There’s now not much to see of the hillfort on Mouselow. It was more obvious in the late 18th century, when it was described by the Reverend John Watson, who also wrote the first account of Melandra, but since then it’s been worn down by ploughing and hidden by trees. When Watson saw it, though, it would have looked a bit like Hambledon Hill in Dorset (see pic).
We can see on Lidar that it had two ramparts and ditches, but as only some of it’s now visible we don’t know where the entrance was or exactly how far it extended. We also have no idea when it was built. Most forts like this date from the middle Iron Age (400-100 BC), but its origins could lie in the Bronze Age (before 800BC), and there could have been human activity on the hill even before that, going back into the Neolithic (New Stone Age).
It’s pretty obvious why it was built there. It overlooked both Glossopdale and Longdendale, could be seen from miles around, and was the best defensive site in the area. It’s unlikely, though, that it was a serious fort in the military sense. Hillforts involved a lot of digging for little protection; the ramparts may have extended for well over a mile, and although there would have been a wooden palisade round the top, a large force would have been needed to keep out a determined enemy. It might have been more for show – my fort’s bigger than your fort – or it could have been a sacred enclosure, for religious ceremonies or high-status burials – a sort of Iron Age cathedral.
So there may well have been graves on the summit, and maybe even from before the fort, as they were often built on sites which were already sacred. In view, though, of all that’s happened there since, it’s unlikely that there are any traces of them now. There may also have been a village on top, as at Mam Tor, and there must also have been a lot of other people living nearby, as to build a structure of that size would require a very large workforce. We know of one Bronze or Iron Age village site locally, and possibly another, and it’s likely there were others close to the fort.
It’s unlikely that it was still occupied when the Romans arrived at Melandra around AD 70, as most such forts had been abandoned long before, and it would have been little use against the Roman army, so legends of two opposing forts are just fanciful. However, it’s not impossible that there were people still living there. Less than five miles away is the smaller hillfort at Mellor, which had disappeared even more completely than Mouselow, being unknown until 1995 when the line of a ditch was spotted during a drought. Ten years of digging then established that it had been built in the Iron Age, on a hill occupied back through the Bronze Age to the Neolithic, but which continued to be occupied through the Roman period by people who adopted a Roman lifestyle.
The Romans sometimes built their forts inside abandoned hillforts, but not this one – there wasn’t enough level ground for their usual playing-card layout, so they had to settle for the second-best defensive site. After the Romans came the Anglo-Saxons, but they didn’t live on fortified hilltops. However, about a thousand years after the Romans, somebody thought the summit was a prime spot for a castle. Who, though, and why, and exactly what they built, we can only guess……
Next – Part 2: The Castle