Alfred's Castle is a small enclosed site south of the Ridgeway on the
Berkshire Downs, excavated between 1998 and 2000 by a team from Oxford
University. This was the third site excavated by the Hillforts of the
Ridgeway project (after White Horse Hill and Segsbury). Although small,
Alfred's Castle displayed a long and complex history, starting with
early Bronze Age round barrows on which later Bronze Age linear ditches
were aligned, these in turn were used to form enclosures in the Iron
Age. In the early Roman period a small villa house was built inside the
smaller enclosure, which then shows some use in the early medieval
period. The long use of the site raises questions of memory, history and
continuity, leading us to wonder how earlier phases of use affected
later ones. This volume contains the results of excavations at Alfred's
Castle and an account of an art project by Simon Callery. This is the
third volume dedicated to the hillfort excavations on the Berkshire
Downs and it ends with an account of the area more broadly, which sees
complicated developments from the Bronze Age into the medieval period
through the constructions of barrows, field systems, linear ditches and
sites of various forms and sizes. How these combined into communities of
the living and of the dead are considered using all the evidence
currently available.