Burrough Hill is an Iron Age hill fort a few miles south of Melton Mowbray that commands impressive views across the countryside. I was there in the drizzle today.
I found it to be the haunt of ambitious sheep. I swear one came to check if by any chance I had left the gate open when I finally made my way down. I did not meet the pig.
The hill fort forms the centrepiece of Burrough Hill Country Park. It is the subject of a major student training and research excavation project run by the Department Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester (when they are not too busy finding Plantagenet kings).
Burrough Hill would have been the highest local point.
ReplyDeleteIt would have been covered by trees and the top point would have looked over trees. It would have been a lousy fort if they didn't have a lot of tree fellers.
I'm growing more convinced that these 'iron age hill forts' are just natural phenomenon. Their scale, is just too great for their supposed antiquity. That doesn't satisfactorily explain their purpose.
ReplyDeleteAs Mr Beesley has pointed out, these 'forts' are often not even very useful for defensive purposes.
In fact, many of these forts could often be described as inhospitable and hazardous which defeats their raison d'etre as a supposed living community. Defensively, they offer no retreat path, usually have no permanent water source, and in the case of many such 'forts' are located at wind-swept altitudes so high that the temperature is so uncomfortably cold that even vegetation struggles to grow.
The circular banking of these 'hill forts' is, in my opinion, not man-made. But due to some hitherto unexplained geological or meteorological effect.
Thank you for your time in reading this, and thank you to the blog host for granting the opportunity to express my thoughts.
Ibrahim S.Ahmed