Danebury Ring Hill Fort, Hampshire: An ancient fort whose archeology reveals a gruesome past

(Image credit: Alamy)

published 2 February 2021

The fortified Iron Age town of Danebury had a turbulent history. Mass graves have been uncovered — some sacrificial — together with scorched wood that indicates burning defences, amid its hills, moats and ridges.'

Reconstruction drawing by Karen Guffogg of Danebury Hill Fort in the Celtic / Iron age, approx. 2nd century BC.

At 469ft above sea level with commanding views, this is the highest point in the region and, in contrast to the peace enjoyed by the few Highland cattle now grazing there, it was home to a thriving farming community for some 500 years from 600 BC.

The manmade landscape has survived remarkably well and makes for fun exploration; archaeological finds are displayed at Andover’s Museum of the Iron Age.

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Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.