Defensive mound and ditch, Bats Castle - geograph

Bats Castle is an Iron Age hillfort at the top of a high hill in the parish of Carhampton south south west of Dunster in Somerset, England. The site was identified in 1983 after some schoolboys found eight silver-plated coins dating from 102BC to AD350. It is on the highest point of Gallox Hill. Previously it was known as Caesar's Camp and is possibly associated with

Black Ball Camp Black Ball Camp is an Iron Age hillfort South West of Dunster, Somerset, England on the northern summit of Gallox Hill. It is a Scheduled Monument. It is also known as British Camp and is possibly associated with Bat's Castle. It has a high ra ...

. Bat's Castle has two stone ramparts and two ditches. The ramparts are damaged in places and the hill fort is partly covered in scrub. Bat's Castle may once have been known as the legendary fortress

Din Draithou DIN or Din or din may refer to: People and language * Din (name), people with the name * Dīn, an Arabic word with three general senses: judgment, custom, and religion from which the name originates * Dinka language (ISO 639 code: din), spoken by ...

, a place also associated with a fortress built or used by the legendary Irish king and raider Crimthann mac Fidaig. The site is designated as a scheduled monument.

Background

Hill forts developed in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age, roughly the start of the first millennium BC. The reason for their emergence in Britain, and their purpose, has been a subject of debate. It has been argued that they could have been military sites constructed in response to invasion from continental Europe, sites built by invaders, or a military reaction to social tensions caused by an increasing population and consequent pressure on agriculture. The dominant view since the 1960s has been that the increasing use of iron led to social changes in Britain. Deposits of iron ore were located in different places to the tin and copper ore necessary to make bronze, and as a result trading patterns shifted and the old elites lost their economic and social status. Power passed into the hands of a new group of people. Archaeologist

Barry Cunliffe Sir Barrington Windsor Cunliffe, (born 10 December 1939), known as Barry Cunliffe, is a British archaeologist and academic. He was Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford from 1972 to 2007. Since 2007, he has been an Emeri ...

believes that population increase still played a role and has stated "

he forts He or HE may refer to: Language * He (pronoun), an English pronoun * He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ * He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets * He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' in ...

provided defensive possibilities for the community at those times when the stress

f an increasing population F, or f, is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ef'' (pronounced ), and the plural is ''efs''. Hist ...

burst out into open warfare. But I wouldn't see them as having been built because there was a state of war. They would be functional as defensive strongholds when there were tensions and undoubtedly some of them were attacked and destroyed, but this was not the only, or even the most significant, factor in their construction".

Background

See also

References

Further reading