Black Meldon

Five of the houses at Black Meldon stand in a straight line. That is the detail worth going up for, because interiors of hillforts are usually the hardest part to read and here the arrangement is unmistakable.

At least seven ring-groove houses survive within the fort — round houses whose walls stood in a circular trench cut into the ground, which is why their outlines are still legible when the buildings themselves are two and a half thousand years gone. They range from seven to ten metres in diameter, and five of the seven lie along the north-south axis in a row. Somebody laid this settlement out.

The fort itself is modest. It sits on a summit at 407 metres, roughly oval, 73 metres north to south by 40 west to east. Its boundary wall has collapsed into a band of debris about three metres wide, and on the north, west and south sides there is a second band beyond it, the remains of an outer wall.

Those three sides are the informative ones. The slope from the summit is gentle on the west and steeper elsewhere, and the double wall appears where the ground gives least help. As at most forts of this kind, the builders read the hill and put their effort where the hill did not.

Black Meldon does not stand alone. The hillfort on the neighbouring hill, White Meldon, lies about 1.6 kilometres to the east on the other side of Meldon Burn, and the two look across the valley at each other. Whether they were occupied together, in succession, or by communities in competition, the earthworks cannot say — but neither should be considered without the other. The site is a Scheduled Monument.

Whether the two Meldon forts were occupied at the same time, one after the other, or by communities in competition with each other, the earthworks cannot say. No excavation has dated either, and the relationship between them remains an open question rather than a settled one.