stonehenge - English Heritage

047-120 section 2.qxd 6/21/05 4:19 PM Page 72
Illustration 49
Vespasian’s Camp,
Amesbury. [After Hunter-
Mann 1999, figure 1.]
Illustration 50
The Packway Enclosure,
Durrington. [After Graham
and Newman 1993,
figure 18.]
boundary features have been noted and Grinsell (1957, 65)
recorded finding Iron Age pottery at the site in 1951. Flints
are also reported from the site and it has tentatively been
suggested that what can be seen today represents a multiphase
site with elements extending back into earlier
prehistory (Darvill 1997a, 182: note 6).
The second hillfort, Vespasian’s Camp on the north bank
of the Avon west of Amesbury, is better known as a result of
recent investigations (RCHM 1979, 20–2; Hunter-Mann 1999;
Illustration 49). It is a univallate enclosure of 16ha with two
phases of glacis-type rampart constructed around the hill in
the early Iron Age around 500 BC.
Outside the Stonehenge Landscape 1.5km to the
southwest is the multivallate hillfort of Yarnbury Castle and
a series of associated settlements and enclosures at
Steeple Langford and Hanging Langford (Crawford and
Keiller 1928, 68–71 and 162–4: Cunnington 1933b, 198–217).
Slightly further away, 5km to the south, is Old Sarum (RCHM
1981, 1–24) and 4km to the southeast is Figsbury Ring
(Cunnington 1925; Guido and Smith 1981). About 4km to the
northeast is Sidbury (Applebaum 1954; McOmish et al.
2002, figures 3.6 and 3.25), and 6.5km to the north
Casterley Camp (Cunnington and Cunnington 1913;
McOmish et al. 2002, figures 3.7 and 3.28). These sites, and
others in the vicinity too, illustrate the point that much of
the high-order settlement pattern of the area has to be seen
in a regional rather than a local context. In the early Iron
Age the Wessex chalklands supported a scatter of hillforts
of various kinds each serving a relatively small local territory
in some way (Cunliffe 1991, 348–52). In this pattern, Ogbury
and Vespasian’s Camp have important positions relative to
the ‘East Avon’ routeway between England’s south coast
and the Irish Sea proposed by Andrew Sherratt (1996b,
figure 2), but the Stonehenge Landscape itself is only one
small part of the wider picture. By the middle Iron Age there
are rather fewer, but larger, hillforts (so-called developed
hillforts) with much more extensive territories around them.
By this time the Stonehenge Landscape lay on the junction
of the putative territories of four developed hillforts outwith
the Landscape itself: Yarnbury, Old Sarum, Casterley Camp,
and Sidbury (Cunliffe 1971, figure 14).
More common are the enclosed and open settlements
which for much of the later first millennium BC represent the
basic settlement pattern of compounds, hamlets, and
farmsteads. Within the Stonehenge Landscape the most
extensively known settlement area is around Durrington
Walls and along the western flanks of the Avon Valley (see
McOmish 2001), perhaps perpetuating the focus of late
Neolithic settlement in the area although generally slightly
separated from the earlier evidence in a way that suggests
settlement drift within a limited compass; this would no
doubt repay further investigation.
To the southwest of Durrington Walls a series of
excavations was carried out in 1970, in advance of treeplanting,
and revealed a few pits associated with Iron Age
pottery (Wainwright 1971, 82–3). Within Durrington Walls a
small cluster of Iron Age pits containing Little Woodbury
style pottery was recorded in 1951 (Stone et al. 1954, 164).
The 1966–8 excavations also recorded Iron Age features
inside the henge-enclosure including a palisade trench
perhaps forming part of an enclosure and a group of pits,
postholes, and a linear ditch north of the northern circle
(Wainwright and Longworth 1971, 312–28). Immediately
north of Durrington Walls is the Packway Enclosure, partially
excavated in 1968 during the construction of a roundabout
on the A345 west of the Stonehenge Inn (Illustration 50).
This kite-shaped four-sided enclosure had an entrance on
the south side. Little was recovered from the inside of the
enclosure because of the circumstances of discovery which
had truncated the natural chalk surface and it remains
poorly dated within the Iron Age (Wainwright and Longworth
1971, 307–11; and see Graham and Newman 1993, 52–5).
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