Cannington Camp is a
Bronze Age and
Iron Age hill fort near
Cannington, Somerset, England. It is a
Scheduled Ancient Monument.
The small hill rises to above low-lying land about west of the tidal estuary of the
River Parrett
The River Parrett flows through the counties of Dorset and Somerset in South West England, from its source in the Thorney Mills springs in the hills around Chedington in Dorset. Flowing northwest through Somerset and the Somerset Levels to it ...
, near the ancient port and ford at Combwich. The hill fort is roughly square in shape, with a single rampart (''
univallate'') enclosing 5
ha (12
acres), and the main entrance to the south-east. The north side of the hill has been destroyed by quarrying during the 19th and 20th centuries. Minor excavations were carried out in 1905, 1913 (Bezell), and 1963 (
Rahtz).
Flint tools, scrapers and flakes have been found on or near the hill, indicating
Mesolithic
The Mesolithic (Greek: μέσος, ''mesos'' 'middle' + λίθος, ''lithos'' 'stone') or Middle Stone Age is the Old World archaeological period between the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic. The term Epipaleolithic is often used synonymous ...
occupation.
Bronze Age finds include an axe head and a knife. The area destroyed by quarrying was a late
Roman and
Saxon
The Saxons ( la, Saxones, german: Sachsen, ang, Seaxan, osx, Sahson, nds, Sassen, nl, Saksen) were a group of Germanic
*
*
*
*
peoples whose name was given in the early Middle Ages to a large country (Old Saxony, la, Saxonia) near the Nor ...
cemetery, with several hundred E-W (Christian) graves, and various grave goods such as coins and pottery from the period 350-800
AD.
It is possibly the site of ''Cynwit Castle'' (or ''Cynuit'', ''Cynwith'', ''Cynwits'', ''etc.'') and the
Battle of Cynwit between
Saxons and
Vikings in 878
AD (see map). It may also be the location of an earlier battle in 845
AD, when the Saxons were led by Eanwulf and Ealstan, Bishop of
Sherborne.
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 from 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".
See also
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List of hill forts and ancient settlements in Somerset
*
Battle of Cynwit
References
{{reflist
* Somerset Historical Environment Record:
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Bronze Age knife(record no. 16250)
*
Cynwit Castle(record no. 10439)
*
Roman cemetery(record no. 10503)
* ''Dumnonia and the Valley of the Parrett'', Rev. W.H.P.Greswell, 1922.
Hill forts in Somerset
History of Somerset
Scheduled monuments in Sedgemoor
Bronze Age sites in Somerset