A Fortress of the Stone Age

 

Commanding some of the grandest views of Sussex, with the Isle of Wight breaking its sea horizon, St Roche Hill rises to 900 feet. It is named from a 15th-century chapel once at its summit.

 

It's most striking feature is a great rampart surrounding the summit and enclosing an area of 12 acres. Known as the Trundle, meaning the hoop, the mound was thrown up by men of the early Iron Age 500 years before the Romans settled four miles below in Chichester. This rampart consists of a low outer and a large inner bank separated by a ditch, which, in spite of the weathering of 2000 years, still dips to 17 feet below the crest of the inner bank. The circumference of this ditch is 3080 feet, and the task of excavating it on this chalk hill must have been stupendous.

 

For over 2000 years an unsuspected secret lay within its wide border, a secret which a photograph from an aeroplane revealed only a few years ago. On this photograph Mr O. G. S. Crawford detected the faint ramparts of a smaller camp within the great hoop. Unnoticed before, they were now easily traced as seen from the clouds. Without doubt this camp was older than the mound around it, its ramparts having been almost levelled by the later arrivals; perhaps it was one of our rare Stone Age camps.

 

In 1928 an antiquary pitched his tent here to put this theory to the test. Characteristic of Stone Age camps is the interruption of their ditches by causeways of undisturbed chalk. The sound of a rammer distinguishes between solid chalk and filled in ditches, so that a plan was soon made which showed these causeways leading to gaps in the inmost rampart where gates would be. This inmost rampart enclosed three acres, and outside was a spiral ditch with a portion extending beyond that dug in the Iron Age.

 

With the plan as a guide a trench was cut through the filled-in ditches, each spadeful being carefully tabulated, the yield from the bottom of each ditch being, of course, the most important. Stone Age pottery 4000 years old was found. Bones indicated that oxen, sheep, and pigs shared these heights with the earliest human inhabitants, but no hint was there of a horse. Most interesting of all, the skeleton of a woman was found under the Iron Age rampart, but resting on the earlier ditch which had already become silted up. She was crouched under a cairn of chalk blocks, and was one of the last of her race to be buried here. The camp was then deserted, and for the thousand years of the Bronze Age the turf grew over the ditches.

 

At last, about 2500 years ago, came the iron-using Celtic invaders from the Continent to build a hilltop city and to dwell in it till the century in which Julius Caesar landed. No mere camp of refuge like Cissbury was this, but the strongest and largest hill-fortress in the land. Finally they deserted it for their new capital on the fertile plain below, Regnum - our Chichester.

 

Relics of these people were numerous on the Trundle. Pits dug out of the chalk by antler-picks and metal adzes were excavated. The most curious pit, 12 feet long, was below one of the two entrances. Round holes two feet across had been tooled out at two of its corners, obviously to hold the posts for a massive gate tower. A wooden wall surrounded the town, and its people dwelt in wooden houses. The pottery found resembled that in our richest example of Iron Age culture.

 

The animal bones found show that a breed of cattle differing from those of the earlier settlement served the people here, while three skulls were evidence of their use of the horse. The shells of snails proved that the climate was moister than today, though drier than in the Stone Age. The oak and the buckthorn had replaced the birch, while gorse had spread its glowing carpet around.

 

Though life must have been hard and crowded in this timber town of 20 centuries ago, the grandsires of those who saw the Roman galleys on the sea below must have had many happy hours on the grass slopes and in the lovely forest land of Goodwood around their mighty ramparts.

 

 

 

 

The King's England - Sussex, by Arthur Mee. Published 1950

 

 

 

 

Top of Page       main page:  www.yeoldesussexpages.com