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Note
Date 13 October 2015 - 18 May 2016
Event ID 1044925
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Note
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1044925
This fort is situated on a moderately steep slope on the E flank of Hog Hill, which is an unlikely position for a fort. Nevertheless the strength of its defences around the uphill, NW and SW. flanks, comprising an inner circuit of two ramparts with a medial ditch, and an outer work of a single rampart with an external ditch, leaves little doubt to the intentions of its builders. Indeed, while the inner rampart stands some 1.5m high internally on the N, externally it falls 2.8m into the bottom of the flanking ditch, which averages about 6m in breadth; the medial rampart on the counterscarp here stands 1.5m high externally. These ramparts were probably originally rather slighter along the downslope, E, flank, but the inner has in any case been demolished and the outer reduced to a scarp, while a quarry has also been cut through them into the interior. The outer work is constructed on a similar scale, but appears to be an addition which may never have been carried around the E flank; roughly concentric around the NW, creating a multivallate belt some 35m deep, on the SW it diverges slightly to include two platforms, leading the RCAHMS investigators who drew up the plan in 1959 to speculate that these were occupied house platforms that were being brought within the compass of the enlarged defences. The interior of the inner enclosure, which measures about 65m from N to S by 49m transversely (0.25ha), has evidently been excavated into the slope and contains at least six crescentic scarps that probably mark the stances of timber round-houses; four of them are set round the uphill side. The entrance approaches obliquely along the slope on the NE, exposing the visitor's right side in front of the gap in the innermost rampart; this effect is enhanced by the way the W terminal appears to turns slightly inside the line of the degraded rampart on the E side.
Information from An Atlas of Hillforts of Great Britain and Ireland – 18 May 2016. Atlas of Hillforts SC3627
