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...

  West Stow. A Recreation of a Saxon village. This post will  (I hope)  complete my effort to track the changes in the landscape and population of this sceptred isle. In fact it isn't clear that the landscape changed much over the first few centuries after the Romans left. But for continuity I have to cover who it was that 'wasn't doing much'. In future posts, covering  the  Middle Ages and beyond,  I will adhere more strictly to the theme of the evolution of the landscape . These are the Dark Ages, not because they were particularly gloomy, but because we don't know much about them, filling the gaps by superimposing our current notions on 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 b...

Must Farm  The last post saw the rise and fall of England's last Stone Age populations. In the same way as they had replaced the earlier population, they were replaced by lighter-skinned settlers originating from the Caucasian Steppe; people who used bronze tools and kept horses and cattle. The  changes on the ground were gradual but eventually profound, and the  region might have got its first blond, as well as one of the earliest flavours of the Indo-European group of languages which predominate 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 where there is an exhibition of what has been found. As before, the huts look very similar to those I have seen in many parts of Africa.  These people added the Sarsens to the already ancient monuments at Stonehenge, the King's Men to the Rollright ...