to 9 metres, or 30 feet. Not long after that alteration the gates were burnt. For a short time the fort had no gate.

When the east entrance was repaired, the passage through it was lengthened.

Around 400 BC a third phase raised the rampart again and the ditch was dug out once more. The new ditch was V-shaped, 6 metres, or 20 feet, deep, and between 11 and 12 metres, or 36 and 39 feet, wide. The size of the ditch it replaced is unknown, because the recutting destroyed the earlier profile. The timber box was given up.

The bank was allowed to slope down toward the ditch, and it was probably crowned by a dry-stone wall of flint. From the top of the rampart to the bottom of the ditch is about 16 metres, or 52 feet. During the long life of this circuit the east gateway was remodelled twice more. It became longer, and earthworks were built on each side of the approach.

The south-west gate, on that same account, was given extra earthworks and was then abandoned and filled in. Another account of the developed entrance says that by the late 4th century BC the south-eastern gate had become a long tunnel, with a hornwork and several outworks, that the ramparts had been substantially heightened around the whole enclosure, and that the western gate had been blocked. These two descriptions do not use the same compass points, and both are left as they stand.

In the early layout the north part of the fort held four-post structures, probably granaries, later replaced by storage pits, while the south held roundhouses set among granaries and pits. In the developed fort the southern part filled with four-post and six-post structures, again read as granaries, and the earlier roundhouses there were replaced. The centre was probably given over to shrines, and houses stood mainly close to the ramparts. A new line of earthworks beyond the existing ring turned Danebury into a multivallate fort, meaning more than one series of banks and ditches.

Those outer works added 5.3 hectares and were probably meant to protect livestock. While other hillforts in the region were abandoned in the 4th century BC, Danebury grew, at about 400 BC, into what is called a developed hillfort. It may have housed a king or a chieftain with his family, his retinue, and craftsmen. One estimate of the people living inside is 200 to 350.

Another is a community of 300 to 400, living there for more than 400 years. A third says that at the peak the fort may have been home for up to four hundred people. Traces of craft and industry on a large scale, and shrines at the centre, are taken as signs that a social elite used the site.

Life on the hill was farming. People kept sheep and cattle, wove woollen cloth, and made leather goods. Horses were known as draught animals, and dogs guarded sheep, cattle, and swine. Warriors fought with swords and sometimes used horse-drawn chariots.

The hill had few raw materials of its own, so iron, tin, copper, salt, shale, and stone came by trade. Wool and grain are the goods likely to have gone out in return. The geographer Strabo wrote that Britain produces corn, cattle, gold, silver, and iron, and that these things are exported. Cereals were the main product.

After harvest they were brought into the fort. Grain for eating was kept in rectangular timber granaries, used for many seasons. Seed grain went into pits sealed with clay and marl so that they were airtight. A sealed pit works because the first sprouting uses up the oxygen.

The grain then lies dormant. Experiments in chalk, with pits up to 2 metres deep and about a metre across, sealed with moist clay and loose soil, found that bacteria and fungi died once oxygen could not be replaced, and that a crust about 50 millimetres thick formed against the chalk while the grain in the middle stayed edible and would still grow. Beans and perhaps other foods may have been stored in the same way, and grass piled in and weighted with stones would cure as silage. Each grain pit lasted only about two or three years.

Probably no more than about ten pits were in use at any one moment. When a pit was finished, a new one was dug nearby and the spoil was often used to fill the old one. The old pits also took rubbish. Before they were closed for good it was common to place selected things in them: pottery, joints or whole carcasses of meat, and human bodies.

The preferred reading of those placements is that they were offerings to underworld deities, in thanks for protecting the seed through the winter or in hope of the next harvest. The same idea has been called special animal deposits. Another study of the same bones has treated the groups as associated bone groups and has asked how the fills of the pits were built up, rather than starting from the rite.

The fort could hold about twenty times as much food as an average farmstead. The farms around it were small, between 1 hectare, or 2.5 acres, and 2 hectares, or 4.9 acres. Danebury is read as a central place where people gathered to trade and to store goods. Times when activity inside hillforts intensified, while the countryside around them lost people, can be read either as the forts growing more important or as moments of unrest when people came in behind the banks.

Many of the farmers may have lived out on those farms and come into the fort in times of stress. The highest point of the hill held shrines and temples. One account says that religion mattered deeply, that the gods were thought to live in rivers, trees, and other natural features, and that offerings and sometimes sacrifices were made. Some of the burials are thought to have been sacrificial.

In that account the rites were carried out by priests known as druids, who were also law makers, teachers, storytellers, and medicine men. The excavation account of the centre speaks of shrines and of carefully placed deposits without using that priestly title, so the two descriptions are not collapsed into one.

The banks were the strongest part of the fort and the entrances the weakest. The long, curving east approach would have slowed attackers and given people on the rampart time to throw missiles. The south-west entrance narrowed, which would have packed attackers together. A store of 11,000 pebble-sized sling stones was found near the main east gate.

Men, women, and children may all have had to throw those stones. Barry Cunliffe has described Iron Age society as effervescent, essentially unstable, and prone to conflict, and he has used the military form of hillforts to support that view. He also allows that the ramparts displayed wealth and power, because Danebury could be seen for miles. The burning of the gates is probably the result of an attack.

Danebury was abandoned around 100 BC, in line with a wider British pattern of hillforts falling out of use. The east gate was burnt again and this time was not replaced. One account says there is some evidence of fighting and that the site was given up then, though it may have gone on for a while as a corral for animals. Most of the inhabitants left.

Groups of bodies were placed in charnel pits. Those pits, from the end of the intense occupation, hold about 100 bodies, many with injuries that look as if they were made by weapons such as spears and swords. Buildings were left to decay and the interior was used for grazing. By the start of the 1st century AD the settlement was probably no more than a single farm.

A visitor account of the same hill says the fort was occupied for nearly 500 years until the Romans arrived. The occupation is also described as nearly 500 years, and as much of the Iron Age, without that Roman end-date. The intensity of occupation and the amount of material deposited generally increased across the 500 years.

In 1997 a further survey, this time without new digging, was made with a magnetometer as part of the Wessex Hillforts Project. After the main excavation, the Danebury Environs Programme of 1989 to 1995, and the wider environs project that followed the fort dig, examined the landscape of linear ditches, field systems, farmstead enclosures, and trackways, much of it first known from aerial photographs. Sites that were dug and in many cases published include another hillfort, farmsteads, and linear ditches, and the time-range was extended to Romano-British farmsteads and villas. Beneath the modern fields around the hill, smaller ancient fields show from the air as crop marks.

The prehistoric farmland was as busy as the farmland of today. In the latter part of 2024, at a place distant from the ramparts but still visible from them, topsoil was stripped so that a farm could be rearranged, and the stripping was watched. No direct evidence of a settlement was found. Two ditches of real size, surviving only in short lengths, may mark a field, a paddock, or some other activity area.

Four large pits were found. Iron Age pottery shows that the activity belongs to the same centuries as the hillfort. There was relatively little pottery, especially in the pits, which argues that these were not grain pits filled with the rubbish of a working farm. Samples from the fills of both the pits and the ditches contained iron slag from production and hammerscale, the fine droplets that spray off during smithing.

The place may be where a community made iron or mended iron tools. It is not part of the interior of Danebury Hill Camp, and it is not one of the pits inside the ramparts.

The object that has drawn the most recent laboratory work from inside the fort is a meteorite. It is an H5 ordinary chondrite. It was recovered in 1974 from metalworking debris, during the excavation of a grain pit, and it was first taken for slag, or for an unusual fragment of heated ironstone. It was first reported in 1984.

It was recognized as a meteorite in 1989, when the metal-rich slags were being characterised, which is also described as about a decade after the find. What remains of a 30 gram sample has been classified. A catalogue entry gave the weight as 63.0 grams and that figure is thought to be probably wrong. Before it was cut it was a walnut-sized pebble.

About 10 grams were taken for a probe mount. A search for the specimen began in 2008. About 20 grams were returned in 2014 to the Hampshire County Council Arts and Museums Service, which holds the finds and the archive. It had been at Oxford.

A thin section and a few chips from the cutting stayed with the laboratory that studied it.

The pit is P706, an eroded beehive pit near the centre of the fort, just left of a fork in the track that leads north-west from the main east gate, and only about 30 metres downslope from the supposed shrine. Its depth was 1.44 metres. The mouth was 1.2 by 1.3 metres. The base was 1.54 metres at the minimum and 1.64 metres at the maximum.

The ratio of mouth to base was 0.75. The uneroded volume was 1.63 cubic metres and the volume actually dug out was 2.41 cubic metres. There were no tool marks that would show which implements cut it. Three episodes of filling were recorded.

The bulk, layer 3, went in probably as one event, then settled and compacted. Weathering of the lip produced layer 2, an erosion layer of silt and chalk in about equal parts, with larger chalk fragments toward the centre. Layer 1 levelled the remaining hollow: fine brown silt with small rounded chalk and flecks of daub, dipping to the centre. Very little else was in the pit.

Layer 3 had one bone each of sheep, ox, and pig. Layer 1 had three sheep, one ox, and two pig. Layer 2 had three sheep and four pig. Two other finds were numbered: a piece of daub, and the lump called slag that proved to be the meteorite.

It was magnetic. Its minerals were not those of bloomery slag. They included a magnesium iron silicate, chromite, and the iron sulphide troilite, and the iron contained nickel, in some grains as high as 20 percent, which is far too high for a terrestrial source and sits in the range for meteorites.

The interior of the stone is remarkably fresh, with a weathering index of W1/2, and there is no evidence that people tried to preserve it. That freshness is explained by chance burial in chalk, in ground whose natural lime keeps the surroundings alkaline. Two ages have been measured, and they are not the same kind of age. The terrestrial residence age, from carbon-14 produced in space and measured with beryllium-10, is 3200 plus or minus 390 years, or 1190 plus or minus 390 BC.

That figure does not include the later variation of carbon-14 in the atmosphere. The weathering products, which took their carbon from the air, give 2350 plus or minus 120 radiocarbon years before 1950. Calibrated, that range is 748 to 230 BC at one standard deviation, and 789 to 120 BC at two. An uncalibrated statement of the same determination is 2350 plus or minus 120 years before the present, and the calibrated span is also given simply as 748 to 230 BC.

The weathering age makes the fall contemporary with the busiest human use of the hill. The stone lay in the layer formed by natural subsidence after the first, human filling had sunk and left a pothole. It may have fallen into that hollow unnoticed. It cannot be ruled out that someone pushed it, or kicked it, in while levelling the ground.

A deliberate link with the shrine is considered extremely unlikely. People at the fort did collect marcasite from the fields for smelting, but the pebble had no outer feature that would mark it as iron or let it be mistaken for marcasite. If it had been picked up as a useful stone, there is no clear reason why it was then thrown into the backfill. The chance of a meteorite of about 30 grams landing on an area the size of the hill since the Iron Age began has been put at about 3 to 4 percent, using an upper estimate of the fall rate.

The 5 hectare enclosure is among the most thoroughly searched pieces of ground of its size, which is why a single small stone was noticed at all.

Danebury is treated as a type site for hillforts because very few others have been dug so completely. The work changed how these places are discussed: as defended settlements and stores, as stages for display, as centres for farms round about, and as places where grain, animals, and human bodies were put into the ground on purpose. Barry Cunliffe was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1979, received the Grahame Clark Medal in 2004, was appointed CBE in 1994, and was made a Knight Bachelor on 17 June 2006. His later writing has argued that Celtic culture grew along the Atlantic seaboard in the Bronze Age and moved inland, against the more usual view that Celtic origins lie with the Hallstatt culture of the Alps.

That argument is his, drawn from a much wider set of Atlantic sites, and it is not a finding from the pits at Danebury. What the hill itself supports is a long, dense, and often violent occupation through the British Iron Age, begun in the 6th century BC, remodelled into a developed fort around 400 BC or by the late 4th century, and emptied of its main population around 100 BC.