The Trundle is a hillfort on St Roche's Hill about north of Chichester, West Sussex, England. It was built in the Iron Age on the site of a causewayed enclosure, a form of early Neolithic earthwork found in northwestern Europe. A chapel dedicated to St Roche was built on the hill around the end of the 14th century; it was in ruins by 1570. A windmill and a beacon were subsequently built on the hill. The site was occasionally used as a meeting place in the post-medieval period.
Causewayed enclosures were built in England from shortly before 3700 BC until at least 3500 BC; they are characterized by the full or partial enclosure of an area with ditches that are interrupted by gaps, or causeways. Their purpose is not known; they may have been settlements, meeting places, or ritual sites. Hillforts were built as early as 1000 BC, in the Late Bronze Age, and continued to be built through the Iron Age until shortly before the Roman occupation. The hillfort is still a substantial earthwork, but the Neolithic site was unknown until 1925 when archaeologist O.G.S. Crawford obtained an aerial photograph of the Trundle, clearly showing additional structures inside the ramparts of the hillfort. Causewayed enclosures were new to archaeology at the time, with only five known by 1930, and the photograph persuaded archaeologist E. Cecil Curwen to excavate the site in 1928 and 1930. These early digs established a construction date of about 500 BC to 100 BC for the hillfort and proved the existence of the Neolithic site.
In 2011, the Gathering Time project published an analysis of radiocarbon dates from almost forty British causewayed enclosures, including some from the Trundle. The conclusion was that the Neolithic part of the site was probably constructed no earlier than the mid-fourth millennium BC. A review of the site in 1995 by Alastair Oswald noted the presence of fifteen possible Iron Age house platforms within the hillfort's ramparts.
Background The Trundle archaeological site includes a causewayed enclosure and a hillfort.Oswald, Dyer, & Barber (2001), p. 156. Causewayed enclosures are a form of earthwork that was built in northwestern Europe, including the southern British Isles, in the early Neolithic.Oswald, Dyer, & Barber (2001), p. 3. Causewayed enclosures are areas that are fully or partially enclosed by ditches interrupted by gaps, or causeways, of unexcavated ground, often with earthworks and palisades in some combination.Andersen (2015), p. 795. The use to which these enclosures were put has long been a matter of debate.Whittle, Healy & Bayliss (2011), p. 5. The causeways are difficult to explain in military terms since they would have provided multiple ways for attackers to pass through the ditches to the inside of the camp, though it was suggested they could have been sally ports for defenders to emerge from and attack a besieging force.Cunnington (1912), p. 48.Curwen (1930), p. 50.
Evidence of attacks at some sites provided support for the idea that the enclosures were fortified settlements. They may have been seasonal meeting places, used for trading cattle or other goods such as pottery. There is also evidence that they played a role in funeral rites: material such as food, pottery, and human remains was deliberately deposited in the ditches.Whittle, Healy & Bayliss (2011), pp. 10–11. The construction of an enclosure took only a short time, which implies significant organization since substantial labour would have been required for clearing the land, preparing trees for use as posts or palisades, and digging the ditches.Andersen (2015), p. 807.
Over seventy causewayed enclosures are known in the British Isles, and they are one of the most common types of an early Neolithic site in western Europe. About a thousand are known in all.Andersen (2015), p. 796. They began to appear at different times in different parts of Europe: dates range from before 4000 BC in northern France, to shortly before 3000 BC in northern Germany, Denmark, and Poland. The enclosures in southern Britain began to appear shortly before 3700 BC, and continued to be built for at least 200 years; in a few cases, they continued to be used as late as 3300 to 3200 BC.Whittle, Healy & Bayliss (2011), pp. 1–2.
The Iron Age in Britain can be broadly divided into two periods: the Hallstatt culture is the earlier, lasting from about 800 BC until about the fifth century BC; it was followed by the La Tène culture, which lasted until the Roman occupation.Carroll & Lang (2008), p. 95. Hillforts began to appear in Britain in the Late Bronze Age and continued to be built throughout most of the Iron Age.Hamilton & Manley (2001), p. 12. These are hilltop sites with ramparts, which could be of stone, timber, or earth. Although the name implies a defensive fortification, excavations have revealed that these sites were used for other purposes: there is evidence of settlement at some sites, and they may have had religious significance. Animals, as well as people, may have been kept within the ramparts, and there is evidence that the entrances to some hillforts were designed to funnel animals into the interior.Pope et al. (2020), pp. 382–385. Hillforts typically have one or two entrances, unlike causewayed enclosures. Thousands of hillforts have been identified in the British Isles. After about 100 BC, oppida, another kind of fortified settlement, became more common.Carroll & Lang (2008), pp. 98–100.
Site and interpretation
The summit on which both the causewayed enclosure and the hillfort stand is St Roche's Hill, an outcrop of the Upper Chalk that lies at the western end of a ridge. The hill is four miles north of Chichester, near to Goodwood Racecourse.Curwen (1929), p. 33. It rises above the neighbouring hills and so is clearly visible from all sides. There is an Ordnance Survey (OS) trig point at the top of the hill, which has an elevation of ;Oswald (1995), p. 16. an earlier trigonometrical station, placed on the hill in 1791, was probably at the same location. The causewayed enclosure consists of at least four circular or partly circular ditches. The exact nature of these earthworks is now hard to determine because the hillfort partly overlies the earlier ditches.Healy, Bayliss, & Whittle (2011), p. 232. The innermost ditch, which encloses an area of , has an internal bank, and may have been the first of the Neolithic ditches to be dug.
Concentric with this is a second ditch that lies a short distance outside the innermost ditch; this second ditch was thought by E. Cecil Curwen (who excavated the site in 1928 and 1930) to spiral out so that the circuit extended more than a full circle around the centre of the enclosure. Curwen named the outermost part of this earthwork the "spiral ditch", at the point on the west where it paralleled the second ditch, but later surveys make the relationships of the ditches less certain, and it is now thought that the appearance of these ditches may be the result of multiple enclosure ditches dug over a long period. A further, outer, ditch was thought by Curwen to only appear from under the Iron Age earthworks at the north of the site, but it has since been suggested that cropmarks visible to the west represent part of this ditch. There may also be further early earthworks that have been completely overlain by the hillfort.Oswald (1995), pp. 18–20. The causewayed enclosure ditches were probably dug in the first half of the fourth millennium BC.Healy, Bayliss, & Whittle (2011), pp. 238–239. The site was one of the first to be confirmed as a causewayed enclosure by excavation; the other four known by 1930 were Whitehawk Camp, Knap Hill, Windmill Hill and Abingdon.Oswald, Dyer, & Barber (2001), p. 25.
The Iron Age hillfort consists of a well-defined bank and ditch, with a smaller outer bank, in an irregular nine-sided polygon. There are two gaps, at the east-northeast and west-southwest edges, indicating entrances. The depth of the ditch and the height of the bank vary, with the highest point reaching above the bottom of the ditch.Oswald (1995), pp. 13–15. The ditches enclose an area of about . A linear cropmark outside the banks has not been excavated but archaeologist Alastair Oswald, who surveyed the site in 1995 for the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME), considered it to be no earlier than Iron Age. Oswald also noted the presence of fifteen depressions in the soil within the ramparts that could indicate Iron Age house platforms,Oswald (1995), p. 14. and three areas that may have been Roman building platforms.Oswald (1995), pp. 22–23. There are two dykes to the north, crossing two of the ridges that approach the hill; the eastern of these included a crouched burial, revealed when a carpark was constructed there, and thought to be dated to the Bronze Age, based on the presence of what appeared to be a round barrow.Collins (1960–1961), p. 2.
The hill is named for St Roche, a French saint who died no earlier than the mid-14th century. A chapel dedicated to him is known to have existed on the hill; it is unlikely to have been built much before the end of that century. A document from 1570 refers to it as "the late chapell of St Rooks", so it was apparently already in ruins by that date, probably having been abandoned or destroyed during the Reformation.Allcroft (1916), pp. 74–80. It appears on a 1575 map, but a 1595 map simply describes the hilltop as a castle. A 1723 engraving of the hill shows a ruined building not yet reduced to its foundations, which probably represents the chapel.Stukeley (1776), pp. 202–203.
In 1645, William Cawley reported in Parliament that a thousand Clubmen—one of several local militias formed to oppose the depredations of both sides in the English Civil War—had assembled on the hill.Wedgwood (1958), pp. 429–430. There was a beacon on the hill from the late 16th century until at least the early 19th century: it is mentioned in 1586,Jones (1968), pp. 107–111. though it does not appear on a 1595 map, but it is recorded on maps dated 1646 and 1675, and appears again on an OS map in 1813.Oswald (1995), p. 25.Ogilby (1675), p. 74. "The Beacon" is recorded as an alternative name for the hill in 1920.Holmes (1920), unpaginated.
A windmill, which burned down in 1773, is known to have existed on the hill; Hadrian Allcroft, a historian, describes it as having been built "almost upon the ruins" of the chapel. Oswald's 1995 survey records the remains of two adjacent rectangular buildings: one is about , and the other is . The latter matches the dimensions of a building foundation recorded on the summit by William Hayley Mason in 1839.Mason (1839), p. 74. Allcroft assumed that this was the foundations of the 14th-century chapel, but Oswald regards it as unsettled, though agreeing that "whichever of the two buildings is not the chapel is likely to be the later windmill". Allcroft also records that a masonic lodge that included the Duke of Richmond, the Duke of Montagu, and Lord Baltimore met at the top of the hill between 1717 and 1757; Oswald assumes the lodge met in one of the two buildings, but Allcroft says "it was, it seems, an open-air Lodge". There was at one time a gibbet on the Trundle; it appears on an OS map in 1813, but had been removed by 1825. Oswald describes two marl pits at the top of the hill that cut into the prehistoric earthworks. Two radio stations, each with four wooden masts, were built during World War II; only one mast was still present in 1995, along with a concrete foundation between the two stations.Oswald (1995), p. 17. Oswald's survey found that multiple trenches and foxholes had been dug into the Iron Age banks.
Antiquarian and archaeological investigations