West Whitecastle

RCAHMS surveyed this site by plane-table on 10 June 1955. The resultant plan was redrawn in ink in 1974 and published at a reduced size in RCAHMS 1978 as Figure 66.

NT04SW 10 0113 4158.

(NT 0113 4158) Fort (NR)

OS 1:10000 map (1980)

This fort is generally as described by the RCAHMS. There are a number of depressions within the interior but none is certainly a house site - more likely caused by quarrying or forestry activity. The small turf enclosure noted by the RCAHMS may have been a sheep stell.

Surveyed at 1:2500.

Visited by OS (JP) 16 August 1971

NT 011 415. Fort, West Whitecastle: Situated on the rounded summit of a low hill approximately 500m SW of West Whitecastle farmhouse and at a height of about 290m OD, this fort commands a wide prospect in every direction. The site has been much disturbed by cultivation and by the former presence of a plantation, with the result that the remains are now in a wasted condition. The defences consist of two ramparts which enclose an approximately circular area measuring about 55m in diameter. Although the circuit is almost complete, the inner rampart is now represented at best by a grass-grown bank 6m in thickness and 0.3m in height. Only two short stretches of the outer rampart survive, appearing in each case as a bank about 4.3m thick and not more than 0.2m high. Cultivation has removed all other traces of the outer rampart and has even encroached upon the NE sector of the inner rampart. The latter sector has been further obscured by a plantation bank and an associated small turf enclosure. What seems to have been the only entrance is situated in the WSW arc of the inner rampart. The interior of the fort, which is crossed by a post-and-wire fence, shows no signs of structures.

RCAHMS 1978, visited November 1976

The defences of this fort, which occupies the summit of a low rounded hill, were heavily ploughed down in the post-medieval period and in the 19th century planted with trees; satellite imagery suggests that agricultural operations are continuing to damage the remains. Nevertheless, the fort is roughly circular on plan, measuring 55m in diameter (0.24ha) within two ramparts set about 8m apart. The inner, which is spread up to 6m in thickness by 0.3m in height, forms an almost complete circuit, but large sectors of the slighter outer rampart have been levelled around the NE and SW. A gap in the inner rampart on the SW is probably the entrance. Apart from some vague hollows beneath the traces of rig and furrow revealed on aerial photographs taken in 1990, the interior is featureless. What is probably a turf-banked sheepfold overlies the outer rampart on the N.

Information from An Atlas of Hillforts of Great Britain and Ireland – 09 August 2016. Atlas of Hillforts SC3238