Greaves Ash camp

Lying 180m to the NE of Linhope on an elevated spur to the S of the summit of Greaves Ash, a complex of Iron Age and Romano-British settlements, including the bivallate hillfort of Greaves Ash Camp. The hillfort lies to the W of the later settlement to which it is linked by a series of trackways and field systems. It overlies and partially destroys an earlier sub-oval enclosure. The bivallate fort is almost circular in plan with two concentric ramparts formed from parallel rows of boulders with rubble infill approximately 70m and 100m in diameter. The inner rampart measures 2.10m wide and 1.7m high and the more massive outer rampart 3.65m wide and 1.10m wide. Within the rampart core, transverse courses of stone provide greater structural stability to the rubble core of the rampart (Tate 1862, 295-6). No evidence of ditches. The NE extremity of the spur has been utilised to form a triangular annex enclosed by a single rampart of similar but slighter construction to the hillfort. Within this is a smaller sub-circular enclosure in the W. An enclosed settlement of four huts utilises the NE rampart of the annex. The outer rampart cuts through the earlier enclosed settlement in the NNE. The ramparts are separated by a berm up to 14.0m wide in places which has been sub-divided by small radial banks/walls. A small sub-oval enclosure overlies the outer rampart in the E. Internally 18 roundhouses were recorded during excavations in 1861 ranging from 3.3m to 8.2m in diameter with crudely faced walls up to 2m wide and 0.9 high and entrances facing E (Tate 1862, 313). The largest of these produced a fragment from a 2nd-4th century AD Roman glass bangle (Hope-Dodds 1935, 31). Querns were also recovered. The most probable entrance lies in the SE where a sunken trackway leads up to the hillfort. Recorded on 1856-65 OS mapping. Scheduled

Source: Lock, Gary and Ralston, Ian. 2024. Atlas of Hillforts of Britain and Ireland. Available at: https://hillforts.arch.ox.ac.uk (CC BY-SA 4.0)