- Fortifications and Defence -
Figure 5.5 The southern ramparts at Maiden Castle, Dorset, England, lit by low sun in 1935.
(Copyright: Society of Antiquaries, London.)
of material employed in fortification-building, as is most elegantly demonstrated at
unfinished sites (Figure 5.6) (Feachem 1971) like Ladle Hill, Hampshire, with its evi-
dence for gang work. In some instances, a counters carp bank is visible beyond the
external lip of the ditch. On excavation, some hill-fort ditches display evidence of
recutting; in others they seem to have been permitted rapidly to infill.
Ancillary features include gateworks of varying degrees of elaboration, and -
although rarely evidenced within temperate Europe - bastions and towers on the
walls. The former range from simple entrance-gaps, barred by gates fixed on a min-
imal number of earth-fast posts recoverable archaeologically, through the elaborate
timber gate-house structures reconstructed on the basis of the post-hole arrange-
ments present in the inturned entrances (Zangentore) of continental oppida (see
Collis, Chapter 10), as at Gate A of Zivist, Czechoslovakia (Motykovi et at. 1990)
and the east gate of Manching, Bavaria (van Endert 1987: ill.x4). The biggest gateway
of this type is that at the Porte du Rebout, Mont Beuvray, Burgundy. Flanked
by inturned works in murus gallicus style, the longer inturn of this offset gateway
was 46 m long; and the entrance passage was C.20 m wide. It lacks an elaborate gate-
structure, which, coupled with its great width, again suggests a configuration meant
to impress rather than to be defensible.
Less grandiose versions of elaborate entrances appear early, around the transition
to the First Iron Age, in the Lausitz culture province to the north of the Celtic world,
as at Biskupin in Poland, and in the British Isles, as at Crickley Hill, Gloucestershire,
and Dinorben in Clwyd. In certain southern British forts in particular, the defensive
appearance of gateways is enhanced by accompanying hornworks of considerable