To the Bank

“Inaccessible” is far too strong. “Awkward to get to” is more like it. It’s a quirk of the map to show so many lines of communication around a place, and yet no route to it. The sky overhead mirrors the lines on the map page – jet-trails intersect far away, overhead. From the hilltop, trucks are visible through the trees, a train’s sound interrupts the birds and the penstrokes of bales stretch between pylons not far from the hill crest. In the valley, the Trent bends away between fields and town.

Bury Bank rises above the junction of the A34 and A51 in Staffordshire. These roads have been important since at least Saxon times – one going north, the other to Wales.

Local legend has it that King Wulfhere of Mercia established his base here. That association may be doubtful, but proximity to road and river is likely to have contributed to the attraction of the site to the Iron Age people who built Bury Bank. Just  as the Mercians may have been drawn to places made resonant by long use, so the Iron Age builders may have seen the presence of a Bronze Age burial mound, now known as Saxon’s Lowe, just to the north of the Bank, as an ancestral confirmation of the value of the place.

Another attraction would have been the prominence of the location. The hillside rises, steep and brackened, immediately from the roadside. To approach the hill fort we crossed the A34 between HGVs and the Trent via the fringe of a crowded roundabout. The hill remained a huge bulk, greens and greys. The slope of the A51 was steeper than it looked, and then we had to pick our moment to dodge across and the vault the stile onto the path. Now we could see the hill’s long back.

Our visit was preceded by much poring over maps spread across the table, recourse to the internet, and speculation about parking spots. No signposted paths go there, as though a silence of official sources had to compensate for the traffic noise.

This is not some thumb-smidge of a fort, not a domestic settlement with cattle-proof ditches and banks, and room for two or three families, like many hill “forts” I’ve explored. It may not be quite the size of Maiden Castle in Dorset, but  it’s a hundred metres across and two hundred long. There’s a rampart round an inner circuit and another a few metres down, after which the hillside falls away into pine plantation.

On three sides it’s steep enough to defeat most attackers (and modern visitors). On the fourth, the route we took, the official path takes one look at the hill top, then turns away, past Saxon’s Lowe and towards Tittensor and Trentham.

We had to slip along the field edge and under the wire fence, where the bark of beech trees shone like paper that’s been touched again and again. Bracken’s thin stems crumpled into the moss. We skirted the bluebell leaves – green points not yet overspread by the flowers’ haze.

We came in where the ramparts are best preserved – the ground peaks as you approach, then falls sharply a little way. There’s a shallow scoop, and then another sharp slope. The top of the ridge is wide enough to walk along, giving a view across the inner enclosure. This too rises, like an upturned bowl, criss-crossed by mossy trails – deer tracks, or dog walkers’ routes, unrecorded by any map.

The pine plantation does not encroach on the fort itself, but mature broad-leaved trees stand singly. Their branches were all in bud, spring sealed up. One had fallen, exposing the knotting of its roots and wrenching a great hole in the topsoil.

In the centre of the inner ring are two raised points, possible burial mounds. Looking, north, the curvature of Saxon’s Lowe is visible despite the trees. If these higher points were a focus of whatever happened inside the earth ramparts, the fact that they were always in sight of the older monument would have been important. This is a reverse of the current situation, in which the sound of traffic is ever present, in the centre of the fort, but the structure is screened from the outside world by trees and apparent pathlessness.

Although the place was deserted by people, the birds crowded it.  Great tits, blackbirds, chiffchaffs, wrens and chaffinches were all in voice in the pine plantation. The traffic’s sound was identical in all directions, but the birds gave a different texture to each side.

It surely wouldn’t have been the same when the ramparts were treeless, and the views east, south and west were clear to the next high ground. The view from those hills back to Bury Bank would also have been clear, and all comers would have known that the place was already held. Perhaps the soundscape would have included skylarks, as we heard when we walked down into the valley to the north – birds that claim their territory with a similar clear declaration, this time in sound, over the surrounding space.

This wasn’t our space, even though we were the only things moving against the white sky between the trees. We started to pick our way across towards the fence and the thread-like path that skirted the field below.

I found my eyes being drawn down to the slightly sticky mud of the tracks. It was scattered with pebbles – my imagination kept wanting to pick one out as an artefact from the time the fort was dug out. None turned out to be, but with a little blurring of vision the stones’ pale colours could stand in for all the debris left behind by Bury Bank’s first inhabitants. All those human things could still be somewhere under the surface – and will still be there long after the traces of our visit have been rained away.