Information provided by Archenfield Archaeology
The Iron Age
Towards the end of the Bronze Age a new class of monument began to be constructed. These were the hill-forts, which in the later Iron Age were to develop into very impressive structures indeed.
The hill-forts were the "towns" of the Iron Age, settlements on hills surrounded by massive ramparts, which would have taken many thousands of man-hours to build. There are over thirty hill-forts in Herefordshire, which must imply a sizeable local population. These vary in size from the comparatively small, to the impressively large, with Credenhill, at 20 hectares, having a greater area than Maiden Castle in Dorset. The earliest of these structures date from the middle of the 6th century BC (Croft Ambrey), while others (Sutton Walls, Credenhill) are a little later.
The Herefordshire hill-forts are almost all covered by recent woods, which means that they are not readily visible from a distance. Only if you actually walk up to them can the scale of these monuments be appreciated.
Herefordshire's largest hill-fort at Credenhill is currently covered with conifers. This tree-cover is very recent — there is much more woodland in the county now than there was two hundred years ago when Credenhill hill-fort was clear of trees. The monument and a large area around has now been purchased for the public and there is a great opportunity to clear these trees from the site and make it possible for people to properly appreciate the scale of the county's largest ancient monument. Credenhill was occupied from about 400 BC until the Roman Conquest.
We do not know exactly who the people who built and used these hill forts were but their culture, like that of most of pre-Roman Western Europe, was Celtic. The tribe which inhabited central Herefordshire in the mid first century AD has often been identified as the Silures, whose power base lay to the west. There is however no firm evidence for this and it is possible that the local tribe was the Dobunnii (modern Gloucestershire) or the Cornovii (modern Shropshire) or even the Deceangi (North Wales).
Several Herefordshire hill-forts have been excavated, although none very recently. Fifty years ago, the archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon investigated the hill-forts of Aconbury, Credenhill, Dinedor and Sutton Walls. At Sutton Walls male skeletons showed signs of violent death. Croft Ambrey was excavated between 1960 and 1966 by S C Stanford who found streets of regularly spaced houses within the ramparts.
Farming was the major activity of these people and their livestock included cattle, sheep and pigs. Hunting was only a marginal source of food. Pigs would have been kept in woodland, and the high proportion of pig bones (about a third of the total) at Croft Ambrey might suggest that some of the surrounding area was wooded. Sutton Walls produced few pig bones: over 50% of the bones were cattle, suggesting a much more open landscape with a great deal of pasture.
Iron Age Herefordshire was capable of supporting a relatively large number of people. At Sutton Walls the average height of the adult males was 5 ft 8½ inches — this was actually taller than the average height of adult British males in the 1950s, when the site was excavated.
Roman Conquest
In 43 AD, Aulus Plautus led a large Roman invasion force across the channel and most of lowland Britain was overrun within a fairly short period. The arrival of the Romans in the area may be associated with an assault on the Sutton Walls hill fort, six kilometres to the north of modern Hereford, where skeletons showing signs of violent death have been found.
The presence of a large Roman army had a major effect upon the economy. Agriculture was, as in all pre-industrial societies, by far the principal occupation of people. Now, however, there was a guaranteed market for surplus farm produce. The army required vast quantities of grain as the staple diet of its troops. It also required meat, fish, vegetables and fruit. Other requirements were horses for cavalry units and transport, and hides for tents, footwear and clothing.
Across lowland Britain, including Herefordshire, farmers benefited from this trade. Although 1st century sites in some parts of the county show little Roman influence, other settlements, although otherwise unchanged from pre-Conquest times, began to use high quality mass-produced tableware and a range other consumer durables. Imported wine became common. Here and there, rectangular buildings in the Roman style replaced the native circular farmhouses. These new houses were more likely to be of stone, and where wealth permitted, fitted with mosaic floors, painted wall plaster and central heating.
Britain became part of an empire which stretched from southern Scotland to the Middle East and North Africa and within which there was a single currency, and at least in the towns, a common culture.
Farmland
The Herefordshire countryside at this time would have been fairly open farmland and crossed by both major paved roads and minor tracks. The main changes in the landscape from that of the Iron Age were the paved roads which ignored previous boundaries. In this landscape were towns, villages and farmhouses. Fields of corn and meadows with grazing animals would have been as characteristic of the area then as they would be for centuries to come.
Larger settlements in Herefordshire included the walled towns at Kenchester (Magnis), Leintwardine (Bravonium) and Stretton Grandison (possibly Eposessa). Magnis, the best-known town in the area, was seven kilometres to the west of the site of modern Hereford, and stood on a main north-south road which crossed the Wye by means of a bridge. There was another smaller settlement at Blackwardine near Leominster and another at Staunton-on-Arrow.
In the south of the county, at Weston-under-Penyard, Ariconium was a major industrial centre. Thousands of tons of Roman slag in the area suggest that iron-working continued for centuries there, fed by the local ores and the carefully managed woods of the Forest of Dean.
Although some settlements may have been new, many people continued to live in places that had been inhabited in pre-Roman times. Occupation at the Sutton Walls hillfort continued through much of the Roman period. Probably more typical were the lowland villages, scattered through the countryside.
One of the innovations of the Roman period in Britain was the introduction of machinery. Water mills were a vast improvement on the manual processing of grain which had been practised before using quernstones often found by archaeologists on Iron Age sites. A Roman period water mill has recently been found at Wellington, in the Lugg Valley to the north of Hereford.
Even though there have been fairly frequent Roman finds in Hereford City itself this is probably due to the amount of archaeological work carried out there. Roman occupation sites produce far more Roman material and it is fairly certain that there was no settlement at Hereford during this period. However the east-west road from Kenchester to Worcester runs just to the north of Hereford (where it is known simply as "The Roman Road") and it is possible that a shrine or temple existed in the area.
It is to the south of the Wye that the firmest evidence of Roman period activity within the modern city boundary has been found. On higher ground where the old SAS regiment barracks once stood, the bases of iron-working hearths are the first definite Romano-British evidence from Hereford.