Story of Highdown from Stone Age

Ferring History Group welcomed 70 members for a talk by

James Sainsbury at its February 4 meeting on the story of Highdown from the Stone Age to World

War II and the 1988 excavations that followed the uprooting of trees in the previous year’s hurricane, writes Ed Miller.

As the archaeologist–curator of Worthing Museum James was well placed to tell the story of the sucessive excavations and what they revealed.

The Stone Age relics were found on the surface, on the southern slopes – flint axes and other tools used by the first farmers who felled the trees and cultivated the land, he said. The Bronze Age enclosure and the earthworks of the Iron Age fort, on the hilltop, would have been visible for centuries but the existence of the Saxon cemetery, for which Highdown is best known, was only revealed in the late 19th Century by excavations.

The Roman period followed but there was no evidence of the Roman army on the hilltop – the fort had been abandoned long before the legions arrived. Sainsbury said Sussex may well have welcomed the Romans as peace-keepers, traders and bringers of a more sophisticated lifestyle. There was possibly a Villa halfway down the southern slope which served the bath-house that was excavated in 1939 and then back-filled to await a post-war further examination (which never happened). The graves that were discovered in the 1890s, when Edwin Henty put a plantation on the hiitop, and in the subsequent excavations were role clearly of the Saxon period, between the 6th and 8th Centuries but James said it was not clear who the 200 or more burials and cremations were for.

There was no evidence of a village of any kind, or of any houses at all. There was an abundance of ‘grave goods’, some of which are in Worthing Museum, showing the high status of many of the dead, and many weapons, which suggested that some of the graves were those of warriors – perhaps mercenaries employed to protect the area against raiders.

Others may well have been farmers living down on the coastal plain. Ferring must have been a settlement well before the founding of the minster church in 765 AD.

The building of the Radar Station in

1941, with its slit-trenches and machinegun nests must have disturbed much of the archaeology, Sainsbury told us, and this was confirmed when the military installations were removed in 1947 and the archaeologists were allowed a quick examination. Sainsbury said there was an on-going project to reexamine all the records of the previous excavations, as well as DNA analysis of the human remains in the Museum, and other investigations, to establish the full story of this remarkable ancient site.

We look forward to getting the results.