What Were They So Scared Of?

That up there is the dramatic Raven Crag and that's on the side of the valley in the Lake District that is home to Thirlmere. But this valley is not just home to Raven Crag and Thirlmere. Somewhere up here in the woods on the side of the valley is what might possibly be the strangest ancient settlement that I have ever stumbled across. Now I've decided to describe this as a strange old ancient place, strange old place in the woods, rather than Hillfort. And there's two reasons for that. One, I'm going to contest that this is perhaps not a Hillfort in the Iron Age sense of the word. We always think Iron Age with Hillforts, don't we? And two, whenever I mention Hillfort in the title of a video, it always bombs. YouTube views is as good a reason as any other reason to sort out your historical investigations. So we are going to see if we can find this place in the woods. We're going to take a look to it. We do have a little bit of science from 30 odd years ago to consider. And as ever, we'll see what you lot think. But when you see the robust defences here, you will ask yourself, what were they so scared of? And when were they so scared of it? Anyhow, it's a beautiful day in the lakes, but the shadows are getting long now and there's antiquarianism to be done. Strewth, how does that kid do it? Having said what I just said about Hillfort videos bombing, Paul Whitewick, obviously it doesn't apply to him. Jesus. I remember the days when I was all serious, rambly, scrambly. Those days are behind me. I thought this would be easy, but it's not. Anyhow, I'm quite pleased that as I'm climbing, it does appear that the Forestry Commission may have been thinning out the plantations. If you look at the Ordnance Survey map, Castle Crag Fort is showing us in the woods. I'm hoping that's going to be a bit clearer now. We will see. It will help us in our investigation. A quick bit of context on Hillforts. Whilst they started in the late Bronze Age, construction picked up place around 700 BC. And by 400 BC, they'd really cracked it. And the simple forts with just one line of defences had given way to complex, multi-vallet structures. There are less examples of large Hillforts in the northwest compared to Wessex. Nearby examples of larger forts being Wharton Crag and Ingleborough. Hillforts seem to have been abandoned around 100 BC, although there is some evidence down south of them coming back into use to defend against the Romans in 43 AD. Nowadays, there's much debate about what they were actually for and whether they were permanently lived in, although roundhouse platforms are regularly found. It wasn't until 450 AD that evidence emerges of re-fortification and re-use, running through to about 700 AD. A dark, early medieval period that lasted ages. Look at that, like some bizarre Lake District sweet track. That justifies the £9 a day target. Ah, Sir Hedders, take note. Now, if you fancy following in my footsteps, when you get to this gate here, you need to go this way, not up there to Raven Crag, as appealing as that might be. Our Castle Crag Fort actually lays over there on the other side of a sort of a little, really remote little valley that sits up here in the fells. And straight away, looking down there at it, I think it's going to be really hard to work this place out. And, you know, the way it's sat here in this sort of little indentation high up in the mountains, effectively, I mean, that's very odd. It's not your archetypal hillfort by any means, is it? Because I am a professional broadcasting and production company, I film these things out of order. Don't worry, we are going to get to our strange ancient place in the fells. That is to come. But for me, that's all happened. I've done all of that and I've now got a beautiful sunset, absolutely astonishingly beautiful sunset. I'm on top of Raven Crag, a high point overlooking the Thirlmere Lake. Wonderful spot. Anyhow, before we get on to the meat, the antiquities of the week, I just want to have a quick word with you. Phil Collinson, one of our members of our institute, keeps on at me, nagging on at me about the fact that I forget to ask you to like and subscribe. I'll be honest, I'm really self-conscious about doing that all the time. Feels like a broken record. I don't like doing it, but he tells me that I must. So here goes. If you watch this channel sometimes or all the times and you like it, please would you click subscribe and like. It doesn't cost you anything, totally free. There's no obligation. You'll get little notifications when we publish new stuff. You can choose whether you watch that or not. The only person it helps is me, because apparently the mysterious goddess of the algorithm will promote my videos further. That means more advertising revenue coming to me rather than going to the fat cats who own YouTube. I'm sure that's something that you would want. You'd want to help me, wouldn't you? So please do that. That is all. I was unnecessarily concerned that we'd struggle to find this today. However, the public footpath that I'm on at the moment actually delivers us straight to the fort. That's the original entrance to the fort, and just to the left of it, to help you out if you follow in my footsteps here, there is a helpful sign. Castle Crag Fort. Let's get our head around this then. Also known as Sholthwaite Hill Fort. It was clearly created by adapting this rocky eminence. It is small, just circa 0.85 hectares. Note the significant ramparts built on the rocky knoll and note the significant ramparts below that on the southeastern side. It is seriously defended with natural protection to the north and to the west. Now let's pull back on that southeastern side. Let's pull back on that southeastern side and see how it lacks natural deterrent here. And this is how it sits in a natural sheltered valley at over 400 meters above sea level, but not on top of the hill. And there's the entrance. Now as tempting as it may be to go scooting off up in there, this is the area that I want to look at. This is really interesting, outside the main part of the fort. So over here, this is natural, although they think it has been shaped. They've done work on that to make that more defended. But this area in front of us here is basically, nowadays, it's a mire. But the bank over here to the left, somewhere about there, is man-made. So this was part of the construction. I don't know if you'll be able to hear this. Can you hear that squelching? So it's really boggy here. So we've got well defended there, flat area here, bank there. And then coming round, that bank's continuing there. But then we've got this mighty set of sort of trench-like outer fortifications there. So this area initially sort of feels a bit exposed, doesn't it? But it was part of the original construction. That bank is man-made. So what was the original intention of this? Was it a moat? Was it water retention? It's the Lake District. Did they need to retain water? Were they living up here or was it just a refuge? All the normal sort of questions. But this is really interesting. I've never seen anything quite like this before. Now what is happening here on this southern and eastern side of the fort is really fascinating to me. On the north and the west, it has amazing natural defences. But here on the east and the south, it doesn't have those. They've bolstered that bit there. But out here we are exposed. So they have built these gigantic embankments at this end. I mean, they are colossal. Huge effort would have gone into this. And yet looking back that way, to where I was faffing around earlier, the mere, for want of a better word, it is completely flat and it doesn't have any of this. I guess we could count it as the idea that this was taken out. This has been eroded away. But really, it's so big. Anyway, we're going to do a practical demonstration, one of our famous practical demonstrations, just to show the extent of this. Now I'm not quite even at the top of this. Let me just go up here a bit. Right. Are we really saying that this has all completely naturally eroded away and become this? Now, look at this. This is good. Over here. I think you can see how this has been chipped away to make this more sheer, to improve the defensiveness of this side of the fort. And you can still see that after all these years. This is a very hard site to capture on camera because there's so much natural stuff going on. Not complaining about that, actually, but all this forestry commission stuff's a bit annoying. Right. So if I come up on here, can you see I'm on a bank? So over there, one, two of those two huge embankments that we saw at the southeastern end, there is this third one. Now I can see you won't be able to. That continues on up there and forms part of the structure of our mirror. So I think we are looking at a deliberate planned part of the build there. I don't think it's a water receptacle for rainwater. I think that would have been easily captured up here. I suspect the site is a refuge rather than permanent habitation, although there are hut platforms in there, apparently. I suspect that, let's say this is Iron Age 2,000 years ago, that was a moat, an excellent part of the, you know, combined defensive features that they've got here at what I would have to say is a highly defended site. What were they worried about? Just to emphasize this point here, as if you could see shadow me here, just wave that shadow me. So if you look here, you know, that's the mirror up on there. So you can see, you know, there is quite a slope to that. I think that is manmade. How cool is this? I'm coming into the fort via its original entrance. Actually, for me, that's the fifth time I've done that because things keep going wrong. But let's just go back to these mysterious outer defenses. Back in 1997, they took two core samples and the radiocarbon dating on those came back as 538 to 676, 560 to 690. So if we take the sort of lower end of those and we go back 100 years, because that's when it would have started silting up, you know, we are in the what the mid 400s there. Very interesting. What was going on there? What was happening in this area? Let's say four or five decades after the Roman soldiers have gone to make people feel that they need to build or reinforce something like this. So then inside the fort proper, we've got these natural rocky knolls. And they think there are three of those in terms of platforms. And obviously, you can see here significant outer defenses. But other than that, it's all a little bit of a mess in here. It's quite rocky, probably not permanently lived in. I don't know if you'll be able to see that down there in this terrible light, but I'm on the northern side now. Absolutely terrifying. You know, nobody is going to attack you from that side. No one's going to attack you from the west either. Precipitous. Coming up onto the top of the highest crag now within the fort. I think you've got a leveled off area there for a another hut. And then I think down there, so difficult with all the bracken and the lights, but I think there's another one there. And that is a modern style ordinance survey trig point. Dull. You know, it's not very charming, is it? I like the old style concrete ordinance survey trig points. They're the best. Anyhow, it's that time of year where I'm starting to have the problem of I'm losing light. And I've just lost quite a bit of time explaining to a chap down there who recognized me off of YouTube that I'm not rails and revolutions. And that's the third time that's happened. It's quite annoying. What is that expression? If it quacks like a duck, then it's a duck. The experts might insist that despite the fact the only scientific date they have here are dark ages dates, that this is still an INA structure that was being brought back into service at that time. To me, it's the other way until they find some iron age evidence up here. This is a dark ages fault. I think it looks like if it was an iron age fault, it'd be on the top of the hill, wouldn't it? But instead, it's in this beautiful little sheltered dip with fantastic natural defenses on two to three sides. And they were able to, you know, put the defenses in over there. And I love this sort of entrance in as well. We've got Raven Crag and other summits around here. So a great place for lookouts. This to me feels like a place to retreat to in the difficult, dark days that followed the end of Roman Britain. Now you might say to me, are you quibbling about something that isn't really important? Does it matter if it's a repurposed iron age hill fault or if it was started afresh during the dark ages? And I guess in reality, it doesn't. There's no different, I guess, than whether you prefer watching rails and revolutions or WC 21 UK productions limited on YouTube. These are minor things, aren't they? But nonetheless, what we have is a really interesting structure, which tells a story about dark times, I think. 450 to 550 AD, the lower end of our carbon dates, what's happening to make them so scared. Looking at the timeline, Roman military control fizzled out here over half a century earlier in the late 4th century. And it seems likely to me that inter-tribal struggles in this sub-Roman vacuum, which ultimately gave rise to kingdoms such as Reged, which was established here by the mid to late 6th century, is what we are looking at here. This is why they were scared. This is why they needed defences as extensive as this. Actually, this place here, just below the highest crag, has all the signs of having been levelled, I would say. That rock there looks like it's been cut back. This is a great place for a hut platform, I would say. And looking out over that edge, I think you'd feel quite secure. It is actually a proper wintry day, really cold, although I am sweating as well. Apologies for any unpleasantness with noses or anything like that that you may have spotted. I also hope that you're actually able to see this thing because in the Lake District, where the landscape hasn't been so meticulously farmed, and where there are obviously so many natural rocky outcrops, I think these things can be difficult to spot. And in this sort of low wintry light today, it's very difficult for me to check. So hopefully when you get to see this footage, you'll be able to have some fun making out how this natural rocky knoll has been shaped by people. But when was it? Was it the Iron Age? Was it the Dark Ages? Well, our 1990s experts, although they got dates that put it resolutely in the Dark Ages or the sub-Roman period, or the early medieval, whatever you want to call it, they still concluded that those people were reinforcing an Iron Age structure, bringing it back into use because of the new threats that were emerging. But there's absolutely no dating evidence whatsoever to support that. The only dating evidence from this site are those two radiocarbon core dates, which are Dark Ages, early medieval. The only other thing that's come from here is Collingwood, I think in the 1920s, discovered a bit of red sandstone, which was similar to items that had been found in other Dark Age populated forts in the Lake District. What an intriguing little place this is, and as ever, I would be interested in your thoughts in the comments down below. Your thoughts? Pop your thoughts in the comments down below. I don't need to pay Jim Murray for these gags anymore, I can do them myself, can't I? Thanks a lot for watching. Oh, excuse me a second. Oh, hi Jim, yeah, hi. No, it's just a joke, mate, yeah. No, no, I know I've never paid you, no. No, no, we don't have a contract or anything like that, no. Yeah, to be honest, Jim, I don't really care what Frankie Howard used to pay.