Goldielea Wood

This fort occupies the hillock forming the SE end of the ridge clothed by Goldielea Wood, where the ground falls away steeply into a deep gully on the W and in shorter slopes elsewhere. Roughly oval on plan, it measures 81m from NE to SW by 57m transversely (0.36ha) within two ramparts, which are not strictly concentric, ranging up to a maximum of 10m apart. For the greater part of the circuit they have been reduced to scarps, and on the NE the line of the outer is uncertain on account of a shallow hollow in the flank of the hillock which may be the remains of a quarry, but where they are best preserved facing onto the shallow saddle in the crest of the ridge on the N they are also accompanied by external ditches. Here the inner rampart forms a bank 4m in thickness, standing about 0.8m in height above the interior, but falling 3m externally into the bottom of the ditch. The outer rampart below it is no more than a scarp, but there are traces of a counterscarp bank on the outer lip of its ditch. The entrance is on the E, where a deep hollow pierces both ramparts, albeit that the outer is no more than the faintest of crest-lines to either side of the gap. This hollow seems to be an original feature of the entrance, cutting down some 3m below the crest of the inner rampart and creating an evenly graded ramp leading up into the featureless interior; at its lower end a later boundary bank cuts across its line. This is almost certainly the fort known in the district in the 19th century as Tregallon Mote, but remained hidden in the dense undergrowth in the plantation that plainly existed when Frederick Coles recorded some miscellaneous features on the adjacent hillock to the N (1893).

Information from An Atlas of Hillforts of Great Britain and Ireland – 23 May 2016. Atlas of Hillforts SC0334