MAIDEN CASTLE, DORSET

'Maiden Castle' is a hill fort, mostly dating from the Iron Age, in the civil parish of Winterborne Monkton, situated 2 miles south of Dorchester, in the English county of Dorset.

Contents

Name and form

Hill fort development

Roman temple

References

External Links

Name and form

The name ''maiden'' was once believed to derive from the Brythonic ''mai dun'', meaning ''great hill''. Recent work by Richard Coates (''Maiden Castle, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Hārūn al-Rashīd'', Nomina 29 (2006), 5-60) has made this theory obsolete. 'Castle' is a common English folk name for prehistoric earthwork sites, referring to
the defensive banks and ditches. There is no 'castle' as such on the site. The earthworks are up to 6 m high, and enclose an area of 18 ha, making it one of the largest hill forts in Europe. The site is maintained by English Heritage.

Hill fort development

Excavations at the site have dated construction of a Neolithic causewayed enclosure back to around 4000 BC. An extensive bank and ditch as well as a bank barrow burial mound are evident from this period at the eastern end.
However most of the works at the site date from around 450 to 300 BC, when an earlier Iron Age hillfort dating to c. 600 BC was extended and enlarged with three new ditch-and-bank earthworks built creating the main fortifications in a set of three concentric rings with offset entrance points.
Centuries after its construction the fort was probably occupied by the Durotriges, a Celtic tribe at the time of the Roman invasion. The site may have been attacked and invested by the 2nd Legion under Vespasian in AD 43. Mortimer Wheeler created a vivid account of the fall of the hill fort in his report following the excavations of 1934-1937. Later examination of his records by Niall Sharples has largely discounted this interpretation and it is no longer thought that the fort was besieged or violently taken by the Romans.

Roman temple

The Romans occupied the site but concentrated their efforts in the area around Durnovaria (now Dorchester) and the nearby Poundbury Hill. There was a large scale reconstruction of the site, just before AD 400. A small Romano-British temple was built in the eastern half of the hill fort during the late Roman pagan revival and the denfences were refurbished to form it temenos. The temple adjoined the site of an abandoned, but apparently remembered, circular Iron Age shrine and seems to have been used for the worship of a number of gods including Diana, Minerva and Taurus Trigaranus. It consisted of the usual sanctuary or ''cella'' surrounded by an ambulatory. A small rectangular structure, perhaps for the priest, stood alongside. The temple did not last long and the site was abandoned by the Romans soon afterwards. It was not re-occupied and remained deserted from then on.

References

★ English Heritage Book of Maiden Castle, , Niall M, Sharples, B. T. Batsford Ltd, , ISBN 0-7134-6083-0

External Links

★ Maiden Castle

★ Maiden Castle site page from English Heritage.

★ Maiden Castle site page on The Megalithic Portal.

★ Maiden Castle site page on The Modern Antiquarian.