Castle Rings, Wiltshire
Iron Age hillfort in Wiltshire, England / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Castle Rings is a univallate hill fort in the parish of Donhead St Mary in Wiltshire, England.[1] The site is a Scheduled Ancient Monument.[2] Castle Rings has been dated to the Iron Age and is at an altitude of 228 metres (748 ft) upon Upper Greensand sandstone beds.[1] The bulk of the fort enclosure lies within the boundaries of Donhead St Mary parish but some of the outlying earthworks are in the neighbouring Sedgehill and Semley parish.[3] In the mid-1980s a metal detectorist unearthed a hoard of stater coins of the Durotriges tribe within the hill fort.[4]
Castle Rings | |
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General information | |
Architectural style | Iron Age hill fort |
Town or city | Donhead St Mary |
Country | England |
Coordinates | 51.025046°N 2.160424°W / 51.025046; -2.160424 |
Technical details | |
Size | 12.8 acres (5.2 ha) |
Lady Theodora Grosvenor described the fort in her 1867 book Motcombe, Past and Present:
...a fine encampment, enclosing a space of about 12 acres, and considered to have been originally British, which exists within the angle where the roads from Semley Church and Donhead to Shaftesbury unite by Wincombe Lodge. It bears the name of Castle Rings, and its embankments and ditches are strongly defined, though, from being overgrown with copse-wood, seldom observed.
— Lady Theodora Grosvenor, Motcombe, Past and Present 1867, pp. 78-79