A fort without a hill
Most of the Iron Age forts around the Vale stand on the chalk ridge, as Uffington Castle and Segsbury Camp do. Cherbury Camp is the odd one out. It lies about a mile north of Charney Bassett on almost level ground, and it relied on water rather than height for protection. Three small streams with broad, boggy margins once closed it in on three sides, and it sits on the narrowest strip of dry land between the Thames and the Ock. The Victoria County History (1924) saw it as guarding exactly that gap.
The defences are three banks with ditches between them, enclosing an oval roughly 300 metres from north to south. When it was surveyed in 1939 the interior measured a little over nine acres, which makes it larger than Uffington Castle. Ploughing has flattened much of the two outer banks on the east side, but the western defences still stand as solid, regular ridges.
The 1939 excavation
John Bradford excavated at Cherbury for five weeks in the summer of 1939, with the support of the landowner at Pusey House. He planned to come back the next year, but the war intervened and he published an interim report in Oxoniensia in 1940. He found that the inner rampart had been faced with a dry-stone wall of thin limestone slabs, still nine or ten courses high in places. The original entrance lay halfway along the east side. Its road was a thin layer of small stones, worn into ruts by carts or wagons with wheels about five feet apart, and it had been resurfaced at least once because of the mud. Inside the gateway it became a heavily cobbled street between stone-lined banks, and deep post-holes showed where the gates had hung. Most of the pottery was Iron Age, with a little Roman ware in the later road surface.
The Charney Bassett history society lists other finds from the site, including a gold coin, a Neolithic flint axe, Bronze Age arrowheads and an early medieval brooch, so people used the spot long before and after the fort was occupied. It suggests the camp took its present form late in the middle Iron Age, probably after about 200 BC. A geophysical survey in 2007 is reported to have found the ring gullies of about ten roundhouses inside the ramparts.
Stories about the camp
Local tradition links Cherbury with two famous kings. One story makes it a palace of Cnut; another says King Alfred came here disguised as a minstrel to spy on the Danes. The Victoria County History called both traditions improbable, and there is no evidence for either. The earthwork is many centuries older than both kings.
Visiting
A public footpath runs north from Charney Bassett to the camp and around its edge. The interior is farmland and is not open to the public. In a wet winter the western ditches can still hold standing water, which gives a good idea of how the site worked.