The Caburn - Hillfort or ritual enclosure?

By Mike Haigh from Northern Earth 89

The Caburn is a striking natural feature glowering over the Lower Ouse valley in East Sussex. The top of this hill is encircled with a bank and ditch, leading most archaeologists to classify it as a normal hillfort. Recent research has cast doubt on this explanation.

The Caburn is one of the most excavated sites in the country. There have been at least 170 trenches dug in the vicinity. Even so, there are a lot of problems associated with the results and a number of curious observations. For instance, although there was a lot of activity in the area during the Mesolithic and Neolithic, very little was found on the Caburn that dates to these periods.

Another puzzle concerns the northern fortifications. The E end of the ditch was not fully dug out. There were more mysteries in the interior of the site. Inside were around 140 pits. Many hillforts contain storage pits, but these tend to approximate to the optimum for food storage i.e. about 1m deep, round tops and bell-shaped profile. The pits at the Caburn diverged markedly from this stereotype. Local archaeological and community groups combined to form The Caburn Project to answer these questions.

One avenue explored was to investigate the vegetation history of the site using pollen cores. The findings indicated that the hill was covered in yew woodland from 3450 BCE until around 2050 BCE. Only one artefact has been found from this period. This was a Neolithic leaf-shaped arrowhead, which could have been carried into the wood by a wounded animal. It has been suggested that the hill was regarded as sacred during this period and subject to a taboo. This may have carried over into the Early Bronze Age, as an alignment of barrows seems to end at the Caburn.

As at many other places in Britain, the way the site was used changed during the Late Bronze/Iron Age. Instead of being avoided, an enclosure was built around the top of the hill, which became the centre for human activity. This has been interpreted as the construction of a fortified village, but there are problems with this. Although postholes have been discovered, they do not seem to readily resolve themselves into the form of a dwelling. Also, the enclosure is riddled with small pits, which as we have seen do not resemble normal grain pits. Furthermore, these pits were not filled with normal domestic rubbish and appear to have been subjected to what is known as structured deposition. The items placed in each pit were apparently carefully selected and then deposited in the pit according to set rules e.g. weapons were mostly buried at the bottom of each pit. There was also evidence that several objects were deliberately, perhaps ritually, damaged. Several pits contained human bones, while a variety of animal bones were also present including horse, boar, curlew, fox, badger and roe deer.

Twelve curious potin (bronze with high tin content) coins were discovered on the site, eleven of which came from the pits. They are thought to be tokens of some kind. One such collected at Caburn is decorated with a head on one side and a bull on the other.

There is also evidence that the NE sector of the enclosure was considered special; most of the high-status objects were found here. During the Early Roman period, a large shaft, 3.3m deep and 10.5m wide, was sunk in this area. This resembles others found in southern Britain and is assumed to have a ritual purpose.

The hilltop itself is difficult to defend. Once inside the enclosure, sight lines become obscured. It would have been hard to co-ordinate a defensive force, s they would not have been visible or easy to communicate with. The team identified five separate areas within the hilltop enclosure, each invisible from the others. Again this is bad news from a defensive viewpoint but it does mean that there could have been a number of special areas which could be used for private ritual.

If this ritual theory is accepted, this still leaves the mystery of the uncompleted bank on the north. This was originally thought to have been constructed during the Iron Age, but recent excavation turned up Romano-British pottery. This indicates that the activity was post-Roman. It is now thought that this short-lived defensive structure might be related to Viking raids in the area during the 8th century.

If the Caburn was used as a ritual site, then it is probable that most activity ceased with the introduction of Christianity into the region. Since then, it has mostly been used for grazing sheep.

The profile of Caburn itself is striking and has been an inspiration to artists from Lambert in the 18th century to Chasseaud and Trant in recent times.

['Caburn: Sacred mount or classic hillfort?'. Peter Drewitt & Sue Hamilton. Current Archaeology 174 June 2001, pp 256 -262]

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