Professor Tom Moore

The Cheviot Hills is covered in hill forts, but those are probably only including a couple of households.

They're incredibly well-constructed monuments with quite substantial ramparts, but they're not big monuments.

And again, another thing with hill forts is we think of it as the Iron Age, but we now know that hill forts start in the Late Bronze Age.

So they're one of these things that continues and develops and changes, and they change over time in terms of their roles as well.

So some of the early Iron Age hill forts, so again, thinking about sort of 800 to 600 BC,

Somewhere like Uffington and Berkshire.

It's probably most people are not living in that hill fort.

It's probably a central focus for a wider community.

It's probably a storage place for food resources, perhaps for some surplus, but they're probably not actually living there.

But then we think of Danebury in the middle Iron Age.

So when I mean that, I mean about sort of 400 to 250 BC.

There's quite a lot of people living in there.

Maiden Castle, yeah.

There's a few hundred people living in those hill forts.

So hill forts are very varied.

like you can't help but think about when you visit one of those sites yes and i mean if you think of the the size and the entrances as well the complex entrances if anybody's been to maiden castle or danbury of kind of getting into these things there's a huge amount of labor expended on those sites i mean one of the big questions for archaeologists is who's constructing them you know so is it that there is sort of vassal peoples who are constructing them or is it the inhabitants i think we're

Most archaeologists now for the Iron Age would assume that it's largely done by the inhabitants or as part of the community.

Hillfoots are not necessarily at the top of a settlement hierarchy where there are lots of other people who are dependent on these sites.

no very much so i mean i think trying to kind of identify them to the the tribal names we can talk more about those in the late iron age is quite problematic these are much smaller uh size communities than than those larger entities so so no i think that's you know these are not they don't work in the same way i mean if you look at

At Dainbury, for instance, in Hampshire, the hill fort there is not the sort of residence of an elite.