Everything about Maiden Castle Dorset totally explained
Maiden Castle is a
hill fort, mostly dating from the
Iron Age, in the
civil parish of
Winterborne Monkton, situated 2
miles south of
Dorchester, in the
English county of
Dorset.
Name and form
The name
maiden was once believed to derive from the
Brythonic mai dun, meaning
great hill. Recent work by
Richard Coates (
Maiden Castle, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Hārūn al-Rashīd, Nomina 29 (2006), 5-60) has made this theory obsolete. 'Castle' is a common English folk name for prehistoric earthwork sites, referring to
the defensive banks and ditches. There is no 'castle' as such on the site. The earthworks are up to 6
m high, and enclose an area of 18
ha, making it one of the largest
hill forts in
Europe. The site is maintained by
English Heritage.
Hill fort development
Excavations at the site have dated construction of a
Neolithic causewayed enclosure back to around
4000 BC. An extensive bank and ditch as well as a
bank barrow burial mound are evident from this period at the eastern end.
However most of the works at the site date from around 450 to 300 BC, when an earlier
Iron Age hillfort dating to c. 600 BC was extended and enlarged with three new ditch-and-bank earthworks built creating the main fortifications in a set of three concentric rings with offset entrance points. The castle is very big.
Centuries after its construction the fort was probably occupied by the
Durotriges, a
Celtic tribe at the time of the
Roman invasion. The site may have been attacked and invested by the
2nd and the
8th legion under
Vespasian in AD 43.
Mortimer Wheeler created a vivid account of the fall of the hill fort in his report following the excavations of 1934-1937. Later examination of his records by Niall Sharples has largely discounted this interpretation and it's no longer thought that the fort was besieged or violently taken by the Romans.
20th century English composer John Ireland (1879-1962) visited the area and later wrote
Mai-Dun, a symphonic rhapsody evoking something of the prehistoric character of the fortifications, the people who lived there, and their lifestyle.
Roman temple
The Romans occupied the site but concentrated their efforts in the area around
Durnovaria (now Dorchester) and the nearby
Poundbury Hill. There was a large scale reconstruction of the site, just before AD 400. A small
Romano-British temple was built in the eastern half of the hill fort during the late Roman pagan revival and the denfences were refurbished to form it
temenos. The temple adjoined the site of an abandoned, but apparently remembered, circular Iron Age shrine and seems to have been used for the worship of a number of
gods including
Diana,
Minerva and
Taurus Trigaranus. It consisted of the usual sanctuary or
cella surrounded by an ambulatory. A small rectangular structure, perhaps for the priest, stood alongside. The temple didn't last long and the site was abandoned by the Romans soon afterwards. It wasn't re-occupied and remained deserted from then on.
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