Among the English hill-forts, there is the Herefordshire beacon, on the highest point of the Malvern hills, commanding the main pass through the chain. It is an irregular oblong, one hundred and seventy-five feet by one hundred and ten; and the inner wall is a strong work of stones and turf. Three exterior walls encompass it, and an eccentric work lops out at either side, on some engineering principle, which, doubtless, was highly approved of in its day, but is sunk in as deep oblivion as the name of the people who awaited anxiously within the inner ring to see the heads of the enemy, as they strove to mount the steep acclivity, in the year of the world in which the defence was completed. Wales claims the chief specimens in England, for the reason we have already stated—that Wales has hills. Hence we have Moel y Gaer in Flintshire, and a great work close to the Castle of Montgomery, where, King says, it was certainly needless, “unless it had been long prior to the erection of that castle.” There are, besides these, Carn Madryn, Trer Caeri in Carnarvonshire, and Caer Caradoc, which tradition associates with Caractacus. One of the oddest of these forts is Penman Mawr, of which Pennant says, “After climbing for some space among the loose stones, the fronts of three, if not four walls presented themselves very distinctly, one above the other. In most places the facings appeared very perfect, but all dry work. I measured the height of one wall, which was at the time nine feet; the thickness seven feet and a half. Between these walls, in all parts, were innumerable small buildings, mostly circular, and regularly faced within and without, but not disposed in any certain order. These had been much higher, as is evident from the fall of stones which lie scattered at their bottoms. Their diameter, in general, is from twelve to eighteen feet; but some were far less, not exceeding five feet. On the small area of the top had been a group of towers or cells, like the former—one in the centre, and five others surrounding it.”[[19]]
Some of our northern forts have been, however, on a greater scale. Of the White Caterthun in Strathmore, General Roy says, “The most extraordinary thing that occurs in this British fort is the astonishing dimensions of the rampart, composed entirely of large loose stones, being at least twenty-five feet thick at top, and upwards of one hundred at bottom, reckoning quite to the ditch, which seems, indeed, to be greatly filled up by the tumbling down of the stones. The vast labour that it must have cost to amass so incredible a quantity, and carry them to such a height, surpasses all description. A simple earthen breastwork surrounds the ditch; and beyond this, at the distance of about fifty yards on the two sides, but seventy on each end, there is another double intrenchment, of the same sort, running round the slope of the hill. The intermediate space probably served as a camp for the troops, which the interior post, from its smallness, could only contain a part of. The entrance into this is by a single gate on the east end; but opposite to it there are two leading through the outward intrenchment, between which a work projects, no doubt for containing some men posted there, as an additional security to that quarter.”[[20]]
The author who is found thus to speak of the rude hill-fort was an experienced officer of engineers, on service in Scotland. The tone of professional respect with which he treats the effort of the primitive engineer is remarkable; one might suppose him discussing the merits of Sebastopol or Cronstadt. In the unprofessional, such works create perhaps all the more astonishment from their unexpected magnitude; for when you are desired to ascend a desolate, uninteresting-looking secondary hill, in a remote district of Scotland, apart from any of the tourist circuits, you do not expect to find its brows covered with some triumph of industrial development. The height necessarily ascended before these works can be seen—a matter which must have made the raising of them all the more formidable—keeps them away from observation. Were they on flat ground, and near watering-places, they would be among the wonders of the world. In the vastness of the mass of collected stones, they are more like the great breakwaters of harbours of refuge than any other works we can name. Even more remarkable than General Roy’s Caterthun, appears to us to be the Barmkyn of Echt, a few miles farther north. The etymologist may call Barmkyn a corruption of Barbican if he likes. The lonely hill is so steep and circular that it seems as if it must have been artificially scarped. Scarcely from below can any curve be seen to interrupt the straight line of the ascent, and one is utterly unprepared for the mighty ramparts of stone—five of them—of which the innermost encloses a space of about an acre, quite flat, and seeming to be levelled, as the sides of the hill seem to be scarped, by art.
It may be a question if these stone masses were ever built, either so as to represent external courses, like the Roman wall in Northumberland, or even in the fashion called cyclopean. They bear, in their heaped character, and the regularity of their course, more resemblance to the moraines on the edge of the glacier, than to any other object, natural or artificial, with which we happen to be acquainted. So ancient, indeed, must they be supposed to be, that in the war with the elements all minuter structural characteristics seem to have been lost, and the stones lie, not as they were placed, but virtually in a heap of ruins.
In these stormy hills, indeed, it is difficult to suppose that anything less imperishable than the gneiss, or granite, of which the blocks forming the circular forts are composed, would have preserved the original plan. In flatter and more turfy districts of Scotland, as well as in England, there are mounds seeming to be artificial, and cast in circular terraces, as if they had been put on a turning lathe and bevelled down. There is one of these—perhaps the most remarkable in Britain—at Old Sarum, and it was generally supposed to have some connection with the franchise of that scheduled corporation. How these could have been very available for forts it is difficult to imagine; and to devise any other purpose to which they can have been applicable would be still more difficult. But when it was reported in England, as it was about seventy years ago, that there were some ancient hill-forts in Scotland made of glass, the antiquaries, not having a prescience of the Crystal Palace before their eyes, turned from puzzling themselves about the earthen mounds in England, to burst forth in scornful laughter about the glass fortresses of Scotland. But people who have had much experience in the ways of this world, learn how the same word may, without the slightest misapplication, be used for very different things. The dingy slag-like lumps, with a vitreous fraction, found in the heather of some Scottish fortified hills, has undoubtedly a claim to the vitreous character, perhaps as strong as the glittering diaphanous squares which are to let in all the sun, and exclude the wind and rain, at Sydenham. That they were the creation of fire is certain; and though the geologists sought at first to make out a case of volcano, yet it became evident that it was administered by the hand of man; for the materials, which had been calcined and vitrified so as to resemble in a considerable degree the scoriæ of a glass-house, were built into walls round the summits of steep circular hills;—those with which we are acquainted have much the appearance, from their extreme steepness and regularity, of having been scarped. And then come the questions—were the vitrified masses produced by some accident, such as the burning of a stronghold? or were they a deliberate method of cementing stones together by fusion? or, perchance, were they the wide circuits within which might be consumed some whole forest of trees, cut down and piled together within a ring of stone, whether as a vast beacon, reddening the sky from the Tweed to Cape Wrath, or a sacrifice to the ancient God of fire?—Questions these which we respectfully decline taking the responsibility of answering.
The step from such rude Titanic works as these to the Norman fortress is great—and perhaps a word or two on other forms of places of strength may be suitable, as showing distinctly that the feudal castles were the combination of the rude strength of the primitive fortress with domiciliary comfort—that they brought the defensive strength, supposed to reside only in inaccessible mountain regions or swamps, into the midst of rich agriculture and smiling abundance—that they no longer rendered necessary a retreat to the place of strength, as one may suppose the whole community of a district to have retreated to a hill-fort, but were themselves alike the abode of luxurious ease in time of peace, and of resistance and fierce contest in time of war. Perhaps we may best comprehend how original was the idea of the union of fortress and house or palace in one, by observing how few are the vestiges of such a combination having existed elsewhere before the establishment of the feudal system. Towns undoubtedly seem to have been fortified from the beginning of town life; and of the extent to which the system was carried, let us take once for all the account which honest old Herodotus gives of Babylon, with its walls two hundred cubits high, on which a chariot could be driven with four horses abreast, and its hundred gates of brass. But, of anything of the nature of a domestic fortress in which people lived in their ordinary manner during peace, and defended themselves in war, we remember but few vestiges.
Separate buildings like towers there probably have been in many times and places, and they may have been used as fortresses. Along the Roman Wall were the square towers called mile-castles, which are interesting, not only as the best remains of the arrangements made by the great aggressors for the protection of their frontier, but as the models on which the ancient inhabitants would probably build their castles—if they built any. It is singular enough that the Border peel towers—built a thousand years after the Romans had abandoned Britain to her fate—have, in their compact squareness, more resemblance to these castella, than any type of earlier British castellated architecture possesses. Since the publication of Mr Bruce’s book on the Roman Wall, to which we lately had occasion to refer, no one need remain ignorant of any feature, however minute, which, now existing, attests what these mile-castles originally were. Mr Bruce tells us, in a summary description, that “they derive their modern name from the circumstance of their being usually placed at the distance of a Roman mile from each other. They were quadrangular buildings, differing somewhat in size, but usually measuring from sixty to seventy feet in each direction. With two exceptions, they have been placed against the southern face of the wall: the castle of Portgate, every trace of which is now obliterated, and another near Æsica, the foundations of which may with some difficulty still be traced, seem to have projected equally to the north and south of the wall. Though generally placed about seven furlongs from each other, the nature of the ground, independently of distance, has frequently determined the spot of their location. Whenever the wall has had occasion to traverse a river or a mountain pass, a mile-castle has uniformly been placed on the one side or other to guard the defile. The mile-towers have generally had but one gate of entrance, which was of very substantial masonry, and was uniformly placed in the centre of the south wall: the most perfect specimen now remaining, however, has a northern as well as a southern gateway. It is not easy to conjecture what were the internal arrangements of these buildings—probably they afforded little accommodation, beyond what their four strong walls and well-barred gates gave.”[[21]]
They were evidently mere barracks or stations, nor can much more be said for any of the Roman works in the lands of their conquests. Roman troops were taught, in the conflict with the barbarian, to look solely to discipline; and the places called forts, apart from these square towers along the wall, were merely intrenched camps.
Investigation is, in this country, ever apt to strip our stone edifices of their hoar antiquity. Mr Petrie has “taken the shine,” as the Cockneys say, out of the round towers of Ireland, by showing that they have the ordinary details of the Romanesque ecclesiastical work, and has rendered it unnecessary to decide whether they are anchorite hermitages for a multitude of rivals to St Simeon Stylites, or temples for Photic or for Phalic worship. Criticism has gone in the same way back upon our castles, proving, in truth, that very few of them are so old as they were supposed to be. Yet there is a particular class of buildings of a systematically castellated type, which the scythe of the archæological iconoclast has not yet swept—on the age of which no particle of authentic light has been cast, and which we are thus entitled to count as old as we like.
These are the circular towers called sometimes Dunes, Burghs, Danish forts, Pictish forts, &c., scattered hither and thither in the far northwest of Scotland. They are supposed to be of Scandinavian origin—to have been the fortresses built by the Seakings, but nothing in the least degree resembling them has been found elsewhere within Scandinavian land. Their mysterious builders have carefully avoided every particle of incidental evidence that might lead to a betrayal of their origin. Graceful and symmetrical as they are in their outline—perfectly circular, and rising without a bulge in a decreasing sweep from the broad base—there is not a single ornament or moulding to let the antiquary detect them, as the Romanesque work proved the betrayal of the Irish round towers. Nay, there is not the mark of chiselling on the stones to show that human hands have touched them. That can be inferred from the structure alone; and the unhewn lumps of mica schist or gneiss are laid in distinct courses perfectly parallel and round, by the selection of rough stones of equal size, and the insertion of minute splinters to make up deficiencies—for, as there is no stone hewing, there is also no cement.