This detailed and very thoroughly referenced book presents the results of analysis for a rare but significant type of Iron Age site that until now has been subsumed under the label of ‘hillforts’. It exposes the special nature of marshforts and the richness of the wetland evidence associated with them, clearly identifying them as a discrete category that, although including some of the familiar characteristics of hillforts, includes others that do not conform. Principal among these is that, unlike hillforts, which were built and located to be prominent features in the landscape, marshforts were designed to be in concealed locations.
The first two chapters explain the background of Shelagh Norton’s PhD research and multi-disciplinary approach to study ‘marsh-forts’ in their environmental and landscape context. The value in differentiating lowland ‘forts’ within their wetland setting from the general classification of hillforts is discussed, and the site of Sutton Common is identified as a type site.
Chapter 3 reviews the approaches adopted to investigate hillforts, tracing the development of archaeological interpretation through the application of empirical and theoretical frameworks. Chapter 4 provides a gazetteer and summarises the characteristics of potential candidate sites for marshforts throughout England and Wales, appraising them against the criteria established for Sutton Common. In Chapter 5 a regional focus for study is introduced, with North Shropshire identified as an area of bogs, meres, mires and mosses in which marshforts have been located.
Chapters 6, 7 and 8 present the results from detailed site investigation and analysis of The Berth, a small hill surrounded by a bank with a second, crescent-shaped feature to the east, joined by two causeways to each other and to the drier land beyond the Berth Pool and its associated wetland peat deposits. The site lies within a kettle hole, much of which has gradually infilled, and multiple coring has provided an almost complete Holocene sequence of c 7m depth with glacial sand and gravels as a basal deposit overlain by two clay layers, wood peat, reed peat, grass and topsoil dating back 14,000 years. Although some woodland clearance and exploitation of the local area is evidenced in earlier times, the marshfort itself was not constructed until the Middle Iron Age, continuing in use into the Roman period. The artefact assemblage from chance finds and limited excavations in the 1960s are interpreted as special deposits, reflecting the importance of the location for ritual or ceremonial use, perhaps a place of pilgrimage with a specific approach and circulation route to venerate the deities worshiped at the site, culminating in a bronze cauldron placed in the waters at the junction of the Berth Pool and stream during the first to second centuries ad.
Chapter 9 brings together the various strands of evidence presented in previous chapters to propose a definition for marshforts and list those that most closely meet the criteria for Sutton Common as a type site. This was a double enclosure located within the Humber wetlands connected by a causeway crossing an ancient watercourse, and included a possible processional route leading around the ramparts and through the enclosures to Shirley Pool, east of the site. Over 150 four-post and six-post structures were found as well as cremated remains and ‘mortuary rings’ dating to the Middle Iron Age. Shelagh Norton’s conclusions are that only very few sites can fulfil most of the criteria associated with Sutton Common, such as The Berth in the Perry valley and Wall Camp in the Weald Moors in Shropshire, but that on present evidence Sutton Common remains unique.
The final analysis discusses the ‘specialness’ of marshforts, the fact that the locations chosen for their construction are in fact opposite to a principal attribute of hillforts: visibility. While hillforts were designed to be seen, marshforts were built in environments that would have made them largely invisible, with an approach through difficult and dangerous terrain. A hypothesis is proposed to be tested by future research, offering a definition of marshforts as Middle to Late Iron Age monumental structures set in, and controlling, wetland locations, designed to fulfil a community function, with a special status over a long duration curated by collective memory. While hillforts might reflect changes to social structure associated with adaption to upland living, marshforts perhaps provided a parallel association with wetlands and watery places, a continuation of ritual and ceremonial practice from earlier prehistory that saw the selection of rivers, lakes and bogs as special, hidden places, liminal space between one world and another in which to make votive offerings.
