A Celtic Fort in the Iron Age

welcome to Casa anklets iron-age fort here in the beautiful Pembrokeshire coast National Park the site's owned and managed by the National Park Authority and is open to visitors all through the year the fort itself is up on the hill amongst the trees over here and is one of many Iron Age forts in Pembrokeshire what makes this one special is that for the last near 30 years it's been excavated by archaeologists and where archaeologists have found evidence of Iron Age round houses and other structures we've reconstructed them on their original foundations in doing this basically our visitors get a great sense of place when they walk into the round houses up on the fort they're walking into spaces that were occupied by people over 2,000 years ago the Iron Age started in Wales around about 650 BC so well over 2,000 years ago and they extended for many centuries right up until about the time of Christ cast iron plates is sited in the north of Pembrokeshire coast National Park near Newport in West Wales and what we have here for visitors is apart from the site itself which has a number of round houses that have been reconstructed we've got livestock from the Iron Age for people to see we put on many many events throughout the year we also have a gift shop and an education centre come exhibition centre cast iron face was privately owned up until 1991 when the National Park Authority was able to purchase it we're going to start our tour from the banks of the Nandi at this beautiful stream that winds its way around the base of castle Angeles and if you'd like to follow me we'll start at all we're actually sighted now at the very outermost rampart of casa endless and you can't really see it anymore but it's over there to the right and in the Iron Age they'd have dug a ditch to provide the material for the rampart and in digging that ditch they tapped into a spring and what we've done here we've got no proof about this whatsoever but we've tried to show what term inode people might have done in this little area because Iron Age people believed very much in the importance of watery places they perhaps thought of them as those ways into the underworld where the spirits and and the gods of the Iron Age people lived and so watery places became quite important and they would make offerings to their gods at these sort of places and rituals would take place as well and so what we've done is we've decorated this spring area to try and give you a flavor of what Iron Age religion would be like and of course with the great oak tree dominating the place we can can't help but think about druids perhaps so let's go on up to the fort we've walked up here from the spring and we're actually on the top of the fort now and all around us who would have been round houses like these the fort itself though is on a promontory a piece of land that's sticking out the side of the valley and they chose this because it is easy for them to defend but also it was very very visible from the local surroundings so everybody who lived in the area around would be able to see the fort and the people in the fort would be able to see them and so it's a sense of status the people who lived up here were the people in charge they're members of the local aristocracy or clan leaders and what they did was they surrounded this split of land with great earthen ramparts and ditches in front of them and on top of the ramparts they built Palisades or wooden fences to keep out their enemies and so in the Iron Age this would have been a spectacular place to see but also be a very smoky place can imagine there might have been as many as 12 round houses here all in this small area you see around there too where the Gateway is the fort would have been packed with round houses so try to imagine what it'd have been like it hear the noises of people living here laughing coughing crying perhaps even singing and the smell of cooking fires all the time a very very busy place indeed not like it is today which is relatively peaceful and quiet and rural the people who lived here in the Iron Age the Celts as we often call them were quite special people in many ways they were just like us but also they had a really good artistic tradition and their light shying off with artistic works on their metalwork and woodwork but also the war clothes made out of wool dyed with bright colors blues greens and reds so the people who lived here would have been the top end of society and everybody else would have lived outside the fort out in little Hamlet's of small round houses as you can see from this round house it's called around for the obvious reason their conical roofs set on circular walls and we don't have a huge amount of evidence for this except from what archaeology can tell us and that tells us that they have circular walls there were no stone walls on these buildings although elsewhere in Wales you will be able to find round houses with walls made from stone these were made from timber from the oak and hazel and with thatched roofs now here on the round houses here you'll see we've used water reed which is the top end material but outside in the landscape people would have built round houses and moved them with any material they could get hold of this could be wheat straw from crops or could even be black and Heather those sort of things and what we'll do is go into one of those round houses and have a look at what all the materials that are used in construction all right well we've come into the the largest round house in the whole the fort it's 13 meters in diameter and who would have lived here or not sir that's a bit of a leading question because we don't know who lived individually in in the round houses on this fort but generally who were the people who lived here now some years ago some archaeologists believe that the Celts came from Europe and invaded Britain in about 500 BC 600 BC we don't believe that anymore we believe that the people who lived here in the Iron Age were the descendants of the people who lived here in the Bronze Age before them who themselves were the descendants of the people who raised these massive burial monuments to the dead people who lived in the Neolithic so Iron Age people had been here all along and so we had a settled landscape which had lots and lots of history to it so the people who lived in this round house for instance would have been part of that tradition but again you know we're in the biggest round house 13 meters in diameter it's possible that because this is the biggest round house that this is where the leader lived up here on the fort now we've got no idea of the names of the people who lived here in the Iron Age because they didn't write that isn't because they're ignorant it's because they chose not to and the the bards and the druids in the Iron Age would have memorized everything and rather than commit it to paper so we don't have very many names but we do have enough names to suggest that women played an important leading role as well as men so we've got names like car team and or and Boudicca for instance so here at casa endless it's quite possible but at one moment in time a woman might have been the leader here and again there are two schools of thought about the people who lived here one is that people from the event the local community lived here and everybody lived in the fort rubbing shoulders with each other uh nobody lived out in the field near to landscape and the other school of thought is that it's just the leaders who lived here and their retinue that is their extended families and their servants and possibly slaves we know that in the Iron Age slavery was quite common so the cross-section of of humanity would have been up here but principally Custer Huntley's would have been the home of the local leader so everything in it is to a top standard and so behind me you'll see carved wooden benches beautifully woven cloaks and rugs and and various tools of the trade for instance over here we have bloom and in the Iron Age you couldn't go to Marks and Spencers and buy yourself some clothing you had to have it made and that made it a little more valuable so people would have taken more care of their clothing now if you look on this loom we've got some lovely wool it's all dyed with different colors we've got red that's from the root of the matter plant and we've got blues which is from Road now this clothing and wouldn't have been tailored in the way that we do today basically all they were doing is producing a sheet of material that could then be stitched up and made into a tunic or pair of trousers and and also cloaks now although we can see the the wool on the loom organic material tends to rot and so a loom that existed over 2,000 years ago in the Iron Age is unlikely to survive in the archaeological record today because things like wool and things like wood tend to rot away and so what we tend to be left with are just those bits of material that can survive and that things like stone so you hit see here at the bottom of the loom we've got stone weights we know they're weights because they've got perforated that they're perforated so you can see they were hanging there under certain conditions though very rare conditions material like this does survive and that is when it's been left in a waterlogged site now we have some evidence for this in the form of Lindow man and this is an Iron Age person who has discovered preserved in a peat bog and he'd been murdered there as a human sacrifice but because the peat bog was waterlogged no oxygen could get in and so his skin and bone survived even his hair survived and elsewhere in places like Ireland and in Denmark we've got more evidence of this kind of survival so we even have the remains of material like this that you see on the loom and so today we can actually recreate or reconstruct how people looked as well as how people lived in the Iron Age and later on you'll see some of our modern-day Iron Age people using various things and not so that's just lieu not not just the loom but also you'll see some of the domestic work that goes on in a typical Iron Age household and here for instance we have the corn as you can see the flour coming out of it you drop the grain in the top there and turn it round and it produces flour and it's quite easy to produce enough flour to make a loaf it doesn't take all that long also in the Iron Age but also much earlier than the Iron Age there's a different method of grinding grain so that is called a rotary quern for obvious reasons the top rotates this is called a saddle quern and here all you can do is grind the grain using a stone like this very much harder work but in the fine tradition I can show you something that was done earlier so grinding grain like that produces flour which has tiny tiny bits of stone in it from the grinding process and this isn't just prehistoric but also in the medieval period and the teeth of people late a lot of this Greg bred warm warm down quite a lot from the stone that's in it as you can see that's nice nice flour now in order to keep the grain that provides the flour very dry there's a special building on this site and it's something we see on a lot of Iron Age sites we call them for posters and that is their structures with four post holes and we think that those post holes are four posts that keep the building up off the ground and that means there's good circulation of air and the contents of that building or food store and is kept nice and dry and it's also possible that they offer ground to stop rodents getting in amongst the the grain as well here we have got an example of other tools common in the iron age this is an ABS this is used for chopping chopping wood and shaping wood using an action like that various other things an axe this is actually from a site or copied from a site in England called Danebury and you can see from its shape if you've ever tried chopping wood this is an ideal way of doing it because it's it's a wedge basically and here we have something that is similar to a find foam cast eventless itself which is a reaping hook and this is used for reaping corn in the Iron Age they grew wheat but they tended to harvest it by cutting the tops off rather than using the bottom they didn't have a scythe in the Iron Age so they used reaping hooks or sickles instead there is other tools this is the the biggest saw that we seem to have for the Iron Age and this is a pull saw so it only cuts when you pull it we use these today in managing our woodlands a couple of small branches off and last but not least of this collection we found a number of pieces of antler this is from a red deer and they use these as pickaxes not just to hit the ground because that's you know you wouldn't think they'd survive very long but using them to lever stones out of the ground so the big ramparts that you see around casts endless the the ditches that provide the material for the ramparts were dug out using tools like this and they work extremely well the tine which is this part the antler is very very hard-wearing and last for a long long time and people were using these as pickaxes and or antler picks as we call them today right from the Neolithic period up until the Iron Age but these are all very necessary manual tools but the person in lived here who lived here would have enjoyed more luxurious comforts as you see behind me the artistic tradition of the the Iron Age Celts was very well developed very beautiful here we can see what is known as a curvy linear design so lots of swirls carrying the motif onto another panel and so on beautiful decoration the pigments they use for paint were things like naturally occurring ochre in reds and yellows and coloured clays with minerals and additive mix charcoal and to get darker colors and then behind me you can see what our interpretation is of how they might have slept here we've got absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever it's just our own personal thought that people in the Iron Age would have liked to have slept on beds raised off the ground simply because for those of us who have tried sleeping in round houses it's bitterly cold if you sleep on the floor what we've tried to do here is use examples of Iron Age art that we've seen on metalwork that survives in the archaeological record for instance and some ceramics and we've taken that design and applied it to wood so they may have sat on the floor but we're suggesting perhaps are they applied it's wonderful in this case anthropomorphic artwork - other things other than metalwork and behind me you'll see a bit of evidence of the more marginal aspects of the Iron Age it's clear that they did fight although we think a lot of the defenses and the way they drew best was for showing off for showing off their status they also had a very real need for defense because other groups in other parts of the landscape may well avatar tried to raid them and steal things like their cattle for instance and perhaps take away people as slaves and so it would have been an unpleasant time to live unless you're right at the top of the social scale what I'd like to do now is is show you this fine cauldron which they may well have had a nice stew bubbling in over the fire in the central half but if we look upwards and see what we've done here at castle endless and we can see part of the way that we actually constructed this building in the first place and the way that we did it was by erecting a central pole we held it up with ropes like you would a circus pole it didn't go into the ground it was resting on a lump of slate and then what we're able to do is use that central pole to construct the roof around it so the most important part of the roof is this central ring beam and that braces the Timbers that go to form the roof we used over 30 oak trees in the construction of this building so what you might say is when you decide to build an Iron Age house the first thing you have to do is plant the acorn to start off the trees growing in the same way as if you want to make yourself a cloak and the first thing you do is feed the sheep that's going to provide you with the wool and so we've estimated that to grow oak rafters this length would have taken between 25 and 30 years but that's not just leaving the oak tree to grow on its own they had to be carefully managed and think these supporting rafters would have been from coppiced oak now coppicing is a technique whereby certain species of tree can be cut down right to ground level and then they produce shoots that grow up fast and strong as they compete for the light against each other and so trees like oak will grow rafters like this after about 25 to 30 years but it's not just oak that we've used in this building and the walls that you see around you here I'll covered in what we call dog which is a mixture a nice mixture of clay rotted down straw and dung from cattle and mixed together when it goes dry it goes rock-hard wonderful material just like plaster but inside there we have another kind of tree which is hazel and we used over 80 hazel trees to produce enough of the wattle which is the long strands of hazel to weave in between the posts to form the wall and then we dog them with this lovely mixture and of course that's called wattle and daub that's where the term comes from so as well as the 30 trees that you see here and the oak trees at the go to form the rafters the tops of the walls and the ring beam above us we've also got the 80 hazel trees that were needed to produce enough material to build the wall and you can also see hazel has been used as what we call purlins which go round and round the the rafters and these are used to tie the thatch on okay and we have over 2,000 bundles of water read on this roof alone something that this house also does for is it not only does it show us one idea of how people in the iron age might have lived in a domestic environment it also tells us what the landscape surrounding the fort might have looked like because this timber has to come from somewhere and it has to be managed and so they would have had woodlands out in the landscape that they'd have managed for coppicing coppiced baroque coppicing ash and coppicing hazel it's an interesting thing today that we find that managed woodlands also produce a really good habitat for some of our rarer animals like dormice so the Iron Age landscape would have been quite sustainable an important word that we use today but in the Iron Age it was absolutely essential so they would have cut their hay for instance early in the summer which would have given the the plants the flowering plants time to flower and seed that to create a good bio biodiverse ward it also allow certain animals to live in that environment like the corncrake long gone from Pembrokeshire now unfortunately so this is how people in the iron age might have lived at home and we can assume that it would be nice and warm and cozy as well and but they had a very real need for defense and as I referred to earlier there are ramparts earthen ramparts that defend this fort so we're going to have a look at those now what I'm walking towards now is what would have been a side entrance into the fort in the Iron Age and by here we can see a section through the great rampart that defended the top of the fort you can also see the trees growing on it and that wouldn't have been the case in the Iron Age this is part of Casa Angeles but we're leaving over to to nature but in the Iron Age that had kept the trees off the ramparts and off the slopes either side so that it could see anybody coming but more importantly so everybody could see them this is what we believe now there was a real need for defense but principally great structures like this were produced to show how powerful the people who organized the work were as we walk this way we descend into the ditch that would have existed between the inner and the outer rampart so here we are in between the two ramparts that principally defended this fort and got to remember they would have been quite a lot steeper in the Iron Age but here some years ago this rampart was excavated I'm going to have a look some years ago this rampart was sectioned that was section was cut through it to see how the rampart was built and actually it demonstrated that the the rampart itself hadn't eroded a great deal at all because at the top of the rampart was a little slot what we call a palisade trench and this slot continued along the front of this rampart and would have held a wooden palisade you can imagine quite nicely made oak Timbers a bright out Timbers perhaps with cross pieces to brace them all along the front of the rampart whereas the rampart that we've just seen up there probably didn't have one so as I said before these earthworks were principally to show off the power and strength and status of the people who were able to Commission them to be built but they had a real need as well because behind the site of the gatehouse to this fort was found over 2,000 sling shots and they were there as the principal defense from behind the ramparts so what we've done here is mark out in timbre what was originally here in stone and so this is the site of the gatehouse in the Iron Age and what would have happened is if you're visiting the fort you first go in to the first guard chamber of the gatehouse and the walls of this gate has may have been three meters high there's no real way of telling the stonework survived up to about a meter in height and then was excavated now the process of archeological excavation is destructive so you have to remove what you see in order to better understand it and see what was there before it so all we've got now is basically and these posts which are just marking out where the stonework was in the Iron Age and I'm in the first guard chamber here there would have been a gate here the gates would have opened and I'd have been into the second guard chamber now over over time the guard chamber changed in shape they rebuilt it and did various things even fell down at one point but it existed over many hundreds of years as a gateway into the fort and behind the wall of the gatehouse over here we found over 2,000 sling shots and in the Iron Age people would have been able to fire their slingshots either from the top of the walls now remember it would be maybe three meters high at that time or they can actually fire them from behind the walls so we think this rampart probably had a flap top and perhaps no palisade on it to allow the defenders of the fort to stand up there and fire their slingshots underarm using slingshots in this way it's like a terrifying weapon because you can hear them whistle through the air as they turn and they get such a velocity that mean even if you miss the person you're aiming at and in dry weather the slingshot will bounce and perhaps hit somebody else and in terms of range from here we've had an expert sling shot and fire a shot way over into the tree that you see over there and that's about 200 meters my guess so it's a long-range weapon as well as a terrifying one and very cheap so the the stones are like goose eggs or or even new potatoes in terms of their shape and quite easy to collect from a local beach a few miles that way what we can do now is go and look at the inside of the rampart that is the part of the vampire inside the fort we'll go over there now so again we had a section cutting through the the rampart here which actually missed this piece of stonework completely there's only a later season of excavation they actually uncover this wonderful dry stone walling which would have acted as a sort of revetment to the top of the rampart and would have carried on all the way around to the side entrance where I was earlier and the level of skill is very evident even today the reason it's gone all wobbly is because over over the years the the rampart itself has moved with gravity but this is as remained in lovely condition and what adds a real human touch to this site to me is the fact that you can see where the the Mason has come along after the wall has been built and his uses hammer and chisel just to knock off edges or nulls that he didn't really like very much like this one here that to me is like a fingerprint so if we we go looking in this round house you'll see how cozy these buildings can be if they've got a nice fire inside them we might meet a couple of the occupants as well so as you can see with a fire inside the round house it can be really quite cozy and you can see the cauldron bubbling away here and our two Iron Age occupants here wearing nice woolen clothing it's it nice and warm thank you yes good thing about wool of course is it stays warm even if it gets wet doesn't it the only problem is it smells a bit then doesn't it yes so it smells like the animal from which it came and the smoke actually goes out through the roof there's no chimney here the smoke actually percolates through the thatch and the good thing about that is it kills off any nasty bugs that might be living in there at the same time so it keeps the fatch clean and it looks quite peculiar when sometimes on a wet day you can see the roof and it looks as if it's actually steaming but it's actually smoke percolating through as you can see this and this cloak is made from a very fine yarn and a very good colleague of ours who used to actually spend this sort of material on-site told me once that to spend two ounces of this yarn might take up to three working days you can see how fine it is and so I presume you take good care of it don't you because it takes a long time to to make a new cloak and so this sort of clothing would have been a lot more valuable to people in the Iron Age than clothing today because we tend to think about just going to buy clothing as in the Iron Age now to be woven the the wall had to be spun into yarn and then woven on the loom and the process of spinning the yarn took a lot longer than the weaving but the weaving took long enough as well and these people are very adept at spinning on is the sort of thing that you do most of the time isn't it so again we sit down and watch the telly or read a book people in the Iron Age would have gathered round in the evening a nice fire and told stories of the past to remind them of their ancestors and while they're doing it they're probably doing a bit of spinning at the same time but I'm not going to talk too much because the the weapon that this person is holding looks as if it might be applied to me if I'm not too careful and there's a we've got documentary sources of women who were very fearsome when the the Romans were trying to attack Anglesey it was women who ran in front of the Celtic tribes tribal warriors and whipping them up into a frenzy sadly it didn't work and Boudicca and Boudicca was defeated and against at one Legion of of Roman troops well as you see the the other three round houses have rather large and this one as you can see is quite a lot smaller but it's still built in in the same way the same methodology we've got the rafters and the ring beam all around a central post which has helped tie up the roof together and can the materials are the same on the walls we've got a different type of art this is the kind of art that you would get iron rock art in Sweden in the Iron Age and we've used it here just to show how a blacksmith might have wanted to decorate his house so in the Iron Age we don't think that forts like Custer handless would have had their own blacksmith we think instead a metal worker would travel from fort to fort plying his trade and so this round house you can see we've made it look a little bit like a forge now trade in the Iron Age particularly here is is quite uncommon we get a little bit of pottery that has come from further east but most of the material goods that are here have been made on-site so homemade things but really skillfully done this fort had to wait many many years before it received any other significant traded objects in fact it was only with the coming of the Romans in the first century AD that trade routes seemed to open up forecast handless but open up they did because as we excavated the site so the area outside the main ramparts seems to have been built up as a farmstead but of very well-to-do one and they totally abandoned the fort itself and moved out into the farmstead other people might have moved into other parts of the landscape to build other farmsteads but here at casa endless we get examples of Roman pottery coming in in the first few centuries after the death of Christ and the type of pottery I'm talking about is is black burnished ware which comes from Dorset which actually would have been quite exotic for the people who lived here quite a long way away indeed and black burnished wear is as it sounds very dark pottery with crisscross patterns on it that might have been used for any sort of domestic use but also they brought in amphora which contained perhaps during the Roman period fish paste and that sort of thing coming in from or even fish oil for lighting lamps the coming way all away from the Roman world and coming from what is now France we get a beautiful red pottery and which is called Samian ware and we found some same in where on this site whereas in the Iron Age if you broke a metal tool like a knife or something you mended it or you had it mended because iron was scarce by the time we move into the Roman period if something iron breaks it gets chucked away and of course that's great for archaeologists because they can then find them during excavation during the Iron Age that doesn't seem to be a great deal of evidence for trading that is we don't recognize things that are particularly different that you would suggest might come from a different area it all seems much the same but what these small groups in West Wales were doing we're not too sure and the Romans called this area the demet I although the people who lived and died at Casa endless probably didn't call themselves that they probably thought of themselves as part of a clan led system and how did these forts relate to each other well again we don't really know one idea is that they had arranged marriages from time to time and which would have been needed for small communities so it could be that they they lived in relative peace with one another or it could be that from time to time they raided each other well caster Huntress was occupied for many centuries throughout the Iron Age right up to the advent of Rome and Emperor Claudius invaded Britain in AD 43 but it took many decades before West Wales was subdued although we've got no evidence for tribal groups in this area of Wales actually fighting the Romans are easterly neighbors the salary's certainly did but also with Rome came opportunities for trade but Casa Angeles was abandoned at this time and the entire fort was emptied people moved outside and built a farmstead outside the ramparts and during that period they were in contact with the Roman world the Mediterranean world and we can see evidence for that in the goods that are traded here in far-flung West Wales where we seem to have been just as close to the Roman world as anybody else and wider Britain so in abandoning castor endless the occupants or similar occupants built a farmstead just outside the fort whereas other people built other sites in the nearby landscape we don't know whether this was because the Romans hadn't forced them to do it or whether things were changing and most of us think the society itself was changing and as people got more access to the wider world and so they believed more more in their material goods showing off their wealth than the rather expensive maintenance of a fortress like this so we'll go now and have a look at where they went you the outer and part of the fort as you can see is not as steep as it was and where I'm standing now I would be in the actual ditch of the of the rampart so were I to be transported back in time to the Iron Age I'd fall about three meters to the bottom of a very muddy ditch and that ditch basically help protect the fort before the ramparts now as time went by so this rampart slumped into the ditch until by the Roman period the probably wasn't much to see here other than a slight depression and it's during the Roman period or just leading up to the Roman period that cast iron nucleus is abandoned and we don't really know why it might have been social change it could be the coming of the Romans but either way some of the inhabitants at Castle endless constructed a farmstead which basically spanned from this rampart right over on 70 80 metres away to what was then an outer rampart and this area in between was the the location of the settlement that existed here during the Roman period up until about the fourth century AD and it's during this period that they get lots of trade with the Roman world and by about the 4th century AD it all seems to come to an end at caster Angeles and the focus of power seems to have shifted perhaps over towards Neven a few miles over that way but here it casts endless we've got spaces that are so special and a sense of place that's so important and catalyst is now open all year round and this time the years were going to winter we have many many schools visiting here and the children learn about the iron age in a fun and smell binding way we've got people in iron age costume authentic costume who teach them how people lived in the Iron Age and some of the craft skills that they did so you've seen children wattle and orbing putting their hands in that horrible mixture although we don't put dung in it for the children we have to say as well as Waterland or being in other crafts activities the children get a glimpse of what life must have been like for our Iron Age ancestors and visitors to Casa Angeles also share the space of these people lived in you can't walk anywhere in casa entrance without walking in the footprints of those who have gone before us back 2,000 years and more and what's really important about custer endless is that oh yes it's important to enjoy yourself very much so but it's also to learn about what the past means first now in the present you Oh

Channel: Lauren Plakhovna

Views: 60,588

Keywords: A, Celtic, Fort, in, the, Iron, Ages

Id: tXhx-0kXOcM

Length: 53min 1sec (3181 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 10 2012