Hillforts have held a special place in Irish and British archaeology for as long as the discipline has existed. Their often-identifiable surface presence led to their inclusion on the earliest antiquities maps, and some of the most famous and enduring excavations in Britain have centered on hillforts—for example, Danebury and Maiden Castle. Every few decades, the evidence for hillforts has been collated and presented as new research and techniques of data collection emerge.
The most recent addition to this history is the Atlas of the Hillforts of Britain and Ireland, by Gary Lock and Ian Ralston. There is much to commend in this volume, and as always in reviews like this, I have a few quibbles, but overall, this is a highly useful contribution to the discipline. My comments are confined to the PDF version of the book, given that the publisher would not provide a print copy, so I cannot say anything about the pros and cons of the physical book (yes, I am annoyed; let's be honest—that is one of the top reasons most of us do these reviews!).
The Atlas provides an introduction to the database that underlies it, accessible online in a very user-friendly website. Some of the data can also be accessed via an Excel spreadsheet provided on the publisher's website (from the “Resources” tab at https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-atlas-of-the-hillforts-of-britain-and-ireland.html). The text of the book provides explanations for the myriad choices made in terms of how the data was collected and entered. I could argue some of these; for example, I get why the thousands of ring forts in Ireland were omitted, but this does rather skew some of the distributions, as the authors themselves note repeatedly. But in this kind of endeavor, choices must inevitably be made, and the authors are clear about what they decided and why—an admirable aspect of the book. As someone who does research in Ireland, I also appreciated their use of “Britain and Ireland” rather than taking the lazy way out and lumping these under “British Isles.” This is not the place to rehearse the political history of this region, but it is complex and deserves the thoughtful consideration provided by the authors.
The various chapters review the history of the study of hillforts and then go through their descriptive parameters in exhaustive detail, with discussions of landscape and terrain, size (both internal and external), the architecture of the various enclosures, associated structures and artifacts, and issues involved in dating. There is also a chapter on distributions, focusing particularly on regional clusters. All of this material is well supported with tables and maps helpfully placed in the text. There are also appendices containing additional information, including an interesting discussion of the vitrified forts focused on the Scottish sites as a case study.
It is perhaps inevitable, given the nature of this book, that it is mostly focused on description, but this is the only real complaint I have about it. There is considerable discussion in the book of the various classificatory schemes created to organize hillforts, but there is no consideration of the implications of the particular schemes chosen here, or indeed why we need to classify them to begin with. This is not self-evident, and decades of postprocessual research have shown that no system is truly neutral. More importantly, the authors have collected a truly impressive amount of data, and yet they only begin to scratch the surface of what it all means. The final chapter of the book does start to discuss some of the issues raised over the decades of hillfort research, such as whether they are about defense or symbolism, hierarchy or community, or some messy combination of all of these. But they mostly avoid taking a real position on any of them. Although the descriptive aspects that take up most of the book are certainly useful, and they are clear that they are presenting all of this data so that future researchers can take it from here, I would have been interested to hear their take on what they now think hillforts are all about. I know this would probably have taken a second volume of equal length, but I would have found it an interesting read.
All of that said, this is a very useful volume, both as an introduction to the website where the data is presented and as a description of the current knowledge base about hillforts. I will certainly be using it in future, and the authors are to be congratulated on the monumental (pun intended) task that they have successfully undertaken.
