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The Iron Age hill fort near Hungerford that marks Berkshire’s border with Wiltshire
Berkshire is a county brimming with history. Windsor Castle is an undoubted highlight and attracts millions of visitors to its historical attraction every year.
But a number of other historic sites can be visited too. Donnington Castle is another, whilst even more ancient attractions can be observed too if you’re willing to look hard enough.
One of these straddles the Berkshire-Wiltshire border, although the bulk of the site actually falls on the eastern border of Wiltshire. In total, it is around 14 acres and sits beside Membury Services on the M4.
READ MORE: Berkshire’s Bronze Age burial site where a woman and child were discovered
It is known as Membury Fort, or Membury Camp, depending on who you speak to, and can easily be accessed by the footpath running through the site. Nowadays the fort is little more than a field consisting of farmland and several copses of trees, the actual camp is made up of a ditch with two banks and a relatively large area of land.
Walls Copse, one of the small wooded areas, falls in West Berkshire and covers around a quarter of the camp. The north and east segments of the site are accessible as they are flat, the south and west provide natural defence however due to their steep run-offs.
To the east of the camp area is the probable entrance, a gap in the flank which has since become overgrown and inaccessible. To the south of the camp, a visible crop mark indicates the likely location of a hut circle.
However, much of one section of earthwork was largely destroyed when RAF Membury was built in World War Two. Despite this, and despite the site having never been excavated, large sections of the fort’s protective ramparts remain, some hidden in the woodland.
Some artefacts have also been found at the scheduled ancient monument. In the 20th century, various pieces of pottery were unearthed whilst flint tools dating from before the Iron Age have also been dug up, much like similar monuments nearby.
Atop the nearby Walbury Hill, the southeast’s highest point, is plenty of history too. An Iron Age hill fort, known as Walbury Camp, sits at the hill’s summit and is deemed the largest of these forts in all of Berkshire, measuring 82 acres.
The remains of the hill fort can be accessed from two directions and again offer magnificent views of the surrounding countryside. The county line with Wiltshire used to run through the camp but this has since moved to Membury Camp.
Another ancient feature in the county is located in Slough, a town not exactly known for its history. The artefact is called Montem Mound and is believed to be an Anglo-Saxon Burial site dating back 1,500 years – the mound was also once used as the location for an annual Eton College festival.
Another site, known as Cock Marsh, is also a former burial site, dating back to the Bronze Age. The 150 acres of marshland, chalk slopes and meadows have a burial mound where a woman and her funeral feast were discovered, another contained the remains of a child.
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