Iron-age hill forts

Back when iron started becoming widely used in Europe, say roughly 500 or 1000 BC give or take a few centuries, people started building hill forts.  Because they didn't write down what they were doing, clearly having no consideration for their descendants a few millennia later, we aren't quite sure if these were places from which lords looked down in fierce disdain at other people, or if they were villages that felt they needed some sort of protection against wild animals or people from the next village, or if perhaps they were sacred sites where people would assemble for rituals at certain times of the year.  They were at any rate big, with at least a few acres inside their outer walls.

They did in any event take an awful lot of work to construct, which might go on for generations.  Some had earthen walls, with a few openings.  The Mound Builders in what is now the US built similar structures for equally obscure purposes.  (The ancestors of the American Indians did not have iron, however.)  Or an iron-age hill fort might have stone walls.

The image above is a hill fort in Scotland.  It was built with stone walls that are still there, even though they are now stone humps rather than walls.  There are millions of stones up on top of this hill, every one of which had to be carried up there.  Interestingly, there are no loose stones evident anywhere on the hill's lower slopes.  The following image will give you an idea of how high up this spot is.

Now this hill fort is still there, essentially untouched, except by the elements.  But a lot of hill forts have been found under Europe's cities when excavations have been done (for sewer lines and the like).  A good commanding spot with a river or stream at the bottom of the hill remains a good commanding spot over the centuries.

Under the Roman Empire hill forts were found all over Europe (though now used for different purposes), and a lot of them had castles built on top of them in the Middle Ages.  Castles went up a whole lot faster than cathedrals, and my guess is that there's a simple reason:  if there was a good hilltop spot with a lot of stones already collected, that would strike everyone involved as a perfect place for a castle.  Why spend a lot of effort collecting stones when they were already there?

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval castles, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.