This page gives a list of ‘Camps and Settlements’ in the ‘Banburyshire Ancient Sites’ guide.
Though modern historians have called them ‘forts’ or ‘camps’, ancient local settlements – primarily from the Iron Age/Celtic era – offer a view of the landscape as the ancient dwellers of this landscape would have seen it; when the land was far less populous than today.
A major Celtic settlement, later overthrown by the Romans and translocated to the vale below. Today Madmarston Hill is a prime example of the slow destruction of our ancient monuments by agriculture, and portends a greater fate for us all.
In the middle of a meander of the River Evenlode, just south of where Akeman Street crosses the valley, North Leigh is the remains of a small 2nd to 4th Century Roman villa, built on top of an earlier Iron Age farmstead which occupied the site. An English Heritage site with public access, its a wonderful stopping off point for walks along the Evenlode valley.
Straddling the top of a 145 metre/476 foot ridge-line, Rainsborough Camp is one of the best spots to take in the local landscape. It’s an early Iron Age double-walled hill fort, in size on a par with many of the more famous sites along The Ridgeway in South Oxfordshire. Rainsborough also sits alongside an ancient trackway – The Portway
Crossed by ancient local and regional trackways, Tadmarton Heath is an historic landscape that covers the wide flat top of this notable local hill.
A single-walled Iron Age hill fort, ravaged by time – its ditch filled in by recent agriculture, its southern flank quarried for stone. Not a grand site, but a well-located one, 196 metres/643 feet up on a hilltop with views over the Evenlode Valley, and where a number of ancient paths meet.