Читать книгу The Cotswold Way. NATIONAL TRAIL Two-way trail guide - Chipping Campden to Bath онлайн

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Neolithic man was replaced by tribes of immigrants from the Low Countries. These so-called ‘Beaker People’ of the Bronze Age lived a mostly nomadic existence, raising stock and undertaking a primitive form of cultivation before moving on. The most significant evidence of their occupation of the Cotswolds (although these are not always clearly visible) is in the form of round barrows, contrasting with the long barrows in which their predecessors had buried their dead. Although there are more than 350 of these round barrows, none of any importance are actually to be seen along the Cotswold Way.

The Iron Age

What is visible, however, is a series of hill and promontory forts dating from the Iron Age, which lasted from about 700BC until the Roman occupation. The work of Belgic immigrants known as Dobunni, it is thought that these defended enclosures served different purposes. Some clearly contained working communities with villages of long houses, some were market centres or animal corrals, and some of the smaller enclosures perhaps were the fortified homes of Dobunni tribal chieftains. Yet whatever their function, they conformed to set patterns, being protected by deep, rock-cut ditches and tall, near-vertical walls. Nowadays they invariably appear as rounded, grass-covered mounds, some saucer-shaped and distinctive, others perhaps with sections of wall having been lost under centuries of ploughing.