This was the day of the Field Club’s visit to Christopher Hawkes’ excavations on Quarley Hill, near Andover. He had already dug on St Catherine’s Hill, Winchester and Buckland Rings, Lymington, but the Quarley opportunity came about because of the untimely death of Miss Dorothy Liddell, who had led the Society’s fieldwork campaign for a number of years.

Quarley had already achieved celebrity, thanks to the pioneering work of OGS Crawford, who persuaded the RAF to take some aerial photographs. These showed that the earthworks of the Iron Age fort overlay the large scale ‘travelling ditches’ then being recognised across much of Wessex.

Hawkes examined these Bronze Age boundary ditches before moving on to the camp itself. He found evidence for an unfinished rampart, but also traces of an earlier palisade crossing the entrance causeways. The nature and paucity of the occupation debris suggested ‘a small colony of people living here in squalor among their own kitchen refuse, into which even human bones could find their way’.

The full report can be found in Proceedings Vol 14 pp136-94