Hillforts and related earthworks of Wiltshire, with Oxford Atlas notes and 1 m LiDAR
Numbered north to south. Search by name, parish or grid. Type is morphology; confidence is how far the sources will bear. Access badges are a desk assessment — check OS Maps and, on the Plain, red flags on the day. To see wooded banks: pick a fort, then Compare satellite / DTM and drag the gold bar along the bottom of the map.
Univallate forts have a single rampart and ditch. Many on the Wiltshire downs belong to the earlier Iron Age — Oliver’s Castle is a clear example. Multivallate forts add further circuits: Yarnbury, Battlesbury and Barbury are regional centres of the middle and later Iron Age, with massive banks still walking as separate lines. The Atlas class on each card (univallate, bivallate, multivallate; contour, promontory, hilltop) is that morphological reading, not a date. Some sites were reused: Old Sarum is an Iron Age hillfort with a Norman castle and medieval city inside it; Vespasian’s Camp sits in the Stonehenge landscape and takes a Roman name it does not deserve. Wooded circuits (Wick Ball, The Earldoms) are often invisible on the ground and on satellite; switch on the satellite / DTM swipe to see the banks as bare earth.
The 52 names are Tim Daw’s 2022 circuit, listed north to south at sarsen.org. Castle Combe and Ludgershall keep those list numbers; their pins sit on the scheduled earthworks after the published coordinates were found to be kilometres out. Classification follows Lock and Ralston, Atlas of Hillforts of Britain and Ireland (2017; data CC BY-SA 4.0). Scheduled-monument numbers are from the National Heritage List for England (OGL). Castle Combe and Ludgershall are graded possible: they were added because there is enough evidence to class them with hillforts, and they are not in the Atlas.
Membury Camp and Kenwalch’s Castle sit on county boundaries; both are in the Atlas and on the 2022 circuit. Ebsbury Hill is scheduled with Grovely Castle under a single list-entry (NHLE 1005604). Winkelbury Camp is the Berwick St John fort, not Winklebury in Basingstoke.
The map’s LiDAR layers are the Environment Agency LIDAR Composite 1 m hillshade (DSM and DTM, Open Government Licence). The satellite / DTM swipe uses Esri World Imagery against the 1 m DTM hillshade. Each card also links to OS Maps, the Atlas record, and the NLS six-inch. Access badges are a desk reading of typical rights of way, not a legal search. Inclusion does not imply public access.
This page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence. It incorporates notes, typology and LiDAR hillshade from Lock and Ralston, Atlas of Hillforts of Britain and Ireland, which is itself CC BY-SA 4.0, so the same terms apply to the compilation. Historic England list-entries and Environment Agency LiDAR are used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.