Hethpool : Iron Age (700 BC – AD 70)

Though it is clear that there was some Bronze Age settlement around Hethpool, and the extensive cultivation terraces may well have second millennium origins, this remains unproven. Iron Age sites are better represented, though very few are securely dated. Hillforts and defended settlements such as Great Hetha (No. 1, NT 388273), Little Hetha (NT 886280) and Hetha Burn (NT 878274) are likely to have been in existence by the mid-first millennium BC. The hillfort at Great Hetha is very strongly situated, and protected by double stonewalls, and seems clearly to have been built with defensive considerations in mind. Likewise, Little Hetha is convincingly defensive in form.

However, recent survey work undertaken by English Heritage at West Hill (NT 909295) and St Gregory’s Hill (NT 916297), near Kirknewton, suggests that defensive criteria may sometimes have been secondary to considerations of status and prestige (Oswald and McOmish 2002, 30). It has also been suggested that hillforts may have served as defended farmsteads established by autonomous small groups (Oswald et al. 2000). In fact, there is probably no single explanation for all so-called hill forts in the Cheviots. They may have served as animal enclosures, market places or trading stations, defensive enclosures, community centres and places of worship.

It is clear that by the mid-first millennium, that a substantial, permanently settled population was well-established in the Cheviots and the Glen valley, as the construction of numerous hillforts would have required significant manpower. Some larger hillforts, such as Yeavering Bell, are likely to have been permanent settlements though many seem to be too small in interior area to have served this function. More likely the majority of the Iron Age upland population would have lived on small farmsteads, much as in preceding times, in roundhouses with adjacent stockyards, perhaps enclosed by a substantial bank or ditch.