Christian antiquities -- Great Britain; Folklore -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- Antiquities
The hill-village of Burpham, in Sussex, is clustered near an oblong
promontory fort (Class A) constructed on a tongue of land, around which
a loop is formed by the river Arun. A gigantic vallum and exterior
fosse cross the neck of the peninsula. The early Norman church of the
village stands but a few yards beyond an entrance breach in the northern
rampart. Mr A. H. Allcroft, pursuing the “method of exhaustions,”
declares the earthwork to be Danish, and Mr P. M. Johnston suggests that
the church occupies a pagan site. At all events the juxtaposition can
hardly be considered casual.
Immediately to the east of Hathersage churchyard, Derbyshire, may be
seen a simple circular earthwork, consisting of a high rampart with a
moat outside. It is classed by Dr J. C. Cox in the division C of the
scheme above-mentioned[58], namely, the division which embraces round
enclosures of a defensive character. An analogous earthwork adjoins the
churchyard of Tissington, also in Derbyshire[59].
Without pursuing this quest further, one or two pitfalls must be pointed
out. Entrenchments found near a parish church may sometimes represent
portions of the “ring fence” of a Mediaeval settlement; and the banks,
which once bore a hedge or palisade, might be hastily ascribed to an
earlier period. Mr Allcroft, in the work just mentioned, cites numerous
warning examples. Again, banks of boulder clay or glacial drift may
assume a false appearance of ridging, as if due to the work of man. To
glacial action I venture to assign the surface irregularities near
Ludborough Church, Lincolnshire, though they may represent the partially
erased banks of the Mediaeval village. Close by the neighbouring
churchyard of St Lawrence at Fulstow, one sees similar unevenness of the
ground, the most important hillock being perhaps a grave wherein were
buried some sixscore parishioners who died of the sweating sickness in
the early seventeenth century. Once more, the traces of earthwork,
military or agricultural, below the church of St Michael, on Glastonbury
Tor, Somerset, may not be very ancient, and I should not connect them in
any manner with any ideas which were held by the Gothic architects.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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