been no camp of temporary refuge, but the fixed dwelling-place of a large tribe, which has not only inhabited the fortified towns, but planted itself over the whole of the southern slope of the hill, where, in quiet times, the cultivation of the soil may have been alternated with the chase of the forest bull, the boar, and other wild beasts with which the forests of Northumberland abounded in early times.
From the few rude articles which have been turned up during the excavations, no evidence has appeared to indicate any degree of wealth on the part of the ancient inhabitants, or the possession of arms and implements in any way superior to such as may have belonged to a people shut out from the more civilised tribes which evidently inhabited some parts of Britain before the Roman invasion.
The few fragments of pottery which have been found are of the most coarse description, some pieces being three-quarters of an inch in thickness, generally devoid of any kind of ornamentation, and apparently fashioned by hand, without the use of the lathe. Some of these fragments are parts of large vessels, and are blackened by smoke, like vessels which have been used in cooking. A few glass beads have probably served as amulets. In one hut a fragment of a glass armlet was found, and which, with the beads, may have reached this remote spot by indirect transmission from those tribes which were in communication with the Phœnician voyagers. Fragments of chipped flints, together with a javelin-head of the lowest type, which as flint does not occur in Northumberland, must have been brought from a considerable distance. Horns of the red deer are evidently the spoils of the noble animal from which the neighbouring hill of Hartside has been named. A few querns were found—the bottom stones only—as is commonly the case, apparently from the circumstance of these rude hand-mills having been in request among the people of those hills in times long subsequent. Indeed it is in the recollection of very old persons that, even when the miller plied his trade within reach of most people, many of them still adhered to the old hand-mill, probably in deference to the proverbial breadth of the miller’s golden thumb, and they could only be induced to bring grist to the mill by taking away and destroying the upper stones of the querns in their possession, and which had probably descended as heir-looms during a succession of many centuries.
With reference to the time when those rude strongholds were raised, or when they ceased to be inhabited, is matter of speculation only; but it may be supposed from the circumstance of their defences being strongest toward the south, that they were intended as a provision against a foe, whose assault had threatened from that direction. It is well known, that the different tribes of Celtic Britain lived in a continual state of hostility with each other, but there is a circumstance apparent in the connection of those towns with that on the opposite hill of Ritta, which would indicate an extended combination to resist a threatened assault or invasion; and if this connection can be traced to exist in common with other fortifications on these hills, there might appear grounds for the supposition that those settlements may have been strengthened and united into one common line of defence on the extension of the Roman occupation of Britain in a northern direction; and that, in fact, we have on the wild Cheviot hills a sort of counterpart to the great work of the Roman wall erected with a kindred view of limiting the incursion of a common enemy.
J. Wykeham Archer.
