Castle Hill overlooks the River Avon and the path we had just walked from home. Castle Hill is an ancient Earthwork. It’s been inhabited for 10,000 years or more. A while back I was involved in a nearby dig. As well a few early flint axes, the main finds were the outline of five Iron Age round houses from 2000 years ago. These would have probably been built by a group of the Celtic tribe called the Durotriges. The river would have provided them with salmon, eels, pike and perch, as well as ducks and geese, and nearby woodlands, would have had many red deer and wild boar. The grassland in the valley below would have provided food for cattle and sheep, as it does today, and there, they would have grown wheat for bread and barley for beer. In times of war the farmers would have retreated behind the earth and timber walls of the castle.
When the Romans arrived in England they recorded that the Durotriges had a unique approach to warfare. It involved getting extremely pissed on their very strong beer, taking off all their clothes, painting their bodies blue, standing at the top of a hill, like Castle Hill, shouting insults at the poncy looking Romans, then roaring down the hill towards the awaiting legions. This didn’t work and all the Durotriges got slaughtered or started thinking that being Roman wasn't so bad after all.
The river valley has a system of water meadows which date from the late 17th century. An extensive series of sluice gates, canals and weirs were built to divert the flow of the river over the grassland. The nutrients and warmth from the river greatly increased the production of grass. It involved generations of Watermen who managed and maintained the system and a few years back I got to know one of these men who, as a child, worked the meadows. Modern farming methods made the meadows obsolete between the two world wars.
There is a small car park at Castle Hill and when my mother and father moved to Fordingbridge they loved driving here to look at the sunset and I often would cycle past this spot when I was getting fit for a long ride.
After sunset the place is now popular with the local youngsters, who maintain the ancestralDurotrigian custom of getting extremely pissed on very strong beer. However customs have moved on, and now they park their cars very close to one-another and do swapsies with glue, coke and weed before roaring off down the hill in their cars... straight into the awaiting police road blocks - Bless!
