Walking the countryside of the British Isles and many parts of the European continent (ring fort; castro), too, some of the traces of long-ago hillforts can sometimes be seen from a distance; or by climbing the hills, the fortification ruins may be seen up close. To people alive today they mean one set of imagined people and events. And to people 100 or 1000 years ago the meanings will have been somewhat different relative to their own moment in time and assumptions mirrored in the lumps of earthworks and bits of stone that sometimes remain. So whether it is the generation alive before construction, during construction, while in active use for different phases, or for the many, many generations viewing the ruins soon after disuse or much, much later, the way of remembering the long-ago times will have varied in sometimes small ways, but in other respects perhaps in large ways, too.
Historicity has a few meanings, but one of them is about the past-present relationship; the nature of pastness that people today see, feel, sense, talk about, and assume to be true. For example, in certain eras or in certain parts of the world the past and present may be inseparable with one bearing some weight in the other. Elsewhere the two may be imagined to be fully detached and independent of each other. In the case of hillforts like the 4000 documented around Great Britain, for instance, people today may first become aware of them from TV shows, schoolbooks, social media pictures or comments, or by personal experience in one’s surrounding landscape or the stories told about memory-places of the surroundings.
For people growing up in the age of heavy equipment to excavate and move rock and soil, ground cover and trees, perhaps the scale of a hillfort is not so impressive by comparison to modern construction sites. Only when the brute facts of making a hillfort with hands and a some hand tools of horn, bone, antler, wood, flint, and limited amounts of iron or bronze technology, then does the effort boggle the mind. This was no 18-month or 3-year public works project. The muscle power, coordination (and coercion, perhaps), and logistics of workers in groups large or small, persistent or seasonal was formidable and long-lasting. It may well have taken many years to complete the earthmoving, wooden palisades, interior buildings, ongoing routine maintenance, and so on. For modern people unaccustomed to outdoor labor in all kinds of weather and during the annual cycle of seasons, the prospect of making something of this size from scratch and with long-ago tools would be almost unimaginable. And yet, somehow, so many hillfort ruins still stand; time-travelers from the 500–1500 years BCE.
While it is impossible to know exactly what people of different moments across the passing centuries thought about the hillforts, nor the range of interest and imagination among people of the same location and decade, still there are some general differences between the relationship of people of a moment in time and the hillforts they knew nearby. At the time there was first talk about undertaking a massive building program, whether copying the neighboring people’s example or conceived of for the first time, there will probably have been some nay-sayers; ones not convinced or motivated to make the investment in laborers, materials, and the opportunity-cost of NOT doing other things with one’s time and in benefit of one’s immediate family or friends. Possibly there was consideration to generations of ancestors (what would they think of digging up the ground in this way) and to future generations who would inherit the fortification (burdened with upkeep or predisposed to seeing the world in defensive terms).
Once the construction began, clearing the selected site and then excavating the ditch(es) will have gone from novelty or point of pride for the community to a seemingly endless burden. For motivation, there may have been a combination of “carrots” and “sticks” to pull or to push the workers and their overseers/planners along the path to completion. Eventually, the perimeter will have been finished and then the rest of the interior could be filled in, year by year, probably with less urgency or precise planning involved. Whether it took a year of “all hands on deck” emergency frenzy of clearing, digging, building or instead it took a smaller band of specialists (or slaves) to do the work over a span of many years, the time did come when the big project was no longer an endless labor, but become something of stories told and memories shared in large sections or in fragmented comments to younger generations to remember about what the makers experienced. And once there was no longer anybody alive who actually worked on the site or the next generation who knew those workers, then only the fortress and the stories lingered from then on.
In the most active phases of the hillfort use-life, it may have served many functions at different times, or overlapping at the same time: for example, defense and deterrence, seasonal residential zone, trading site (animals, textiles, crops, metalwork — tools, weapons, finished hardware or fine decorative pieces), religious place of worship or offering, political agreement property (pledging loyalty, fealty, and so on), treasury or place to make one’s contributions.
With the Roman occupation of Britain in the many regions peppered with hillforts there were treaties or battles to render the sites no threat to Roman purposes of extracting tin, slaves, and other wealth (taxes; tribute) and maintaining social order, partly by making roadways, legal systems, and establishing commercial centers — towns not characterized by hilltop defensive works but places with marketplaces, temples of worship of Roman gods, and barracks for imperial forces. So the earlier functions of safety, commerce, religion, and political compacts were displaced little by little with Roman ways of doing things, instead. The people looking up to the disused, or repurposed once-mighty feature on the cultural landscape, perhaps, now saw reminders of the old ways, somehow irrelevant and drained of earlier meaning. After several generations of partly Roman terms for social life, the remains of the hillforts might seem even more irrelevant and empty of opportunity or worth measured in cultural capital.
After the Romans left in the early 400s CE, groups of immigrants from NW Europe (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) began to bring their technology and trading networks to many parts of Britain. Having some experience of the Roman occupiers, luxury goods, and disuse of iron age hillforts on the Continent, the ones in Britain probably reminded them of the old ways that Roman rules rendered irrelevant. So between 450 and 1066 those hillforts may or may not have been used in some secondary or derivative way (sheepfold, seasonal cool spot, sometimes as defensive safe location), but since life was largely about agriculture and by extension about trading, largely the hillforts and the centuries they embodied did not weigh heavily on surrounding residents’ minds or imaginations.
Like the earlier waves from NW Europe, the Vikings also wanted farmland and trade centers. But after the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the Norman centuries into the 1300s and Black Plague catastrophes on and off many years, fortified sites again were being built; not on top of hillfort ruins, though. So the large earthworks and commanding views may have been a curiosity to people of those Medieval generations. The 500 years leading to the 1900s saw the rise of sciences and ever more sophisticated technology, including printing presses and increasing rates of literacy, colonialism and resource extraction of materials like fossil fuels and labor resources in large-scale slavery. Positivism put increasing confidence in human intellect, logic and problem solving, engineered solutions, and so on. In that way of thinking, the ruins of hillforts must have represented antiquated traces; antiquated for being surpassed by modern ways and antiquated for dating to pre-Roman societies.
By the middle 1900s the prehistory expertise and methods made better and better assessment of the many ways of life before historical records were written down. During the next 4 or 5 generations into today’s moment, the hillforts and societies that made and used them began to fill in with more and more detail: organic traces, climate information (pollen and ice-core interpretation), carbon-14 dating technique, digital survey and photography, Lidar and subsurface mapping, Internet knowledge sharing, and ancient DNA analysis allowed more and more flesh to be added to the skeletal knowledge in previous centuries. As a result, at least among the experts, the hillforts and their time now present a much more vivid picture. No longer are the curious ruins merely a caricature of “uncivilized locals.”
In summary, the meanings and consequences of the hillforts have changed in the minds of the many people who have lived within sight of the hilltop; those alive at the talking stage, people involved in the construction years, the generations that the fort passed between from one to the next, the collision with the Roman Empire of several centuries and after that the reality of the successive centuries up until the age of powerful archaeological tools to bring those long ago times back to life in some ways from the 1930s and 1950s until today. The relationship between hillfort past and living generations present has gone from looming daily fact of razor-sharp status to silent relic of the Old Ways to archaeological site for uncovering lives long before Roman occupation. So while the same lumps and bumps on commanding heights have not much changed in 1900 or 2000 years, the shape of their image and meaning has greatly changed in the minds of people living nearby and those who take an interest from afar.
