EARLY BRITAIN

Taranaki Daily News, 23 March 1935, Page 21 (Supplement)

EARLY BRITAIN

MAIDEN CASTLE WONDER. MARVELLOUS WALLS OF CELTS. ~ Maiden Castle is being revealed to us as to no generation' for certainly a thousand years, says the Children’s Newspaper. It is the wonder of Early Britain, the biggest and finest prehistoric hill fort in the country. It was one of our earliest cities, the forerunner of Roman Dorchester, being finished about 200 B.C. . We look upon it green with turf as if Nature had made it, but in truth it is of Man, and worthy of comparison with the Pyramids for the strength that was', put into it and the colossal movement of material with’simple tools. ~ Round..the level summit'?bf a hill , the marvellous' engineers of the Iron Age threw up gigantic chalky ramparts and made a city of strong defence for their families, cattle, and stores. They quarried with antler picks, and carried up the chalk in wicker baskets and skin bags. ' / ' The great oval ramparts enclose a whole hilltop of 45 acres, an area nearly half a mile long and half as wide. The steep earth walls are from 60 to 90 feet, high, and three or four lines of them encircle the hill, making five miles of trenches in all. The outer defences are nearly two miles round. At each end are complicated earthworks guarding the entrances; at the west are no fewer than seven banks through which the zigzag pathway winds. Such colossal works would hardly have been needed at the time they were built, and may be due to the pride and power of some chieftain long ago. Warlike his people were not, for though 4000 slingstones have been dug from a pit no other weapons of their day have been found. HEARTHS 4000 YEARS' OLD. Running across the enclosure is an earlier and weaker earthwork of about 500 or 600 B.C. which helped to fortify only a third of the hill. In the top of the banks have been found traces of a strong palisade of tree trunks deeply embedded in the soil. Within the bank have been, found pottery and a millstone; and beneath it, under the original level of the ground, have been discovered cook-ing-pits and hearths, all 4000 years old, and showing that there was .a village on the hill long before this earliest earthwork was built. Two flint axes, were beside one of the hearths, and scattered around were stone knives, bone scrapers,, and cooking-pots •of clay. A group of 50 pits near by . formed surprisingly primitive houses for those who could raise the gigantic earthworks around them. Huddled like the cells of a honeycomb, they were about 12 feet deep and half as wide. Their thatched

roofs and wooden, ladders have perished, but on the floors have been found pottery, and loomweights of clay and chalk. ' . Good-sized bones of sheep, goats, and oxen show that this was a clever farming people, and remains of their dogs have been found in the pits. Millstones show they grew wide stretches of corn, and the shallower and smaller pits seem to have been' granaries. One 1 pit was a reservoir and another a cold storage for meat. In the hole of a po». Which once supported a roof was found the huddled frame of a two-year-old child covered with slabs of stone. With it was a little bowl it may have used 2000 years ago. The castle must have been one. of the 20 towns captured by Roman Vespasian in 43 A.D., the inhabitants afterwards moving to found Dorchester. It lay abandoned for centuries, and it was not until after 375 that the Romanised Britons gave it its last flicker of' life by building a temple on this windy . site. It was a square, buildingwith a verandah round it/ancl’we can stifl. see the coloured plaster on the walls. Behind are the foundations of a little bungalow for the priest. Some fragments l of the temple floor • are in the Dorchester Museum; with a bronze statuette of a deified bull and a bronze plaque of Minerva. A fine Roman brooch of bronze has also been found, and among the coins was a heap of gold pieces, with a ring. Maiden Castle stands a mute witness to the prodigious organising power of the Celts. Here must' have been a multitude of disciplined workmen to be fed, clothed, and housed for their stupendous task. Silent and deserted for centuries, it is undergoing a three-years programme of scientific excavation, and for the' time at least. much that was hidden is exposed to view. Archaeologists from all over the world are wresting secrets from the most imposing earthwork in our land, and it is hoped on this ideal site to fill most of the gaps in our scanty knowledge of Celtic Britain.

When we called great white clouds were drifting lazily over the wide horizon, and the lofty lattice masts of the beam wireless station, sending out messages *to South America and the Far East, seemed as beautiful and imposing a monument as these stupendous old earthworks close by. Two great wonders they are indeed, with twenty centuries and all the history of our civilisation between. .■