My instinct was a "cistern" for catching rain water. I looked up "dew pond" and the Wikipedia entry had some interesting things to say that caught my eye like the "chalk puddle" used to make one. Where my father grew up every house had a cistern and many of these dew ponds of every size are dotted about- primarily for livestock.
Especially in Southern England the water table has been continually lowered since the 1800s by the extraction of groundwater for public waters supply and by agricultural drainage. There would have been far more springs and seasonal springs ( maybe in the camp ditches at times) than is evident today .
Agreed. There has been increasing ground water abstraction to the point where some ancient rivers have completely dried up. Many are now in the process of naturally disappearing, while a couple only run during times of great flooding. I was gobsmacked to learn how many rivers and streams had disappeared in recent times, whilst attending a presentation to the IFM at Fishmongers Hall 30 years ago.
In the Philippines, on the scarp above Cagayan de Oro, people live by their fields and fetch water from the bottom of the hill. Their solution is to send the kids to fetch the water.
My grandmother did that 120 years ago in the west of Ireland. The hamlet was on high ground. The grazing was good on the high ground but the spring was down at the bottom of the field. The children had to fetch the water.
that is all fine and well in PEACE time, but the question is.. if it;s a fort, a place people use to defend themselves from attackers, you can't use that low water stream, your enemy will be the one using it, laughing at you until thirst forces you to surrender or die
@@gerrycastlemanwarde5933 if i wanted a load of water up on a hill id try to catch rain water i presume these hill forts take a while to build and the UK is known to be a pretty rainy place So i could imagine over the many months or years you would set up a method for catching rain and storing it the easiest way id think is having some kinda pond on the top of the hill with all the rain water running into it off the top of the hill so maybe the lowest point of the top of the hill plus I wouldn't be surprised if each family had their own rain catching method for day to day use if i had a round house id look for a method to catching rain off my roof my first idea would be to just attach a bit of straw to the bottom of the roof going into a pot so when rain came it would run down the roof then down my straw straight into my pot or maybe set up a few wooden troughs under the roof to catch the rain it could be a as simple as stickling 50 clay pots on the ground catching rain as a it falls but i would certainly try things to catch the rain in the UK, water is never the problem you have a really good supply of water as it rains 70% of the year I don't know why you wouldn't try and catch it
As. Retired Archaeogist from Texas , I have a huge interest in in Hill forts in Britain. As this is just a suggestion as to water supply , I could be wrong . In the dry American SW ( Texasis part of that ) there are 100s of thousands of Stock Tanks made by excavation to catch rain to form a pond . I have worked at many prehistoric and early historical sites . At one near Goliad Texas , one of a pair of 1700s Spanish colonial Missions in the area ( Rosario) was on a slight rise away from the local San Antonio river . It was enclosed by a stone wall with 2 corner bastions, but no well was found in the 2 archaeological excavations done the in 1936-41 and later in 1976 ( my experience) . There was instead a large deep cone shaped pit excavated during the 1700s in the center of the plaza . The fill indicated this was a pond of water , perhaps used to mine earth to make Adobe and or used as a water tank . As Britain is know to get a lot more rain then Texas , why are the deep trenches enclosing a hill fort able to catch and hold rain water?
I have been watching utubes 'desert drifter' and now want to visit over there. Texas would be a dream for me to visit. So much archelogy just sitting about in the open... I'm so jealous! Btw if you ever do come to the UK, visit Maiden Castle during a full moon its magical. The ramparts would have been kept clean, making them white with no mud or grass on them, so maybe you are right after all. But the real problem is that the ramparts are made of broken chalk from when they were dug, so I don't think water would have run down them but rather have soaked into them. The bottom of a rampart is virgin chalk that has not been dug, but is still far too porous to hold water as the chalk is full of flints and debris. If a pond were to be dug from over to lower than the waterline, it will be a permanent pond, but hillforts are high up so will drain unless being constantly fed. Summers are unpredictable and could be very dry, so with a hillfort as huge as Maiden Castle with is suggested 1000 inhabitants, water would have needed to be constant. I think caught rainwater would be a bonus, but springs for drinking would be necessary. In the south of the UK farmers (ranchers) still take water directly from chalk fed springs to use for human consumption, (no other filtering is necessary) the water is still incredibly clean. I like your idea, but have not heard nor seen evidence of it. I have spent many years investigating Maiden Castle as an amateur, but no matter how much it rains, I have never seen a pond in the bottom of a rampart (these days they tend to be full of deep grass). But I'm sure you are on to something, the bottom of ramparts are not level, the water could run towards a man made pond if an aqueduct were to be made and if you could make it water tight then bingo! There were ancient Roman aqueducts that ran around Dorchester (very close to Maiden Castle), but they were spring fed and the water would ultimately end up going into a river. Even the romans understood that water from chalk hills rarely would stop running, so making a large well would mostly be pointless (there are a few small ancient reservoirs). Now I'm expecting a huge well to be found to prove me wrong! I hope so! Have fun with in your amazing Texas! Lucky luck you.
@@Inoxx44 If damp chalk and other soils are "puddled" - crushed under the feet of oxen or many people or pounded with tools for instance - it forms a paste that when compacted, becomes capable of retaining water instead of draining away - this is why footpaths in constant use develop puddles, when the area around drains freely. Large numbers of people are needed for a community building a hill fort, and constant traffic in trenches and footpaths would lead to this phenomenon. The more dry dwellings there are, the greater the runoff area for rain from the roofs becomes, and paths between them become rivulets for collection in ponds, which can be planted with reeds which purify the water. Ice in Winter can be collected, and insulated with rushes away from the sunward side to last long into the warmer months. Ramparts and trenches can be modified and used to direct any floodwaters when they occur. Hard work is a solution to winter cold as well as burning fuel! Now the UK has always had a maritime climate because of its latitude, so drought is the exception. And thousands of years later, these constructions still exist, and are remembered in nursery rhymes. Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water, not down to the river.
In my youth, hiking the Breidden (inc. Rodney's Pillar) and other local hills I was always surprised by Springs bubbling up on the hills, maybe they're not there now. Having a Villa discovered in a field at my home with a spring & a clay pit, anything's possible.
Hello from rural Sweden. Most farms nearby is high up. Reason is that the ice age left better soil on top of hills. And it is a pair of degrees warmer than in the valleys. So less heating needed in our cold winters. Farms was only built in reasonable proximity to wells. Remember that cattle needs at least 10 times more water than humans, even more in the summer. Water always runs down, but ground water levels defy simple logic. Permeability differs for different soils. My barn is just about 5 metres below top of the hill. The old well behind it is just 3 metres deep.
A slight dip dug out, even in chalk. Lined with clay and then drive the cattle back and forth across it to firm up the clay and waterproof the basin. Called puddling here in Dorset. And have you ever seen the water run off a well-thatched cottage? The way the reeds are laid makes the roof waterproof and sends the water down. Same as a reed or twig drain. Dig your ditch, lay reeds or straw, all laying the same way and bury them. It becomes an underground drainage pipe that cleans the water as well. Live reeds and plants in the pond clean it as well, if the water runs through them. Swales are shallow, broad channels that are dug along the contour of the land, meaning they run horizontally across a slope. Their primary purpose is to slow down, capture, and redirect rainwater, allowing it to infiltrate the soil rather than run off. This process helps prevent erosion, improves soil moisture, and supports plant growth, making swales an essential tool in water management for sustainable agriculture. Puddling horizontal ditches in front of banks works as well. Probably not to much archaeological evidence of these methods after all this time but the methods are still used within living memory, although I am over seventy! LOL!
The reeds in the ditch is totally a new concept to me. I’ve always wondered why archaeologists never find any erosion in the ditches around roundhouses, but reeds would help - along with swales further from the village (as we are learning that many many cultures around the world that have used them.)😊
One obvious source is collection of rainwater. I used to live on the NW rampart of Ham Hill in Somerset, quarried for stone during the Roman occupation and still is. However, there are many cisterns some of which may well predate the Romans. It is a very large earthworks castle and was inhabited at least during the iron age. Please would you reply with any historical references and knowledge you have about it. Thanks for your videos.
Exactly my thought. Not sure how much and how frequently it rains in the area, but rainwater would surely help supplying the hillfort. Even if it isn't enough alone, it would be another source besides carrying the water up.
Another GREAT video tackling anotger mystery..maybe they had a mixture of dew ponds, water in the ditches and dug puts to collect rainwater. Maybe a video about dew ponds and visits to those? Great scenery. Thank you.😊😊😊😊
Scarborough Castle, on a seaside clifftop hill, between 200-300 feet high, was occupied, as a Hill fort from at least as far back as the Iron Age, in the 4th century AD there was a Roman Signal Station on the edge of the cliff, & in the Medieval period a mighty stone Castle. The Iron Age site included a number of bottle shape storage pits for grain, with various artifacts in their fills proving domestic occupation. Right in the heart of this area, and beside the Roman station there is a stone lined well, which served the Priest's house attached to the remains of a chapel built into the remains of the Roman structure, before the Norman conquest, which continued to serve the Castle through the Medieval period. At the heart of the Castle, near the 12th century Keep, & some distance from the Roman & Iron Age finds there is a well, some 170 feet deep, & stone lined for nearly half this distance from the top down. This still contains water, somewhere way down in the bottom, out of sight from the top without a light. The point is that your mention of the impossibility of making a well to reach water at a hill fort is pertinent to the Scarborough situation, because the rock that forms the hilltop on which Scarborough Castle, & former Hill fort stands is composed of thick layers of limestone on top of sandstone, underneath which are further layers of shale & other rocks, all exposed in the surrounding cliff faces. Yet there clearly were wells on the site, likely from an early date, which therefore included the period of the occupation as a hill fort. Certainly the Romans would have used the well by their station. That is interesting, because if the well had Roman origins associated with the tower one would have expected it to have been within the safety of the circuit of wall built to protect the tower. That it was not suggests that it already existed before the Romans used the site, or that it was not built until a later period, presumably therefore when the chapel was constructed. However it is very close to the priest house foundations, & may have been overridden by them, & the fact that there was a well nearby in the castle would seem to make the need for another at the chapel unnecessary, therefore an earlier, Iron Age, date is more likely. Interestingly, at a much later period, when the Castle received a considerable Garrison following the Jacobite rising of 1745, the water of the well by the chapel was diverted into a large, brick vaulted semi underground chamber, constructed in the Roman fort ditch, in which a large cistern was constructed to collect them, along with a major part of any rainwater that fell on the hilltop, via a series of drains made right across the site. This cistern still holds water today. So a large hilltop can be supplied with water, via similar drain/collection systems, or by the digging of wells, & as well as the collection from roofs etc, & at a push, by human or animal carriage. In just the same way the large amount of grain for which the 'silos' at Scarborough were dug was fair more than could have been grown on the site, even in the remaining 16 acres or so of ground available, though there may have been a bit more at earlier times, but still not much more. This grain then will have had to have been carried uphill also to the site, in considerable quantities. As with grain then so with water, if needed, by either human or animal carriage. At the height of a siege during the English Civil War, a shortage of water for the large garrison of some 700 soldiers, with some horses, cattle, & womenfolk, servants etc within the Castle, men had to resort to a fresh water spring at the base of the cliff to fetch water into the castle, under gunfire from enemy ships etc. so bringing it up the cliffs was possible, if not normal outside of an emergency.
Solid chalk or limestone would actually be very good material to dig through for a well. I wouldn't want to be an iron age well digger trying to go down say 30m but the material would be good. I did some foundation excavation at Foxhill very near Liddington Hill fort and the chalk was perfect.
And the water would be filtered as it seeped into the well. My step father dug a well into chalk, at the bottom of it was a pump that pushed the water to a reservoir that was at the highest part of the farm. The water was so clean that no other filtering was necessary even for human consumption.
Could you perhaps do a short video on dew ponds and the geology of wells? You hint at them and reasons why they'd work or not work a few times, but don't really go into detail. Dew ponds are such a feature of the downs it would be nice to know a bit more about them.
I am not an expert but what he says about wells does not make sense to me. The purpose of a well is to collect ground water, why would you want to line it with pudding clay? That would keep the water out! Limestone or chalk are hard so you can dig a deep hole without it instantly collapsing, seems ideal to me.
@@angelabrady9342 A traditional well is a hole down to the level of the ground water, the ground water has to flow into the hole you have created. You bring the water to the surface with a bucket on a rope.
Southern England; you're looking at hillfords on chalk downland. When you have chalk you have a springline at the bottom of the slope. Why? Chaulk is a very permable rock, water drains through it until it encounters the Greensand - a form of Sandstone from the Early Cretaceous and much less permeable. The water flows along the Greensand until it breaks out at the base of the escarpment. Naturally, this doesn't apply to limesotne, either Carboniferous (Mendips) or Ooltic (Cotswold).
@@pwhitewick what about their (much smaller than today) livestock? Under siege, they'd still want to water the cattle (average 200kg) , sheep (30kg), goats, pigs (70kg), hens, surely? 1 and a half gallons per 45 kg by one estimate. What size herd would sustain a population of 300 people? The volume of water needed would go beyond rudimentary storage capacity.
@@CGM_68 Sieges were rare, and in the rare event they did happen, you weren't going to be able to save your livestock. You just had to eat them. So I wouldn't include sustaining the livestock for long periods of time in part of your siege calculations.
In the absence of data let's first do a guesstimate. Let's assume 150 animals on Beacon Hill, Hampshire, to establish a volume, we can then decide to half it, or double it as required. [1 gallon is 4.546092 litres] 50 cattle need 1,513 litres/day minimum. 40 pigs require 422 litres minimum. Sheep are generally more frequent than goats throughout the period in a ratio of approximately 3 to 1. 30 sheep 136 litres 10 goats 45 litres 20 chickens 3 litres. That's just short of a total of 2,000 litres for each day of the siege. It would be a considerable effort to transport 1000s of litres of water to the top. Storage would be have to be evident in the archaeological record. Then consider the need for fire fighting, should the besiegers try to burn you out. Not much good if you dowse the flames with your drinking water. I guess loose earth could be used to smother the flames, since it's a difficult question, how much water would it take to dowse the flames on 15 huts.
This made me think of Silbury Hill. Apparently, over long periods of time, natural springs have hills form around them. Going back to the time when these hill forts were built, a natural choice for location would be an isolated Spring Hill in the middle of a plane. They would be dry now but burrowing into the hill at the right place would reveal them.
In general building hills on planes is frowned upon - these days anyway. It tends to limit their ability to fly. But maybe, back in the days of Gods and Monsters, things might have been different? 🤔🙄
Theres a not very well advertised hillfort at Blunsdon on the north side of Swindon which was very obviously inhabited as you can see the hut markings thanks to the nettle patches. It really brings history to life when you see stuff like that 😊
Maybe UK folks know what dew ponds are, but I never heard that term before. I found some interesting information about them online. Thanks for another interesting story.
Bullington House on chalk has or had 2 wells one inside the house and the other in what was known as the summer house. I know this because I was brought up in the bungalow on the grounds of Bullington House. These wells were very deep and it was believed that they had been dug when the first part of Bullington House was built, which I was told was in the 12c. All I am saying is that wells are on chalk.
Surely its just livestock and a cart? I mean did they have 15 blokes running up and down all day past the livestock, and the carts they had, that they already used to move heavy things like "There has to be a better way of doing this!"
@@carlchallinor4933 Oh come on now! Surely you're not suggesting that these stone age Urks would have any more nous than the average modern city dweller and actually know where on a cow or chicken the food packaging machinery is located? 🤔😉
It rained a lot more in the iron age. The lack of engineering could be considered evidence of how little a problem it was. We know they used gutter systems on roundhouses, but more rain also means springwater and streams are more numerous, it's not just about direct rain collection. Hill forts and hill pastures may have been a way to ESCAPE the water/boggy lowlands, this especially rings true in regards to animal enclosures.
Hills are a great solution to a general lack of sanitation. Having to work a bit to bring water uphill is probably preferable to standing ankle deep in your own waste.
Yep, came here to say this. It's England, water falls out of the sky. In the Iron Age you didn't need water for bathing or flushing toilets, or washing porcelain. Just enough to keep yourself and the animals you kept hydrated.
You can also add the run off from the roofs of the roundhouses. I can fill a large water butt from the roof of a 4 x 2 metre conservatory roof on a reasonably wet day.
I believe the British weather would supply a considerable amount of water with captured rainfall. If you use vessels to carry water why not have vessels filled by hides stretched to capture rainfall?
I lived in a Hillfort in a prevous life. We made huge funnels using animal skins and wood. We caught the rain water and stored it in pots. It rains quite a lot in England.
In the aerial view of the first hill he ascends is a lot of dry, brown-ish grass, with a few spots of bright green. There's obviously water in those spots.
It has no bearing, I’m sure but I live about 1/2 mile from Beacon Hill and about a mile from the car park sits The Dew Pond restaurant…complete with a dew pond. What Beacon Hill does do, is cause a local micro-climate.
Hi Paul, excellent video. One thought that occurs to me is that perhaps they never resolved this problem and were only able to sustain life high up during periods when they could collect enough water. As an aside a short while ago I saw a report showing how water was being harvested from the clouds high up in the Andes in nets which were then collected the condensation and channeled it down the mountainside to where it was needed. All the best!!
Glad I mentioned it, you're welcome. So those berms and swales would capture and drink down the rainwater, substantially. When the ground water is filled, the swales will fill. Looks to me very much like for growing as we do with dry farming/agriculture. Building moats,swales and well and ponds to be filled naturally to serve as a source. If there were people living there inside the ring, being under attack would jeopardise the lives of the water carriers, so i don't agree with this theory.
Along with your deduction, I am inclined to believe that they built catch basins an cisterns. And don't forget that >2000 years ago, they had much more regular rainfall. 😎
These hill forts are surrounded by long circular ditches. Have the archaeologists checked any of them for clay linings? Even the runoff from such a construction would be substantial and could be captured without going very far from the top.
@@pwhitewick Various accounts appear to corroborate each other that the UK area was a lot wetter until recent times, meaning rainfall included; and including significant areas of land that is inland now, under water, further back in time.
@@stephengraham1153 there has been an investigation of some ramparts - I saw it on an Alice Roberts video. The "forts" were progressively built over many generations - not thrown up like a military work. I reckon, as I think Paul is slowly coming around to, that these are community resources. Before we had villages these were our village green, market square, tax collection centre, sport and festival spaces, and like the Anglo Saxons with their churches these were places of last redoubt during periods of invasion. All 'round useful things to have for a libertarian style of government without formal rulers .
In Australia many rural homes use water tanks that gather water from the rain that falls on the roof for drinking water. I can't help wondering if it could also have been as simple as basic roof gutters leading to barrels to collect water. If it works now in dry Australia, surely it'd work well in the UK. Nothing would exist in the archaeological record of such given stains in the ground show footings, but not the roof...but it is a very simple solution to the water issue.
Hmmm… their thatched roofs would have been different, but famously the English rain is far more frequent. Dew ponds collecting rainwater seem more likely than roofs.
Eaves troughs would be quite labor intensive, but possibly you could drain drip trenches down a back slope into a lined basin or cistern. Several round houses on a slight ridge might make it worthwhile?
@@katebowers8107 Thatched roofs still have run off. In archeology we find the drip line around round houses where the run off has eroded the soil. Often they also dug a deliberate ditch around their roundhouses to keep the run off water away from the walls. Line that ditch with pudding clay and it can help feed your dew pond or cistern.
I was thinking some form of rainwater harvesting. I live in rural North Devon in the UK. In theory my property is fed from a spring but with climate change and modern living it just can't cope with the demand. We did look at a borehole but access to the property is difficult and creating a route in for the machinery would have been a project in its own right. The solution was rainwater harvesting from our roof (smallish footprint two bed bungalow) which easily keeps us supplied.
During a "seige"? I think Paul underestimates the problems of storage. In chalk Downland a clay lined cistern would be the easiest most efficient way of storing water. But none exist.
@@AndyJarmandid sieges happen in the Iron Age? It takes tremendous resources to stage and maintain a siege for weeks/ months. Would it have been possible back then? Maybe a fort only needed a week or two of stored water…?
I’ve always reflected on water supply. My local hill fort “Bury Hill” North Bristol once had a forever well (spring) inside it, according to excavation. They also found a Paleolithic blade and a Neolithic polished axe head. In the dry weather you can see the foundations of a Roman villa. So maybe the spring created the significance to the site. There is the river Frome passing the fort and an old track going up to the fort. So I assumed that water could have been taken up to the fort, via horse and carriage? Many fields also have small ponds. I assumed were once for water for animals.
Hey Paul great content thank you. Funny I was walking the Dog only yesterday morning around a local hill fort ( to you and me) and there was 2 Dew ponds it was lovely to see, and it wasn’t Danebury, Bury, Quarley or Figsbury.
From what I understand, the city of Venice had squares of sand with a well in the centre into which they would funnel rain water to create a large sand and gravel cistern, the entire square and the buildings around it capturing the rain water. These hill forts involved a fair bit of earthworks and you often find a layer of clay below a fair bit of permeable silt material from which the clay was leached from, so they could've lined a large hollow area (either natural or dug out) with clay, then filled it with the permeable materials and finally the fertile soils hence producing an artificial shallow water aquifer. Such shallow aquifers would also explain why springs are often found along the side of these structures. Obviously we would have to calculate the expected rain fall and drill some core samples to see if an artificial shallow aquifer was created and somehow I doubt people have bothered to do so but it is something that may have been within the abilities of society at that time as well as perhaps a concept they may have thought of as rain water retention should've been obvious to them as would sand filtration.
There is a southern water station on top of Offham hill near lewes. You’d think they would all have had a deep well somewhere. There were also many more springs in the past than there are today. Additional rainwater and simple hard work we just can’t imagine now explains the rest.
I was going to ask if it never rains in England, but since almost everyone else mentioned rainwater there is obviously no need. Strange though that one of the most obvious sources goes unmentioned.
Hi Paul, looking at the footage you took with the dtone of beacon hill. You can see a number of dark green patches of grass. Those would be natural gathering places for water that could have been improved, to suply atleast part of the need. And don't dismiss rainwater!
Here in South Wales, I've always thought when visiting the local hill fort called Twmbarlwm that the problem is too much water and wind. I can't really imagine that getting water was much of a problem given the amount of rain, but staying warm and dry must have been difficult
I'd guess that some 'hillforts' might have been more realistically used during the winter time, when there was plenty of snow available as a water source; in the warmer seasons, I think it might have made more sense for groups to travel a bit further to those which may have better sources...
This brought back a memory of Oswestery Hill Fort in Shropshire. There are a series of ponds-like structures built into the ramparts that, as I recall, created a wet swamp-like glade. This could have been a ready water supply for that hill forts, and also food that could be protected. Other hill forts could have had similar constructions. A clay base could be excavated or brought in to line the pond and make it watertight..
One sees video of women and children in Africa carrying 20 or 25 litre canisters of water. Say you were using hide containers, would the container itself weigh 10kg when wet? Then carrying 10 or 15 litres of water becomes easily possible for people who are used to carrying weights.
One advantage of the metric system is that 1 ltr of water weighs exactly 1 Kg. So 15 ltrs of water weigh 15 kgs which for a normal fit person is not too heavy to carry..
Are any of these forts based on clay, as it tends to stop seepage and collects water so they might have had open pits or pits covered with skins or with wooden tanks lined with clay for rainwater, animals skins, hollowed logs as culverts, maybe oxen with large water skins (the arabs manage on their chargals of water carried on camels etc) carried up each day. They would have needed large storage tanks or vessels any pottery remains of large jars? The same question applies to fuel for cooking once the trees have been cleared at the top (if any) and animal dung does make a good hot fire, as does peat, any of them near peat fields? Peat holds water and when dried burns well. This is a survival existence day to day but they were intelligent enough to plan ahead too, and co-operate if a larger group. Fascinating thoughts.
I made my first hillfort visit last week, to Abbotsbury Hillfort, and the water question immediately came to me. In thinking about it, all these hillforts have ditches around them. If you were to line a portion of a ditch with something impermeable, maybe clay, and direct rainfall to that spot with a slope in the ditch, it seems to me you can have a nice pond--and we know how rainy England is. I would imagine the layer of clay could have broken down in the intervening thousands of years. But that's all just a guess.
I know that hillfort well, and just a few hundred meters to its west is very wet area that is hidden under trees. It would have been a great place to find water or to have made a pond. Also there are springs between the fort and the sea. Lots of fresh water around that hillfort.
I believe the answer is that the ditches were not primarily for defense. They were dams. All rural properties collect there own water from roof runoff. This water would then been used to gravity irrigate there crops.
No idea on the hill forts, but Norwich castle is on quite a sizable hill, and its water supply is (was) an internal well, which still exists. Same for Framlingham Castle . Wells have been dug for centuries, so its the most logical answer if there is non running, surface, water on tap (?) Next best solution is to find a friendly water diviner, and see what he/she can tell you about the place. You are right... they had to get water somewhere close, and I would bet that would have been a factor considered when choosing the site.
Some exceptionally lovely Wessex landscapes here. The "did people actually live in hillforts" and "what did they do about water" questions seem to torture us antiquarians nowadays. There are hut circles on Ingleborough and that's a mountain. Gulp! I've always assumed - based on no substantive evidence! - that the solution must have had various constituent parts. So you'd have dew ponds, manually carting water up and rainwater capture. With the latter - which seems the most obvious - I don't think anything's been found that could have served this purpose. Finding that "thing" is probably the game changer. Right, I need to find that thing!
They probably collected rain water at the top with buckets makes a lot of sense although not reliable. I've known this to be done in more modern times building BMX tracks and mixing chalk with water to create great surfaces
First, they could have used animals to carry water. Second, this is England. the most obvious source of water is rainfall. They could have used dew ponds. It is possible that most early archeologists would miss them and even fill them up with dirt from the digs.
You ask about water. In the next sentence you talk about pastoral areas on the hills. How much "water" is carried in an animal? In this way, how much "water" can a shepherd herd up the hill per day? More than 10 liters? Or plants (like melons) that might grow on the hill? Thank you Paul and Rebecca for your excellent content. You inspire us to think!
Great video as always. Slightly off topic but I've wondered for a while if the difficulty of getting water was a reason for the decline of Silchester. Perhaps as defensive needs lessened people gravitated towards Reading and Basingstoke where it was easier to access and trade from?
LOL! At least the doubts we planted some time ago are starting to bear fruit. Dewponds may form during the rainy season, but if it gets hot, they’ll dry up unless fed by natural springs, creating an interesting paradox. It would be best to examine Old Sarum in your research, where wells and a historical community existed. Most people know about the Norman well at the Castle, which is 220 feet deep, but excavations in the Church have revealed shallower wells that were clearly functional in the past. This leads to an interesting paradox: if the church wells were operational, the water table must have been high enough to fill the wells and the surrounding ditches. Therefore, these ditches were likely moats. The same principle applies to ditches found in other 'Iron Age forts,' offering a simple solution-avoiding impractical conclusions-as the area would have been surrounded by water. More details are available on the website. 🤓
So ground water bubbling up the hill? Or would the hill be an island? In that case Swindon would be right at the coast. The place sits around 70-80 m/230-260 ft above the surrounding terrain. Old Sarum is only 60 m above the bed of the Avon.
@@HappyBeezerStudios - You need to read up on Hydrology. Groundwater (water table) is reflected in the topology of the surface level of the ground - The highest freshwater lake in Britain is Loch Etchachan, located in the Cairngorms of Scotland. It sits at an altitude of around 927 meters (3,041 feet) above sea level, making it the highest body of freshwater in the British Isles - If we followed your 'logic', then Britain would be ultimately underwater. 🙄
Walbury and Beacon Hill forts water is about 100’ below surface today so I believe the aquifer was higher in those days so I would say either a shaft directly down below the hill fort or a skid way up the side to draw goat bladders on slides up into the fort from a shallow well at the base. My estimate would be that originally there was a well shaft from the top to make the fort self contained but after the Roman invasion Agricola probably ordered the shafts filled in to make resistance to occupation more difficult/impossible. I’ve drilled many water wells in the countryside around all three forts and can say the chalk is solid and cohesive ideal for old fashioned type dug well fairly easy to sink and line.
Membury fort was inhabited and has a pond near the northern entrance. I don't know if it was man made but it seemed a significant size and quite full when I was last there. It gives an idea of how much water was needed for that size hillfort. I'm not sure that lugging 10 litres per person up a hill a few times a day would be feasible. A Sisyphean curse no less. You'd be drinking most of that on your way up there in the warmer months and have a mere dribble and a drop left by the time you'd reached the top. I can imagine the Celtic version of 'sod that' would be uttered a few times before they gave up.
Did they just survive with wine imported and milk baths😂they licked the walls in castles and some had wells if lucky for a sweater source😮and you having to carry all your water up there,maybe they had a genius way we don’t know ,all we can do is speculate,fascinating show as usual interesting,high and dry and very thirsty this show should be called.😮 thank you for your enthusiasm and effort in getting up there.
The Britain I remember had lots of rain. People capable of creating such huge earthworks could easily have created ponds to collect that regular rainfall. Perhaps the ponds would need some sort of lining (if the ground is the porous chalk.)
If you visit some of the more remote commumities of the Atlas mountains of Morocco some are high up the mountains in very dry areas. They get their water daily by using several mules and donkeys with large leather water containers carrying perhaps 50 to100 litres at a time from down in the valleys below. It's generally a child's job to make the trip with the animals. At the top the water is poured into tanks and buts. The round trip can easily be several kms.
My theory was that the hillfort water problem may also be that they weren't intended for prolonged sieges. Attackers probably didn't have the resources to mount a proper siege - warriors were individuals and keeping them on a leash long enough was a feat in itself. So a small supply through manpacking or dew ponds could probably last a couple of days.
Barbary castle is another interesting one to visit, looks like plenty of occupation there and around the fort. I imagine some of these places were mainly for occasional occupation, trade and commerce, or securing livestock from raiders.
BC, The sea level land was wetter as it was pre man-made drainage and closer in years to the final ice age, so building villages on hills was important. (Think Glastonbury Tor and Brent Knoll. The Somerset levels weren't drained until Roman occupation for example) They chose a hill which had a spring and constructed the ditches to hold the water, that is what they are for. Think champagne glass stack, fill the top one and watch it flow over. the ditches were filled top to bottom fed by the spring. The ditches are level but at the lowest point there would be a connecting culvert. The higher ditches were used for drinking water and lower ditches for animal water and keeping water fowl to eat. There would be an overflow at the bottom. The whole concept of villages on hills like this was to sustain life incorporating modern living and farming. The surrounding land at the bottom of the hills were used for grain production and the grain was carted up the hill over bridges that had culverts through them and stored in straw lined grain pits by the round houses. The closest fort I have found to show this whole concept is Worleberry in Somerset. I once had an archaeological dig of an old hillfort on my own land where the archaeologist refused to accept my hypothesis in favour of the standard rhetoric of the forts being built to defend the village...... problems with that theory, the villages only had 5 or 6 roundhouses so why would they use the labour to dig ditches for defence?, the population of the UK when the romans arrived was approx 1,000,000 and there are over 3300 hillforts. That equals 300 people per village, what did they need to defend? There was plenty of resources for everyone. I hope you enjoyed my explanation, good luck trying to mention it to any archaeologist, I've never found one who would even listen to me in 30 years of research you get used to it 🙂
i'm pretty sure if in need they had ways to catch extra rainwater. these people were as smart and resourcefull as we are. greatly reducing the need to bring up water. thing is alot of these would be makeshift and not of long lasting materials and probably removed after use so the chance to find anything related to this are rather slim
This was fairly discussed if I remember well. The hill forts were indeed used for daily activities and periodical markets for animals and act as defensive structure. However, related to sieges is worth mentioning that the same issue are faced by the attackers (1) and second, the shear size of the fortification means that is no way for a party to surround it, meaning that the sieges are hit and run, no evidence for prolong sieges and on the other hand there are options for the defenders to find water for longer sieges finding routes in the night. Being said that, the hills forts are NOT primary for real defensive structure as we envision but more for psychological one. Imagine first look at the mighty fortress with miles of ramparts. Those will prevent most of the attacks, and the rest are anyway like I said hit and run attacks. As the time progress, in the end coalitions of tribes are formed and thousands of warriors start to conquer those hill tops as their impressive looks have also downsides. And this was their end.
Yes, I also think rainwater played a part. Their are people today that live off rain collection. Limestone has caves that could have been tapped into as well.
Hi Paul, I have always thought that the 'defensive ' ditches themselves might have been used to store rainwater if needed... Health & Safety not being too strong back in the day, but I'm not aware of any investigation revealing clay puddled linings. 🤔
My instinct was a "cistern" for catching rain water. I looked up "dew pond" and the Wikipedia entry had some interesting things to say that caught my eye like the "chalk puddle" used to make one. Where my father grew up every house had a cistern and many of these dew ponds of every size are dotted about- primarily for livestock.
Especially in Southern England the water table has been continually lowered since the 1800s by the extraction of groundwater for public waters supply and by agricultural drainage. There would have been far more springs and seasonal springs ( maybe in the camp ditches at times) than is evident today .
good point.
Agreed. There has been increasing ground water abstraction to the point where some ancient rivers have completely dried up. Many are now in the process of naturally disappearing, while a couple only run during times of great flooding. I was gobsmacked to learn how many rivers and streams had disappeared in recent times, whilst attending a presentation to the IFM at Fishmongers Hall 30 years ago.
In the Philippines, on the scarp above Cagayan de Oro, people live by their fields and fetch water from the bottom of the hill. Their solution is to send the kids to fetch the water.
My grandmother did that 120 years ago in the west of Ireland. The hamlet was on high ground. The grazing was good on the high ground but the spring was down at the bottom of the field. The children had to fetch the water.
that is all fine and well in PEACE time, but the question is.. if it;s a fort, a place people use to defend themselves from attackers, you can't use that low water stream, your enemy will be the one using it, laughing at you until thirst forces you to surrender or die
@@Blackadder75 So what's the answer!
@@gerrycastlemanwarde5933 if i wanted a load of water up on a hill id try to catch rain water
i presume these hill forts take a while to build and the UK is known to be a pretty rainy place
So i could imagine over the many months or years you would set up a method for catching rain and storing it
the easiest way id think is having some kinda pond on the top of the hill with all the rain water running into it off the top of the hill so maybe the lowest point of the top of the hill
plus I wouldn't be surprised if each family had their own rain catching method for day to day use
if i had a round house id look for a method to catching rain off my roof
my first idea would be to just attach a bit of straw to the bottom of the roof going into a pot so when rain came it would run down the roof then down my straw straight into my pot or maybe set up a few wooden troughs under the roof to catch the rain
it could be a as simple as stickling 50 clay pots on the ground catching rain as a it falls but i would certainly try things to catch the rain
in the UK, water is never the problem you have a really good supply of water as it rains 70% of the year I don't know why you wouldn't try and catch it
Well, that part of Mindanao is also a tropical rain forest climate, so the kids probably don't have to go that often, at least.😉
As. Retired Archaeogist from Texas , I have a huge interest in in Hill forts in Britain. As this is just a suggestion as to water supply , I could be wrong . In the dry American SW ( Texasis part of that ) there are 100s of thousands of Stock Tanks made by excavation to catch rain to form a pond . I have worked at many prehistoric and early historical sites . At one near Goliad Texas , one of a pair of 1700s Spanish colonial Missions in the area ( Rosario) was on a slight rise away from the local San Antonio river . It was enclosed by a stone wall with 2 corner bastions, but no well was found in the 2 archaeological excavations done the in 1936-41 and later in 1976 ( my experience) . There was instead a large deep cone shaped pit excavated during the 1700s in the center of the plaza . The fill indicated this was a pond of water , perhaps used to mine earth to make Adobe and or used as a water tank . As Britain is know to get a lot more rain then Texas , why are the deep trenches enclosing a hill fort able to catch and hold rain water?
I have been watching utubes 'desert drifter' and now want to visit over there. Texas would be a dream for me to visit. So much archelogy just sitting about in the open... I'm so jealous!
Btw if you ever do come to the UK, visit Maiden Castle during a full moon its magical.
The ramparts would have been kept clean, making them white with no mud or grass on them, so maybe you are right after all. But the real problem is that the ramparts are made of broken chalk from when they were dug, so I don't think water would have run down them but rather have soaked into them. The bottom of a rampart is virgin chalk that has not been dug, but is still far too porous to hold water as the chalk is full of flints and debris. If a pond were to be dug from over to lower than the waterline, it will be a permanent pond, but hillforts are high up so will drain unless being constantly fed. Summers are unpredictable and could be very dry, so with a hillfort as huge as Maiden Castle with is suggested 1000 inhabitants, water would have needed to be constant. I think caught rainwater would be a bonus, but springs for drinking would be necessary. In the south of the UK farmers (ranchers) still take water directly from chalk fed springs to use for human consumption, (no other filtering is necessary) the water is still incredibly clean.
I like your idea, but have not heard nor seen evidence of it. I have spent many years investigating Maiden Castle as an amateur, but no matter how much it rains, I have never seen a pond in the bottom of a rampart (these days they tend to be full of deep grass). But I'm sure you are on to something, the bottom of ramparts are not level, the water could run towards a man made pond if an aqueduct were to be made and if you could make it water tight then bingo!
There were ancient Roman aqueducts that ran around Dorchester (very close to Maiden Castle), but they were spring fed and the water would ultimately end up going into a river. Even the romans understood that water from chalk hills rarely would stop running, so making a large well would mostly be pointless (there are a few small ancient reservoirs). Now I'm expecting a huge well to be found to prove me wrong! I hope so!
Have fun with in your amazing Texas! Lucky luck you.
@@Inoxx44 If damp chalk and other soils are "puddled" - crushed under the feet of oxen or many people or pounded with tools for instance - it forms a paste that when compacted, becomes capable of retaining water instead of draining away - this is why footpaths in constant use develop puddles, when the area around drains freely.
Large numbers of people are needed for a community building a hill fort, and constant traffic in trenches and footpaths would lead to this phenomenon.
The more dry dwellings there are, the greater the runoff area for rain from the roofs becomes, and paths between them become rivulets for collection in ponds, which can be planted with reeds which purify the water.
Ice in Winter can be collected, and insulated with rushes away from the sunward side to last long into the warmer months.
Ramparts and trenches can be modified and used to direct any floodwaters when they occur.
Hard work is a solution to winter cold as well as burning fuel!
Now the UK has always had a maritime climate because of its latitude, so drought is the exception.
And thousands of years later, these constructions still exist, and are remembered in nursery rhymes.
Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water, not down to the river.
In my youth, hiking the Breidden (inc. Rodney's Pillar) and other local hills I was always surprised by Springs bubbling up on the hills, maybe they're not there now. Having a Villa discovered in a field at my home with a spring & a clay pit, anything's possible.
Hello from rural Sweden. Most farms nearby is high up. Reason is that the ice age left better soil on top of hills. And it is a pair of degrees warmer than in the valleys. So less heating needed in our cold winters. Farms was only built in reasonable proximity to wells. Remember that cattle needs at least 10 times more water than humans, even more in the summer.
Water always runs down, but ground water levels defy simple logic. Permeability differs for different soils. My barn is just about 5 metres below top of the hill. The old well behind it is just 3 metres deep.
A slight dip dug out, even in chalk. Lined with clay and then drive the cattle back and forth across it to firm up the clay and waterproof the basin. Called puddling here in Dorset. And have you ever seen the water run off a well-thatched cottage? The way the reeds are laid makes the roof waterproof and sends the water down. Same as a reed or twig drain. Dig your ditch, lay reeds or straw, all laying the same way and bury them. It becomes an underground drainage pipe that cleans the water as well. Live reeds and plants in the pond clean it as well, if the water runs through them.
Swales are shallow, broad channels that are dug along the contour of the land, meaning they run horizontally across a slope. Their primary purpose is to slow down, capture, and redirect rainwater, allowing it to infiltrate the soil rather than run off. This process helps prevent erosion, improves soil moisture, and supports plant growth, making swales an essential tool in water management for sustainable agriculture. Puddling horizontal ditches in front of banks works as well. Probably not to much archaeological evidence of these methods after all this time but the methods are still used within living memory, although I am over seventy! LOL!
The reeds in the ditch is totally a new concept to me. I’ve always wondered why archaeologists never find any erosion in the ditches around roundhouses, but reeds would help - along with swales further from the village (as we are learning that many many cultures around the world that have used them.)😊
One obvious source is collection of rainwater. I used to live on the NW rampart of Ham Hill in Somerset, quarried for stone during the Roman occupation and still is. However, there are many cisterns some of which may well predate the Romans. It is a very large earthworks castle and was inhabited at least during the iron age. Please would you reply with any historical references and knowledge you have about it. Thanks for your videos.
There are large developed catchment areas and cisterns on Gibraltar too, which is a sort of 18th to 20th century hillfort.
This is how a lot of roman homes got water. They'd have a courtyard where the roof directs water into a central basin.
Exactly my thought. Not sure how much and how frequently it rains in the area, but rainwater would surely help supplying the hillfort. Even if it isn't enough alone, it would be another source besides carrying the water up.
Occam's Razor is always a friend when uncovering seemingly unfathomable mysteries, and you worked it out, Paul.
Ha Ha! Midden, that's what my Mum used to call my Bedroom when I was a Teenager! 😂👍
Another GREAT video tackling anotger mystery..maybe they had a mixture of dew ponds, water in the ditches and dug puts to collect rainwater. Maybe a video about dew ponds and visits to those? Great scenery. Thank you.😊😊😊😊
The pre European hill forts in New Zealand have left impressive marks on the land and used as places of refuge. Always had water sources
Scarborough Castle, on a seaside clifftop hill, between 200-300 feet high, was occupied, as a Hill fort from at least as far back as the Iron Age, in the 4th century AD there was a Roman Signal Station on the edge of the cliff, & in the Medieval period a mighty stone Castle. The Iron Age site included a number of bottle shape storage pits for grain, with various artifacts in their fills proving domestic occupation. Right in the heart of this area, and beside the Roman station there is a stone lined well, which served the Priest's house attached to the remains of a chapel built into the remains of the Roman structure, before the Norman conquest, which continued to serve the Castle through the Medieval period. At the heart of the Castle, near the 12th century Keep, & some distance from the Roman & Iron Age finds there is a well, some 170 feet deep, & stone lined for nearly half this distance from the top down. This still contains water, somewhere way down in the bottom, out of sight from the top without a light. The point is that your mention of the impossibility of making a well to reach water at a hill fort is pertinent to the Scarborough situation, because the rock that forms the hilltop on which Scarborough Castle, & former Hill fort stands is composed of thick layers of limestone on top of sandstone, underneath which are further layers of shale & other rocks, all exposed in the surrounding cliff faces. Yet there clearly were wells on the site, likely from an early date, which therefore included the period of the occupation as a hill fort. Certainly the Romans would have used the well by their station. That is interesting, because if the well had Roman origins associated with the tower one would have expected it to have been within the safety of the circuit of wall built to protect the tower. That it was not suggests that it already existed before the Romans used the site, or that it was not built until a later period, presumably therefore when the chapel was constructed. However it is very close to the priest house foundations, & may have been overridden by them, & the fact that there was a well nearby in the castle would seem to make the need for another at the chapel unnecessary, therefore an earlier, Iron Age, date is more likely. Interestingly, at a much later period, when the Castle received a considerable Garrison following the Jacobite rising of 1745, the water of the well by the chapel was diverted into a large, brick vaulted semi underground chamber, constructed in the Roman fort ditch, in which a large cistern was constructed to collect them, along with a major part of any rainwater that fell on the hilltop, via a series of drains made right across the site. This cistern still holds water today. So a large hilltop can be supplied with water, via similar drain/collection systems, or by the digging of wells, & as well as the collection from roofs etc, & at a push, by human or animal carriage. In just the same way the large amount of grain for which the 'silos' at Scarborough were dug was fair more than could have been grown on the site, even in the remaining 16 acres or so of ground available, though there may have been a bit more at earlier times, but still not much more. This grain then will have had to have been carried uphill also to the site, in considerable quantities. As with grain then so with water, if needed, by either human or animal carriage. At the height of a siege during the English Civil War, a shortage of water for the large garrison of some 700
soldiers, with some horses, cattle, & womenfolk, servants etc within the Castle, men had to resort to a fresh water spring at the base of the cliff to fetch water into the castle, under gunfire from enemy ships etc. so bringing it up the cliffs was possible, if not normal outside of an emergency.
Solid chalk or limestone would actually be very good material to dig through for a well. I wouldn't want to be an iron age well digger trying to go down say 30m but the material would be good.
I did some foundation excavation at Foxhill very near Liddington Hill fort and the chalk was perfect.
Soft enough to work quickly, but solid enough to stay put. At least as long as the fort would be in use.
The skills to sink a well into chalk were similar to those used in flint mining, as at Grimes Graves etc.
And the water would be filtered as it seeped into the well. My step father dug a well into chalk, at the bottom of it was a pump that pushed the water to a reservoir that was at the highest part of the farm. The water was so clean that no other filtering was necessary even for human consumption.
Could you perhaps do a short video on dew ponds and the geology of wells? You hint at them and reasons why they'd work or not work a few times, but don't really go into detail. Dew ponds are such a feature of the downs it would be nice to know a bit more about them.
I am not an expert but what he says about wells does not make sense to me. The purpose of a well is to collect ground water, why would you want to line it with pudding clay? That would keep the water out! Limestone or chalk are hard so you can dig a deep hole without it instantly collapsing, seems ideal to me.
@@MrMonkeybat I was thinking the same thing
@@MrMonkeybatI think limestone is porous, so the water would leach away…
@@angelabrady9342 A traditional well is a hole down to the level of the ground water, the ground water has to flow into the hole you have created. You bring the water to the surface with a bucket on a rope.
Glad I subbed, this types of videos is exactly what I'm hill fort!
Awesome, thank you!
Groan, let me guess you're a dad right?
@@AndyJarman just an intellectual
:D very good
The question regarding water has been pestering me ever since I had become interessed in the hillforts here in Slovenia. Thanks for addressing it!
Can confirm, if i'm taking friends or family hillforting doesn't take long for this exact question to come up
great episode!
Southern England; you're looking at hillfords on chalk downland. When you have chalk you have a springline at the bottom of the slope. Why? Chaulk is a very permable rock, water drains through it until it encounters the Greensand - a form of Sandstone from the Early Cretaceous and much less permeable. The water flows along the Greensand until it breaks out at the base of the escarpment. Naturally, this doesn't apply to limesotne, either Carboniferous (Mendips) or Ooltic (Cotswold).
All my favourite local hillforts in one video, superb! Nice mention of Wessex Ways too
Ive been shouting dew ponds since the video started.
I know... I can hear you!
what about the sheet on posts condensation / rain method too
@@pwhitewick what about their (much smaller than today) livestock? Under siege, they'd still want to water the cattle (average 200kg) , sheep (30kg), goats, pigs (70kg), hens, surely? 1 and a half gallons per 45 kg by one estimate. What size herd would sustain a population of 300 people? The volume of water needed would go beyond rudimentary storage capacity.
@@CGM_68 Sieges were rare, and in the rare event they did happen, you weren't going to be able to save your livestock. You just had to eat them. So I wouldn't include sustaining the livestock for long periods of time in part of your siege calculations.
In the absence of data let's first do a guesstimate. Let's assume 150 animals on Beacon Hill, Hampshire, to establish a volume, we can then decide to half it, or double it as required. [1 gallon is 4.546092 litres]
50 cattle need 1,513 litres/day minimum.
40 pigs require 422 litres minimum.
Sheep are generally more frequent than goats throughout the period in a ratio of approximately 3 to 1.
30 sheep 136 litres
10 goats 45 litres
20 chickens 3 litres. That's just short of a total of 2,000 litres for each day of the siege. It would be a considerable effort to transport 1000s of litres of water to the top. Storage would be have to be evident in the archaeological record. Then consider the need for fire fighting, should the besiegers try to burn you out. Not much good if you dowse the flames with your drinking water. I guess loose earth could be used to smother the flames, since it's a difficult question, how much water would it take to dowse the flames on 15 huts.
My video on this subject followed by your video cover the subject to a good level-Thank you Paul an interesting watch 👍👍
This made me think of Silbury Hill. Apparently, over long periods of time, natural springs have hills form around them. Going back to the time when these hill forts were built, a natural choice for location would be an isolated Spring Hill in the middle of a plane. They would be dry now but burrowing into the hill at the right place would reveal them.
In general building hills on planes is frowned upon - these days anyway. It tends to limit their ability to fly. But maybe, back in the days of Gods and Monsters, things might have been different? 🤔🙄
plain😢 not plane.
Theres a not very well advertised hillfort at Blunsdon on the north side of Swindon which was very obviously inhabited as you can see the hut markings thanks to the nettle patches.
It really brings history to life when you see stuff like that 😊
Maybe UK folks know what dew ponds are, but I never heard that term before. I found some interesting information about them online. Thanks for another interesting story.
Check out the Woodingdean Well. 1280ft. deep and dug by hand.
Bullington House on chalk has or had 2 wells one inside the house and the other in what was known as the summer house. I know this because I was brought up in the bungalow on the grounds of Bullington House. These wells were very deep and it was believed that they had been dug when the first part of Bullington House was built, which I was told was in the 12c. All I am saying is that wells are on chalk.
Thank you Paul, yet again a well thought out video 😀
This video has convinced me that the water problem is still to be answered.
Agreed.
Yep. Interesting scenic video. Shame about the blather!
Surely its just livestock and a cart? I mean did they have 15 blokes running up and down all day past the livestock, and the carts they had, that they already used to move heavy things like "There has to be a better way of doing this!"
@@carlchallinor4933 Oh come on now! Surely you're not suggesting that these stone age Urks would have any more nous than the average modern city dweller and actually know where on a cow or chicken the food packaging machinery is located? 🤔😉
It rained a lot more in the iron age. The lack of engineering could be considered evidence of how little a problem it was. We know they used gutter systems on roundhouses, but more rain also means springwater and streams are more numerous, it's not just about direct rain collection. Hill forts and hill pastures may have been a way to ESCAPE the water/boggy lowlands, this especially rings true in regards to animal enclosures.
The photography is stunning. Thank you for such quality videos. And time stamps.
Hills are a great solution to a general lack of sanitation. Having to work a bit to bring water uphill is probably preferable to standing ankle deep in your own waste.
Absolutely brilliant Paul! Loved every second of this … and water is a great example of what makes a site tick … or not! 👀⚔️☠️🐑👻👍👋😎❤️
Thanks 👍
Your videos remind me of time team. The more in depth bits where they’d look at a part of the people’s lives. I think your channel will explode.
Great video as always Paul..👍👍
The ditches going around the fort could act as drains to a water pit lined with clay. No shortage of rain in the UK.
like what the mayans did
Or they could use animal hides to contain the water
Yep, came here to say this. It's England, water falls out of the sky. In the Iron Age you didn't need water for bathing or flushing toilets, or washing porcelain. Just enough to keep yourself and the animals you kept hydrated.
@@jonathanrichards593 Not washing your bowls and stuff is a good way to get food poisoning. Unglazed earthenware is harder to wash than porcelain.
You can also add the run off from the roofs of the roundhouses. I can fill a large water butt from the roof of a 4 x 2 metre conservatory roof on a reasonably wet day.
Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.
Were they going the wrong direction? No wonder they were accident prone.
Nuts in may
Still fetching a pail of water going up hill! That's for your detractors. Peace Brother.
Maybe their forgot water only travels one way ! they should have waited at the bottom and let the water come to them
Jill came down with two fifty.
I believe the British weather would supply a considerable amount of water with captured rainfall. If you use vessels to carry water why not have vessels filled by hides stretched to capture rainfall?
I lived in a Hillfort in a prevous life. We made huge funnels using animal skins and wood. We caught the rain water and stored it in pots. It rains quite a lot in England.
You beat me to it....
i remember,i was cow whose skin you used.
But rain cannot be relied upon. There are still dry periods.
Thats assuming that the climate then was the same as it is now. It could have been wetter then.
Sacrifices had to be made.. sometimes to the gods of the weather.
Well presented. Thoroughly enjoyed your journey for water. Plenty to think about. Fascinating subject. Thank you.
‘Atavistic’ - superb word. You truly are the teacher, Mr W 😊
In the aerial view of the first hill he ascends is a lot of dry, brown-ish grass, with a few spots of bright green. There's obviously water in those spots.
It has no bearing, I’m sure but I live about 1/2 mile from Beacon Hill and about a mile from the car park sits The Dew Pond restaurant…complete with a dew pond. What Beacon Hill does do, is cause a local micro-climate.
Yep. Causes tourists and day-trippers to fall upon the area in torrents. Damned climate change again! 😱🧐
Hi Paul, excellent video. One thought that occurs to me is that perhaps they never resolved this problem and were only able to sustain life high up during periods when they could collect enough water.
As an aside a short while ago I saw a report showing how water was being harvested from the clouds high up in the Andes in nets which were then collected the condensation and channeled it down the mountainside to where it was needed.
All the best!!
Glad I mentioned it, you're welcome. So those berms and swales would capture and drink down the rainwater, substantially. When the ground water is filled, the swales will fill. Looks to me very much like for growing as we do with dry farming/agriculture. Building moats,swales and well and ponds to be filled naturally to serve as a source. If there were people living there inside the ring, being under attack would jeopardise the lives of the water carriers, so i don't agree with this theory.
Along with your deduction, I am inclined to believe that they built catch basins an cisterns. And don't forget that >2000 years ago, they had much more regular rainfall. 😎
I've not been able to find a huge amount of data on the climate outside of water levels.
We would certainly be able to find evidence of basins and cisterns if they used it. Such things leave very clear marks for an archaeologist.
These hill forts are surrounded by long circular ditches. Have the archaeologists checked any of them for clay linings? Even the runoff from such a construction would be substantial and could be captured without going very far from the top.
@@pwhitewick Various accounts appear to corroborate each other that the UK area was a lot wetter until recent times, meaning rainfall included; and including significant areas of land that is inland now, under water, further back in time.
@@stephengraham1153 there has been an investigation of some ramparts - I saw it on an Alice Roberts video.
The "forts" were progressively built over many generations - not thrown up like a military work.
I reckon, as I think Paul is slowly coming around to, that these are community resources.
Before we had villages these were our village green, market square, tax collection centre, sport and festival spaces, and like the Anglo Saxons with their churches these were places of last redoubt during periods of invasion.
All 'round useful things to have for a libertarian style of government without formal rulers .
Thank you Paul Whitewick for your beautiful videos with clever and stunning cinematograpy and thoughtful narration . I am a recent subscriber.
Many thanks!
In Australia many rural homes use water tanks that gather water from the rain that falls on the roof for drinking water. I can't help wondering if it could also have been as simple as basic roof gutters leading to barrels to collect water. If it works now in dry Australia, surely it'd work well in the UK. Nothing would exist in the archaeological record of such given stains in the ground show footings, but not the roof...but it is a very simple solution to the water issue.
Hmmm… their thatched roofs would have been different, but famously the English rain is far more frequent. Dew ponds collecting rainwater seem more likely than roofs.
Eaves troughs would be quite labor intensive, but possibly you could drain drip trenches down a back slope into a lined basin or cistern. Several round houses on a slight ridge might make it worthwhile?
@@katebowers8107 Thatched roofs still have run off. In archeology we find the drip line around round houses where the run off has eroded the soil. Often they also dug a deliberate ditch around their roundhouses to keep the run off water away from the walls. Line that ditch with pudding clay and it can help feed your dew pond or cistern.
I was thinking some form of rainwater harvesting. I live in rural North Devon in the UK. In theory my property is fed from a spring but with climate change and modern living it just can't cope with the demand. We did look at a borehole but access to the property is difficult and creating a route in for the machinery would have been a project in its own right. The solution was rainwater harvesting from our roof (smallish footprint two bed bungalow) which easily keeps us supplied.
I think you have a point. Why wouldn’t they collect water from as many sources as possible.
Great video very interesting i love old history.
Could they maybe have used donkeys, mules or even sheep to help carry water?
Ponies, dogs and goats...
During a "seige"? I think Paul underestimates the problems of storage. In chalk Downland a clay lined cistern would be the easiest most efficient way of storing water. But none exist.
@@AndyJarmandid sieges happen in the Iron Age? It takes tremendous resources to stage and maintain a siege for weeks/ months. Would it have been possible back then? Maybe a fort only needed a week or two of stored water…?
Great production value in this video, love it.
Your videos are a little piece of magic Paul
Very good video again Paul I look forward to Sunday evening.
Thanks Leonard
Commenting immediately for the algorithm 🫡
Well thanks
Brilliant and interesting video Paul and some nice views from those hillforts as well.
Always the teacher Paul. Today you sent me off to Google where I leant what a dew pond is! Love it!
I’ve always reflected on water supply. My local hill fort “Bury Hill” North Bristol once had a forever well (spring) inside it, according to excavation. They also found a Paleolithic blade and a Neolithic polished axe head. In the dry weather you can see the foundations of a Roman villa. So maybe the spring created the significance to the site. There is the river Frome passing the fort and an old track going up to the fort. So I assumed that water could have been taken up to the fort, via horse and carriage? Many fields also have small ponds. I assumed were once for water for animals.
Thankyou Paul, I've been screaming at you through my phone's screen for the past five years asking your views on this!
Hey Paul great content thank you. Funny I was walking the Dog only yesterday morning around a local hill fort ( to you and me) and there was 2 Dew ponds it was lovely to see, and it wasn’t Danebury, Bury, Quarley or Figsbury.
hello again Paul, as always it was a very interesting video, i really enjoyed it, well done and thank you 😊
Cheers Davie
From what I understand, the city of Venice had squares of sand with a well in the centre into which they would funnel rain water to create a large sand and gravel cistern, the entire square and the buildings around it capturing the rain water.
These hill forts involved a fair bit of earthworks and you often find a layer of clay below a fair bit of permeable silt material from which the clay was leached from, so they could've lined a large hollow area (either natural or dug out) with clay, then filled it with the permeable materials and finally the fertile soils hence producing an artificial shallow water aquifer. Such shallow aquifers would also explain why springs are often found along the side of these structures. Obviously we would have to calculate the expected rain fall and drill some core samples to see if an artificial shallow aquifer was created and somehow I doubt people have bothered to do so but it is something that may have been within the abilities of society at that time as well as perhaps a concept they may have thought of as rain water retention should've been obvious to them as would sand filtration.
There is a southern water station on top of Offham hill near lewes. You’d think they would all have had a deep well somewhere. There were also many more springs in the past than there are today. Additional rainwater and simple hard work we just can’t imagine now explains the rest.
I was going to ask if it never rains in England, but since almost everyone else mentioned rainwater there is obviously no need. Strange though that one of the most obvious sources goes unmentioned.
Hi Paul, looking at the footage you took with the dtone of beacon hill. You can see a number of dark green patches of grass. Those would be natural gathering places for water that could have been improved, to suply atleast part of the need. And don't dismiss rainwater!
Here in South Wales, I've always thought when visiting the local hill fort called Twmbarlwm that the problem is too much water and wind. I can't really imagine that getting water was much of a problem given the amount of rain, but staying warm and dry must have been difficult
I'd guess that some 'hillforts' might have been more realistically used during the winter time, when there was plenty of snow available as a water source; in the warmer seasons, I think it might have made more sense for groups to travel a bit further to those which may have better sources...
This brought back a memory of Oswestery Hill Fort in Shropshire. There are a series of ponds-like structures built into the ramparts that, as I recall, created a wet swamp-like glade. This could have been a ready water supply for that hill forts, and also food that could be protected. Other hill forts could have had similar constructions. A clay base could be excavated or brought in to line the pond and make it watertight..
One sees video of women and children in Africa carrying 20 or 25 litre canisters of water. Say you were using hide containers, would the container itself weigh 10kg when wet? Then carrying 10 or 15 litres of water becomes easily possible for people who are used to carrying weights.
One advantage of the metric system is that 1 ltr of water weighs exactly 1 Kg. So 15 ltrs of water weigh 15 kgs which for a normal fit person is not too heavy to carry..
@@sharonjuniorchess remember to carry that up the hill.
Are any of these forts based on clay, as it tends to stop seepage and collects water so they might have had open pits or pits covered with skins or with wooden tanks lined with clay for rainwater, animals skins, hollowed logs as culverts, maybe oxen with large water skins (the arabs manage on their chargals of water carried on camels etc) carried up each day.
They would have needed large storage tanks or vessels any pottery remains of large jars?
The same question applies to fuel for cooking once the trees have been cleared at the top (if any) and animal dung does make a good hot fire, as does peat, any of them near peat fields? Peat holds water and when dried burns well.
This is a survival existence day to day but they were intelligent enough to plan ahead too, and co-operate if a larger group.
Fascinating thoughts.
I made my first hillfort visit last week, to Abbotsbury Hillfort, and the water question immediately came to me. In thinking about it, all these hillforts have ditches around them. If you were to line a portion of a ditch with something impermeable, maybe clay, and direct rainfall to that spot with a slope in the ditch, it seems to me you can have a nice pond--and we know how rainy England is. I would imagine the layer of clay could have broken down in the intervening thousands of years. But that's all just a guess.
I know that hillfort well, and just a few hundred meters to its west is very wet area that is hidden under trees. It would have been a great place to find water or to have made a pond. Also there are springs between the fort and the sea. Lots of fresh water around that hillfort.
I believe the answer is that the ditches were not primarily for defense. They were dams. All rural properties collect there own water from roof runoff. This water would then been used to gravity irrigate there crops.
Excellent! Thanks for the info.
All rural wells in Australia were lined with timber props until after WW2. Digging a well in chalk would be easy peasy.
No idea on the hill forts, but Norwich castle is on quite a sizable hill, and its water supply is (was) an internal well, which still exists. Same for Framlingham Castle . Wells have been dug for centuries, so its the most logical answer if there is non running, surface, water on tap (?)
Next best solution is to find a friendly water diviner, and see what he/she can tell you about the place. You are right... they had to get water somewhere close, and I would bet that would have been a factor considered when choosing the site.
Some exceptionally lovely Wessex landscapes here.
The "did people actually live in hillforts" and "what did they do about water" questions seem to torture us antiquarians nowadays. There are hut circles on Ingleborough and that's a mountain. Gulp!
I've always assumed - based on no substantive evidence! - that the solution must have had various constituent parts. So you'd have dew ponds, manually carting water up and rainwater capture. With the latter - which seems the most obvious - I don't think anything's been found that could have served this purpose. Finding that "thing" is probably the game changer. Right, I need to find that thing!
Borough Hill in Daventry (really one of the best hillforts in the UK!) has a spring on the top - a bit hard to find these days but still there.
They probably collected rain water at the top with buckets makes a lot of sense although not reliable. I've known this to be done in more modern times building BMX tracks and mixing chalk with water to create great surfaces
Cool.
Both the subject and enthusiasm.
First, they could have used animals to carry water. Second, this is England. the most obvious source of water is rainfall. They could have used dew ponds. It is possible that most early archeologists would miss them and even fill them up with dirt from the digs.
They had horses and chariots so could have taken a lot of water very quickly to the top
Hillforts in my area made extensive use of springs and dew ponds.
Our local hill fort is a rare thing in many aspects and it even has a well. It's even in the most defendable part too
Very interesting. Three two mile trips a day sounds like hard work.
Not when your life depends on it.
You ask about water. In the next sentence you talk about pastoral areas on the hills. How much "water" is carried in an animal? In this way, how much "water" can a shepherd herd up the hill per day? More than 10 liters?
Or plants (like melons) that might grow on the hill?
Thank you Paul and Rebecca for your excellent content. You inspire us to think!
Great video as always. Slightly off topic but I've wondered for a while if the difficulty of getting water was a reason for the decline of Silchester. Perhaps as defensive needs lessened people gravitated towards Reading and Basingstoke where it was easier to access and trade from?
I love this guy!
LOL! At least the doubts we planted some time ago are starting to bear fruit. Dewponds may form during the rainy season, but if it gets hot, they’ll dry up unless fed by natural springs, creating an interesting paradox. It would be best to examine Old Sarum in your research, where wells and a historical community existed. Most people know about the Norman well at the Castle, which is 220 feet deep, but excavations in the Church have revealed shallower wells that were clearly functional in the past. This leads to an interesting paradox: if the church wells were operational, the water table must have been high enough to fill the wells and the surrounding ditches. Therefore, these ditches were likely moats. The same principle applies to ditches found in other 'Iron Age forts,' offering a simple solution-avoiding impractical conclusions-as the area would have been surrounded by water. More details are available on the website. 🤓
So ground water bubbling up the hill?
Or would the hill be an island? In that case Swindon would be right at the coast. The place sits around 70-80 m/230-260 ft above the surrounding terrain. Old Sarum is only 60 m above the bed of the Avon.
@@HappyBeezerStudios - You need to read up on Hydrology. Groundwater (water table) is reflected in the topology of the surface level of the ground - The highest freshwater lake in Britain is Loch Etchachan, located in the Cairngorms of Scotland. It sits at an altitude of around 927 meters (3,041 feet) above sea level, making it the highest body of freshwater in the British Isles - If we followed your 'logic', then Britain would be ultimately underwater. 🙄
Walbury and Beacon Hill forts water is about 100’ below surface today so I believe the aquifer was higher in those days so I would say either a shaft directly down below the hill fort or a skid way up the side to draw goat bladders on slides up into the fort from a shallow well at the base. My estimate would be that originally there was a well shaft from the top to make the fort self contained but after the Roman invasion Agricola probably ordered the shafts filled in to make resistance to occupation more difficult/impossible. I’ve drilled many water wells in the countryside around all three forts and can say the chalk is solid and cohesive ideal for old fashioned type dug well fairly easy to sink and line.
Paul, great investigating about "where is the water?"
Membury fort was inhabited and has a pond near the northern entrance. I don't know if it was man made but it seemed a significant size and quite full when I was last there. It gives an idea of how much water was needed for that size hillfort. I'm not sure that lugging 10 litres per person up a hill a few times a day would be feasible. A Sisyphean curse no less. You'd be drinking most of that on your way up there in the warmer months and have a mere dribble and a drop left by the time you'd reached the top. I can imagine the Celtic version of 'sod that' would be uttered a few times before they gave up.
Did they just survive with wine imported and milk baths😂they licked the walls in castles and some had wells if lucky for a sweater source😮and you having to carry all your water up there,maybe they had a genius way we don’t know ,all we can do is speculate,fascinating show as usual interesting,high and dry and very thirsty this show should be called.😮 thank you for your enthusiasm and effort in getting up there.
The Britain I remember had lots of rain. People capable of creating such huge earthworks could easily have created ponds to collect that regular rainfall. Perhaps the ponds would need some sort of lining (if the ground is the porous chalk.)
Excellent. 👍
If you visit some of the more remote commumities of the Atlas mountains of Morocco some are high up the mountains in very dry areas. They get their water daily by using several mules and donkeys with large leather water containers carrying perhaps 50 to100 litres at a time from down in the valleys below. It's generally a child's job to make the trip with the animals. At the top the water is poured into tanks and buts. The round trip can easily be several kms.
Aside from the interesting information, that was a really professional job with the shooting and editing.
My theory was that the hillfort water problem may also be that they weren't intended for prolonged sieges. Attackers probably didn't have the resources to mount a proper siege - warriors were individuals and keeping them on a leash long enough was a feat in itself. So a small supply through manpacking or dew ponds could probably last a couple of days.
Barbary castle is another interesting one to visit, looks like plenty of occupation there and around the fort. I imagine some of these places were mainly for occasional occupation, trade and commerce, or securing livestock from raiders.
BC, The sea level land was wetter as it was pre man-made drainage and closer in years to the final ice age, so building villages on hills was important. (Think Glastonbury Tor and Brent Knoll. The Somerset levels weren't drained until Roman occupation for example) They chose a hill which had a spring and constructed the ditches to hold the water, that is what they are for. Think champagne glass stack, fill the top one and watch it flow over. the ditches were filled top to bottom fed by the spring. The ditches are level but at the lowest point there would be a connecting culvert. The higher ditches were used for drinking water and lower ditches for animal water and keeping water fowl to eat.
There would be an overflow at the bottom. The whole concept of villages on hills like this was to sustain life incorporating modern living and farming. The surrounding land at the bottom of the hills were used for grain production and the grain was carted up the hill over bridges that had culverts through them and stored in straw lined grain pits by the round houses. The closest fort I have found to show this whole concept is Worleberry in Somerset. I once had an archaeological dig of an old hillfort on my own land where the archaeologist refused to accept my hypothesis in favour of the standard rhetoric of the forts being built to defend the village...... problems with that theory, the villages only had 5 or 6 roundhouses so why would they use the labour to dig ditches for defence?, the population of the UK when the romans arrived was approx 1,000,000 and there are over 3300 hillforts. That equals 300 people per village, what did they need to defend? There was plenty of resources for everyone. I hope you enjoyed my explanation, good luck trying to mention it to any archaeologist, I've never found one who would even listen to me in 30 years of research you get used to it 🙂
i'm pretty sure if in need they had ways to catch extra rainwater. these people were as smart and resourcefull as we are. greatly reducing the need to bring up water. thing is alot of these would be makeshift and not of long lasting materials and probably removed after use so the chance to find anything related to this are rather slim
I was thinking that every one of the huts mentioned by Paul probably stored food and water.
This was fairly discussed if I remember well. The hill forts were indeed used for daily activities and periodical markets for animals and act as defensive structure. However, related to sieges is worth mentioning that the same issue are faced by the attackers (1) and second, the shear size of the fortification means that is no way for a party to surround it, meaning that the sieges are hit and run, no evidence for prolong sieges and on the other hand there are options for the defenders to find water for longer sieges finding routes in the night. Being said that, the hills forts are NOT primary for real defensive structure as we envision but more for psychological one. Imagine first look at the mighty fortress with miles of ramparts. Those will prevent most of the attacks, and the rest are anyway like I said hit and run attacks. As the time progress, in the end coalitions of tribes are formed and thousands of warriors start to conquer those hill tops as their impressive looks have also downsides. And this was their end.
Yes, I also think rainwater played a part. Their are people today that live off rain collection. Limestone has caves that could have been tapped into as well.
Hi Paul, I have always thought that the 'defensive ' ditches themselves might have been used to store rainwater if needed... Health & Safety not being too strong back in the day, but I'm not aware of any investigation revealing clay puddled linings. 🤔