Homestall Wood Earthworks, Harbledown
by Christopher Sparey-Green, Canterbury Archaeological Trust
A recent comprehensive LiDAR survey of The Blean, to the north and west of Canterbury, carried out for The Blean Initiative, has revealed previously unknown earthworks both west and north of Bigbury Camp. Kent Wildlife Trust now own and manage several woodlands in the area and, supported by a Heritage Lottery Grant, were the key funders of the project. Additional contributions from Kent County Council, Canterbury City Council, the Woodland Trust and the Forestry Commission enabled the survey to be extended across The Blean. This note concerns particularly an extensive enclosure first noted by Neill Morris, a one-time warden for KWT, in Homestall Wood, immediately north of the presumed line of Roman Watling Street at Upper Harbledown and 1.5km north of Bigbury Camp.
It is salutary to remember that as late as the mid-nineteenth century the earthworks of the now-famous Bigbury Camp had not been recognised, the first recorded finds here being the iron agricultural tools, iron tire and horse bit recovered by John Brent in 1861. Brent had also reported a find of iron fire-dogs and had assumed that all the finds from gravel-digging had derived from Roman graves since he was unaware of any earthworks on what he termed Bigberry Hill. It was R. C. Hussey who, thirteen years later, recognised the defences and published an excellent plan of the ‘British Settlement in Bigbury Wood’, marking the findspot of the ironwork within the southern defence line (Hussey 1874). Hussey also expressed surprise that the significance of the site had not been recognised since it lay in ‘a district referred to by several writers as the supposed scene of some of Caesar’s most vigorous military operations’. As he commented ‘readiness in the use of the pen is not always accompanied by a taste for topographical explorations in woods and byeways’.
It seems that since then there still has not been sufficient exploration in the extensive woodlands surrounding Bigbury to exhaust its potential for hidden surprises and that other earthworks remain undiscovered. The Homestall Wood site is particularly remarkable since the banks and ditches here appear to surround a prominent hill, overlooking Bigbury to the south and Harbledown to the south-east, with the Stour valley and the Tonford manor crossing beyond. At its foot to the south is the line of the Roman road into Canterbury. Springs feed streams around the base of the hill to the north and east and one stream rises within the area. The apparent earthworks enclose an area of approximately 800m east-west by 550m north-south, approximately 35 Ha, the circuit perhaps 2.2km in length. Other works extend over an additional 40 Ha to the south and west into Willows Wood, these features slighter than the Homestall Wood enclosure. In plan the main earthwork is approximately an oval, following the contour of the hill, with the more rounded end to the west. Where most prominent on the west and north-west, the main earthwork consists of a bank 9m wide and an external ditch 6m wide, measuring approximately 2-3m from the peak of the bank to the base of the ditch. The general impression is of a
once substantial earthwork, the bank heavily eroded and the ditch heavily silted.
The eastern side of the enclosure, towards the valley that separates the site from Stock Wood and Rough Common, appears to be breached in two places, one coinciding with the course of a stream, the other with more substantial earthworks flanking a causeway leading into the enclosure. The outer extensions of the flanking banks were especially prominent as if defensive features in the outer part of an entrance.
Within the enclosure, near the summit of the hill towards the western end of the interior, is a more clearly defined rectangular enclosure, its bank and ditch slighter than the main earthworks. Much of the circuit lies within woodland and appears unrelated to the present layout of the parcels of tree cover. Only on the south-west does the earthwork coincide with the present woodland limits; here at least it serves as a wood bank. The slighter outer works on the hillside above Harbledown village are more sharply defined in cross section and may have served as boundaries to the woodland on that side.
The only finds from the area are some sherds of Late Iron Age pottery recorded by Frank Jenkins as found close to the line of the Roman road to the south.
While some of these earthworks may relate to medieval and later woodland management, the scale of the main enclosure suggests a major boundary of earlier date, defining the hilltop with a bank and ditch, once of substantial proportions but now heavily eroded and silted. At present these earthworks are undated but they seem out of scale with normal woodland enclosures or deer park boundaries. They are more comparable to prehistoric earthworks, in the form of the boundary and the hilltop location. In scale this enclosure has a circuit considerably greater than Bigbury Camp, its location suggesting it served as a pair to that earthwork, but set back further from the river. Bigbury appears, then, as only an element within a previously un-recognised defensive complex, almost an outpost, overlooking the river crossing and linking with the earthworks extending west into the south Blean.
The Homestall Wood site deserves further study which would allow a proper comparison with the rest of the extensive earthworks in the South Blean and at Bigbury Camp. If this is part of a single prehistoric earthwork complex then it would be analogous to the largest Iron Age oppida in Britain. The historical context of such a site must also be considered, since, as Hussey first suggested, the Bigbury complex should be considered as the woodland stronghold described in Julius Caesar’s commentaries as the object of an assault early in the campaign of 54BC. The identifying of archaeological sites with events recorded by historical sources is notoriously difficult, in view of the different forms of evidence and the numerous possibilities for misinterpretation, but the scale of these earthworks reinforces the case for Bigbury, Homestall Wood and the other earthworks as being the object of this campaign.