Crickley Hill, on the edge of the Cotswolds, is famous for its spectacular views over the Severn Valley, as well as the well-preserved remains of an Iron Age hillfort that was built there c.600-500 BC. As 25 years of excavations led by Professor Philip Dixon of Nottingham University have demonstrated, however, the site’s story stretches back much further (see CA 110 and 200). Beginning in 1969, these investigations revealed that the hilltop had been settled many times throughout prehistory – and this occupation had begun some 4,000 years before the Iron Age ramparts rose.
Today, the most obvious features on the site (which is open to the public, and in the care of the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust) are the hillfort’s imposing earthworks. These initially enclosed a settlement of rectangular buildings, followed soon afterwards by a group of roundhouses. Occupation of the site had actually begun much earlier, however: set within the ramparts is a much earlier Neolithic settlement which, the long-running excavations revealed, had also seen two phases of activity (CA 58). Its earliest incarnation was a causewayed enclosure, built c.3650 BC, after which came a continuous ditch settlement in c.3550 BC. This new design had defence in mind, but it met with violent destruction around a century later, in an event known as the ‘Battle of Crickley Hill’. Evidence of a determined attack on the settlement is preserved by the patterns of hundreds of flint arrowheads that have been found across the site, concentrated particularly around its entrances and in and around the line of the palisade that once crowned its bank (CA 76).
While archaeological work at Crickley Hill ended in 1993, post-excavation analysis has continued ever since, bringing different aspects of the site’s story to publication in successive volumes. The latest iteration of the excavation report has just been released (see ‘Further information’ box below), focusing on a particularly enigmatic feature of the site: the Long Mound valley, a shallow depression that contains a 110m-long, 3m-wide earth mound. Set well away from the hillfort buildings in a secluded natural hollow, the mound was initially interpreted as a burial monument, or perhaps a medieval warren for farming rabbits, which had been built in a single episode. Both of these theories have since been comprehensively disproved. So, what was it for, and when was it constructed?
