Maiden Castle
Early, before the mist cleared, a circuit of the ramparts of Maiden Castle Iron Age hillfort.
Entrance to the hillfort, a winding route through the defences.
Circling the inner ramparts, steep ditches to either side. Crows cawing. But it's not spooky. Maiden Castle never seems to me to have much of a genius loci - it just feels vast, too empty. (Unlike two of the Dorset hillforts - - Eggardon Hill and Coney's Castle - both of which have a slightly uncanny, unfriendly reputation.)
And whereas the hillfort at Badbury Rings is managed for biodiversity, and the ramparts are covered in wild flowers during spring and summer, Maiden Castle is intensively grazed by sheep, so there's nothing but grass on the ramparts. (But hopefully this will change. I read in the paper that English Heritage has teamed up with Plantlife to create 100 new wild flower meadows...)
It's hard to get much of a sense of the hillfort from the ground, even when the fog clears. Aerial pictures make the structure clear:
"Maiden Castle is one of the largest and most complex Iron Age hillforts in Britain. Its vast multiple ramparts enclose an area the size of 50 football pitches, and the site was home to several hundred people in the Iron Age (800 BC-AD 43). Excavations in the 1930s and 1980s have shed much light on the development of the hilltop, from its origins as a Neolithic enclosure over 6,000 years ago, through many centuries of modification during the Iron Age, to the building of a Romano-British temple." www.english-heritage.org.uk
The mist starting to lift. Skylarks singing from somewhere up in the pale blue sky.
You know you have almost completed the circuit when the Italianate towers of Poundbury - Prince King Charles' model city - appear on the skyline, like an hallucination caused by lack of tea. But it's half past eight on Easter Sunday. Nowhere's open. There's no tea to be had. Poundbury just won't go away.
