The Most Amazing Iron Age Fort

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:01]This channel has shown you glorious cathedrals, fascinating churches, >> [music] >> and dramatic castles. But, this is very special indeed, bigger and bolder than anything we've featured before.

[00:00:15]This is British Camp.

[00:00:19]>> [music] [music] [music] >> British Camp is [music] an Iron Age fort perched on top of Hereford Beacon in the Malvern Hills. We're just over 1,100 ft high here, and you can see why a place that commands such a view of the surrounding [music] countryside would be a great place to build a settlement. These earthworks, the terraced layers, basically a reshaping of the whole hill, date back to probably around the 2nd century BC.

[00:01:08]There is evidence of even earlier activity, much earlier, but the main settlement is about [music] 2,200 years old. Hill forts were the cities of their time. In that pre-Roman era, communities rarely exceeded about 50 people, but hill forts were the exception. There could have been >> [music] >> a few thousand people living up here.

[00:01:32]With such a valuable strategic location, the prominent hill forts of Great Britain and Europe often have an evolving [music] story and history.

[00:01:43]Excavations of another hill fort just a few miles away show evidence of a violent end to the local community around AD 48. Don't ask me how they know that. So, maybe the whole area, including British Camp, >> [music] >> was decimated by the Romans. It's very common to find medieval castles either semi-intact or in ruins on the site of Iron Age forts, which makes perfect sense. When I build my castle, I'm going to build it in a place like this. And there was indeed a medieval castle here from just before the Norman invasion, about 1050, possibly built by Harold Godwinson, the future king of England, who would be defeated by William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings. Over the next century, the castle changed hands a few times.

[00:02:38]>> [music] >> It's remodeled, it's refortified, and it's eventually destroyed in 1155 by King Henry II.

[00:02:47]>> [music] >> But today, there's nothing left of the castle to see, which leaves the fort itself, or this wedding cake formation, to take center stage.

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