Ice Houses and Iron Age Forts

In the A-Z of Ashdown we have reached I for the Iron Age hill fort and, most appropriately for the weather, Ice Houses. I have blogged about the Ashdown House ice house before - here - and I hope it doesn’t make anyone feel too chilly!

The Iron Age hill fort of Alfred’s Castle lies to the north west of Ashdown House. It is small as hill forts go with a single rampart bank and ditch but it has a large enclosure attached that in aerial photographs shows as crop marks. It is possible that a second ditch was re-used as part of the medieval park pale in 1204. The current bank was originally revetted with sarsen walls but when Ashdown House was built in 1662 these were robbed out to lay the foundations for the house. The antiquarian John Aubrey who passed Ashdown at the time recorded this act of historical vandalism!

Two excavations by Oxford University recorded Bronze Age origins for the site, dating from the 6^th century BC. This is an interesting tie-in with the line of four Bronze Age barrows on the horizon, thought to mark a tribal boundary and with the Bronze Age artefacts found on Weathercock Hill. Evidence of an Iron Age roundhouse was found and also a Romano-British building dating from the 2^nd to the 4^th century AD.  The Roman building was a “villa farmhouse” of fairly high status with six rooms, several of which had an “opus signium” floor of stone and tile. The building was substantially built of stone and had painted walls but no hypocaust or mosaic floors. It is one in a series of early villas in the area.

In 1855 William 2^nd Earl of Craven donated a copper Romano-British brooch and two bracelets found there to the British Museum.

Alfred’s Castle was originally known as Ashbury Camp and was given the name Alfred’s Castle in the 18^th century when antiquarians wanted to tie it in with King Alfred’s Battle of Ashdown of AD 871. I’ve blogged about the battle in other posts (links here and here) and Ashdown has at least as good a claim to be the site as any, with Alfred’s muster at the hill fort. The Second Earl of Craven also donated a number of other finds from the estate that show Anglo Saxon origins including a knife, shears, spear heads, and a sword. There was also a Viking axe…

In modern times the author James Long used the archaeological dig at Alfred’s Castle as inspiration for his book Silence and Shadows.

There is currently no interpretation board at Alfred’s Castle as we are waiting for the final report from the Oxford University dig so that we can incorporate the details. However it is a site that is well worth seeing as part of the historical landscape.

Field of Dreams

To the south of Ashdown Park is a walk that takes you straight back into history. It begins, prosaically enough, in a layby near the water pumping station where you go through a gate into what I call the Field of Dreams. It's a bit like the Secret Garden; on one side you're standing by the road to Lambourn. On the other you're in Deep History.

On your right the remains of the medieval Park Pale of the Ashdown deer park sweep down the hillside, still imposing after hundreds of years. The park pale was erected in the Middle Ages when Ashdown was a hunting chase belonging to Glastonbury Abbey. It consists of a bank and ditch and in places it is still five feet wide and several feet high. Originally there would have been a paling fence on the top too high for a deer to leap.

As you cross the field, the remains of what look like a small camp come into view on your left. Some antiquarian books record this as a Roman fort although I have never been able to discover any details about it or find it on any maps. It's true that there were a number of Roman villas scattered across this part of the Downs, one of which was built into the centre of the Iron Age hillfort at Alfred's Castle. The current road along the Downs beneath the Ridgeway, the Portway, was a Roman Road to the major settlement at Wanborough. So it's possible there might have been a small fort nearby. As is the case with Alfred's Castle, you can see what look like banks and gateways, ditches, entrances and possibly the outline of internal walls.

A little further away across the field is an enormous barrow with a sarsen stone on the top and a ring of what I at first thought were sarsens around the base. On closer inspection they turned out to be tree stumps that looked almost petrified and I wondered if this had once been a site like Waylands Smithy that the Victorians had prettified by adding a ring of trees to complement the rugged beauty of the stones.

As you walk on across the wheat field you have a magnificent view of the park pale ascending the escarpment of Ashdown Upper Wood, a mysterious and ancient woodland with trees up to eight hundred years old and abundant wildlife. The path leads directly to a line of three Bronze Age barrows on the top of the hill. This was a Bronze Age tribal boundary and there are actually four barrows but one of them was sunken and now it is a pool in the winter. As you stand on the top of the hill looking at the sun on the gold dome of Ashdown House you can feel the years roll back. This is a place to come to dream.