Investigations at Dorstone Hill in the parish of Dorstone in the Dore Valley, Herefordshire, have taken place annually since 2011, with the aim of investigating Neolithic settlement in the area just to the south of the chambered tomb of Arthur’s Stone. The project has been directed by Professor Julian Thomas of Manchester University and Dr. Keith Ray, formerly County Archaeologist with Herefordshire Council, in association with Professor Koji Mizoguchi, of Kyushu University, Japan, and Tim Hoverd of Herefordshire Council. The project has deployed local volunteers and students from (mostly) the Universities of Manchester, Kyushu and Cardiff. Irene Garcia-Rovira, Ellen McInnes and Lara Bishop of the University of Manchester have supervised the work in the field during all four seasons.
The hilltop at Dorstone Hil is a promontory extending south-westwards from the ridge separating the Dore and Wye valleys east of Hay-on-Wye. The field occupying the hilltop was cleared of scrub and levelled to be brought into cultivation during the Second World War, and had, by the 1960s, produced a significant assemblage of worked flints. The site was test-excavated by Roger Pye and members of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club in the 1960s, and was provisionally classified as a Neolithic hilltop enclosure. The low earthen bank that extends east-west for 120m across the narrow neck of the promontory was surveyed by English Heritage in the late 1990s, and it was concluded that it was a defining feature of the putative enclosure.
In 2011, a trench was dug across the bank where it appeared to survive best, close to its eastern limit, and well to the east of a putative entrance gap. No ditch accompanying the bank was found, but a historically-recent quarry was intercepted. The bank itself was found to comprise large stone slabs on its north-facing side, and burnt clay on its crest. A pit containing sherds of Neolithic pottery was found on the southern side of the bank. In 2012, a trench opened to the west of the ‘entrance gap’ revealed that the bank was covered on both northern and southern sides with a capping of stones, and a stone-lined cist, with a broken leaf-shaped arrowhead, was uncovered on the northern side. Again, no ditch was evident, and a burnt deposit was found within two parallel lines of palisade slots.
In 2013, this trench was further investigated and the burnt deposit was seen to cover the remains of a timber aisled hall. It was deduced that this had burned down and that the burnt clay was super-structural daub. Structural timbers were recorded, decayed from charred posts and woodwork. Also in 2013, a further trench was excavated between the eastern and western mounds. A pit containing distinctive flint items of likely Late Neolithic date was found to have been dug into the top of the eastern mound, close to where a rectangular mortuary chamber of Early Neolithic character (large upright timber posts linked by a stone-lined trough) had previously been dug into the subsoil. An early Neolithic axe was found, albeit displaced by a modern drain, immediately west of this chamber. Further finds included the eastern end of the aisled building intercepted in the 2012-13 trench, and a series of Bronze Age deposits apparently located deliberately to reference the earlier features.
In 2014, a further trench was opened across what had been supposed was the western end of the western of two long mounds. This revealed a third long mound that had been created in similar sequence to the central mound, with a burnt deposit then capped by turf. It was, however, retained within a stone wall (lost to bulldozing along its southern side) that had formed the basis for a ‘Cotswold-Severn’-style cairn that included modest side-chambers. The eastern end of this trapezoidal cairn had been reinforced with stone buttressing before all three mounds were linked by further stonework. In 2015, planned excavations will complete the investigation of this western mound/cairn.
https://www.academia.edu/12506828/An_Interim_Report_on_Excavations_at_Dorstone_Hill_Herefordshire_2011-14
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