In rural north Norfolk, where green farmland falls away towards the coast, imposing twin earthworks rise from the grass to form an impressive circuit of concentric Iron Age banks and ditches. Anywhere else in the country you might call this monumental enclosure a hillfort, though, in the famously flat landscape of East Anglia, Warham Camp lies at just 15m OD. All things being relative, however, the site – which is located near Wells-next-the-Sea, about 35 miles north-west of Norwich – does occupy a fittingly defensible vantage point, with sweeping views across its surroundings. It was built by the local Iceni people, centuries before the Roman occupation that would ultimately trigger the famous uprising led by their queen, Boudica, in AD 60/61, but a more precise chronology for the site has historically proven challenging to pin down.
Warham Camp is one of five, possibly six, Iron Age ‘forts’ known in Norfolk, and the best-preserved of the set, though its once circular footprint is now a horseshoe, having been truncated by 18th-century landscaping works that rerouted the River Stiffkey (pronounced ‘stookey’) in order to improve the view from nearby Warham Grove House. Today, the monument’s interior appears as a sea of empty grass, but over the course of the last 90 years archaeologists have been striving to shed light on how the site evolved and how it may have been used.
Previous investigations led by Harold St George Gray (in 1914) and Rainbird Clarke (in 1959) revealed that the fort’s surrounding banks had once been crowned by a tall timber palisade with a wooden platform to the rear. Both excavations produced pottery sherds attesting to Iron Age and Roman activity taking place within its bounds (further fragments have been recovered as stray finds in more recent years, after being brought to light not by archaeologists, but by resident populations of moles and rabbits); what those activities were, however, remained obscure.
