Pootler

Hillforts pepper our hills, maybe around four thousand across the country. At least we  have called them hillforts. But are they? It seems that they not always on hills and probably not usually forts. The label was pinned on them by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, one of the most revered pre-history pundits of the 20th century and a former Brigadier in the Army so he might just have seen what he was programmed to see!  Sir Mortimer Wheeler Gandalf in the City?   In my own search for a sound basis for generalisation, I drew on lots of visits, slogged my way through a fat tome on hillforts generally, waded through archaeology papers in the British Library, scaled a mound of local landscape history books and tiptoed into the prehistory nerd websites. After all that, they remained inscrutable.  Some do seem to have seen conflicts. We are confident that Cadbury in Dorset saw battles with the Romans.  Others were clearly built with defence in mind, for instance by adding a...

  GPX File of Route :   Calleva This is a tour of the Berkshire countryside which starts from Theale Station and ends up at Twyford Station, further down the line to Paddington. It links places in the valleys of the Kennet, Loddon and Blackwater rivers, starting off on the towpath of the canalised River Kennet (NCR 4) but after that follows minor roads through green, rolling mixed farming country to Aldermaston, Silchester and eastwards. The exception being a rather tedious stretch through Winnersh on the home straight.   Zoom In The standout attraction is Roman Silchester whose visible remains are, in my humble opinion, only bettered by Hadrian’s wall in the UK. There are also traces of the pre-Roman settlements here.  The bucolic Kennet towpath. The Duke of Wellington’s Estate at Stratfield Saye. (You need to pay to enter). A rather good Nature Reserve & Cafe at Dinton Pastures The odd oddity. On the debit si...

  My earlier posts deal with prehistory generally, and the series on my 'Pootler'  bike routes blog was simply linked to Oil Drum Lane. From here onwards, they will be different with the posts on Oil Drum Lane taking a broader and more thematic view of events, while the Pootler version, with the emphasis on taking a microscope to the changes in the landscape over time, will remain relatively untouched. The period after the Romans left is known as the  Dark Ages, not because they were particularly gloomy, but because we don't know much about them, so we superimpose our current ideas about how things are organised around kings, nations and regular armies. The reality was almost certainly more chaotic.  It  might be better to think of early England as being a bit like the Congo, with weak or non-existent central control and people with strong family and tribal loyalties. There would probably have been frequent informal invasions, many refugees, and a few wandering,...

Must Farm  The last post saw the rise and fall of England's last Stone Age populations. They had replaced earlier hunter-gatherer populations and were in turn replaced by lighter-skinned farmers who introduced bronze tools. You make bronze by adding a small amount of tin to copper. Both were mined in Cornwall. Handy!  It is hard to determine what actually happened. The  changes seem to have been gradual but eventually profound. They could have resulted from the incomers simply breeding more quickly, aided by a better food supply. The  region might have acquired its first blonde, as well as one of the earliest forms of the Indo-European group of languages, which predominates today.  One of their villages has been unearthed in Norfolk and tells us a lot about them. See (Link)  Must Farm .   I f you are interested in pre-history, you could also check out (Link)  Flag Fen ,  which is nearby and where some of the local archaeological finds ar...