Early Excavations and Recent Survey
The Alnwick antiquarian George Tate, in an admirable, early, attempt at what we would today term ‘landscape archaeology’, excavated within the Yeavering hillfort and also at a number of surrounding settlement sites in an attempt to better understand the hillfort within its immediate landscape setting. His results, although fascinating in many respects, almost inevitably leave many issues relating to the date and function of the hillfort unresolved.
A recent survey by English Heritage’s Field Survey Team, suggests that the hillfort enclosure was itself constructed in two phases. In the first phase the fort was longer, with what are now the two exterior enclosures forming the east and west ends. The second phase saw new stretches of wall being constructed on the east and west, which shortened the overall length of the fort and left the original east and west ends as the two exterior crescent shaped banks we see today.
The survey has also suggested that excavations using modern techniques could potentially tell us a great deal about the communities that resided within the fort. For example, there is much variation in the size of ‘roundhouses’ within the fort, not all of which need necessarily have been dwellings. Some of the largest structures cluster around the entrance and it is quite feasible that some of these were for communal use. Others may have been specifically for industrial or agricultural activity. Of those that were dwellings, whether or not variation in size reflects any variation in the status of their occupants remains unknown.
Various breaks in the fort bank were recorded although only five of them show signs of having been regularly used for access to the fort interior; two are on the west and with one on each of the other three sides. Of these, the south entrance has the strongest claim to be an original gateway into the fort, since it looks out over land that has apparently been cleared and cultivated and the easiest approach to the hillfort is on this side. The field evidence also suggests the passageway was lengthened on the inside by semi-circular inturns which, judging from Tate’s discoveries in the 19th-century, could have accommodated opposing guard chambers.
Having established that there is relatively little that we can say with any degree of certainty about the founding of the Yeavering hillfort, it will come as no surprise to learn that there is equally little to be said for sure about its eventual abandonment. Brian Hope-Taylor, the excavator of the Anglian ‘Palace’ site of Gefrin, located below the hillfort and just outside the National Park boundary, found some evidence for occupation of the hillfort through into Roman times, but he suggested that this amounted to no more than ‘desultory, small scale use or occupation of its interior during the second, third and fourth centuries’. Perhaps, at some point during the Roman era, the main functions associated with the hillfort were transferred to the base of the Bell, where the site of Gefrin was eventually established in the early medieval period.
