Penbury knoll

I like Martin Down, I like the chalk grassland landscape, it's an open book if you can read the language. I'm sitting on the crest of one of the later monuments to human activity, a large World War Two rifle range butt surveying Martin Down, a landscape created and marked by man since man made marks. Directly in front of me is Bokerley Ditch, a 3 mile long Roman bank and ditch defencive work which cut through the landscape, built, it's believe, on an earlier Bronze Age defencive feature. To my right, Ackling Dyke, the Roman road connecting Badbury Rings and Old Sarum.  Just beyond are the wooded mounds of Neolithic long barrows, which house the remains of the earliest static human residents. In the fields all about are the ploughed remains of Bronze age barrows, burial mounds of a later elite. Whilst, criss crossing the land are hedgerows, hollow ways and well trodden tracks, all that remain of a Post Medieval agricultural landscape. Finally, crowning the horizon, Penbury Knoll Iron Age hillfort* and enclosed field system. It's clear the land here has always been favoured and a land that's been toiled over since the introduction of farming. And that's only the monuments we can see, aerial photographs of the area show a landscape denslt covered in ploughed out features.  I'm lost for a while, deep in thought about the past of the land. Until a flock of birds, making the sound of rustling leafs, fly overhead and I return to the present.

*I've mention Penbury before, I don't Penbury as a hillfort, I think the RCHME categorized it wrongly. I think Penbury was something else.