Kilham : Iron Age (700 BC–AD 70)

The boundaries of the current study exclude the prominent local hillforts of Bowmont Hill and Pawston Camp, though the defended settlement at White Hill (NT 874323) may be Iron Age in date. A fort is also recorded at Kilham Hill (NT 886311), though there are unfortunately no further details available for this record, and further examination is clearly needed. At Wester Hill, NT 879339, an enclosure is visible on a vertical aerial photograph (106G/UK.765 - 3/09/45, Frame 4019) held by the SMR, for which a first millennium BC date might be suggested.

The great density of hillforts and hilltop enclosures is not unusual in this part of the Cheviots. Many of these so-called hill forts were not necessarily defensible or defended, and the small interior area of the majority of Cheviot hillforts suggests that they were not permanent settlements. Some hillforts may have served as defended farmsteads established by autonomous small groups (Oswald and McOmish 2002, 30). In fact, there is probably no single explanation for all so-called hillforts in the Cheviots. They are likely to have served as animal enclosures, market places, 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 Bowmont valley, as the construction of numerous hillforts would have required significant manpower. Iron Age peoples continued to live in much the same way as in the Bronze Age, on small farmsteads, in roundhouses with adjacent stockyards, perhaps enclosed by a substantial bank or ditch. The enclosure identified from cropmarks at Barley Hill (NT 887342) may be an Iron Age settlement of this type, though the site cannot be securely dated without excavation.