alloy. Strong, crude and cheap, iron was a more democratic metal. Its raw material was a humble orange rock found in surface seams throughout the known world, and the end product's versatility was to revolutionise every aspect of prehistoric life. Before its arrival in around 500 BC, the vast majority of Britons still went out hunting with a bag of rocks, and struggled to master the rudiments of agriculture by scraping away at the soil with flint hand tools. Iron pulled us out of the Stone Age, and bequeathed the technology that would characterise daily life right up to the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, considering the metallurgical basis of the steel that underpins modern industrial society, the Iron Age lives on today.
The problem for our prehistoric forebears was that this miracle metal's grubby, utilitarian appearance belied a production process considerably more complex than anything they had previously mastered. The temperatures required to coax liquid metal from the rocky ore were stupendous, and procured only a hopeless, spongy material whose impurities had to be wearyingly hammered out. Even then you had a substance that remained a poor match for bronze until reheated, and in a precise manner that caused charcoal to combine with the iron to produce a bar of crude but highly resilient carburised steel. Take that, and after several further hours of highly skilled red-hot battering, you might finally have a knife.
Producing decent iron was a royal pain in the ancient behind, but less so than trying to skin a boar with a pebble. The widespread availability of decent hand tools, heatproof cookware and above all agricultural equipment – principally the iron-tipped ploughshare – had a profound impact on daily life. And in a strangely circular manner, so did the arduous complexity of the iron-making process itself. Once your tribe or extended family had pitched up near a supply of ore, and set up its forges and furnaces, you'd want to stay put. You'd clear woodland to make charcoal, and plant crops in the space left behind. The itinerant lifestyles still prominent in Bronze Age Britain became gradually redundant: after centuries of having to supplement their diets and lifestyles through trade or plunder, communities around Britain found they could co-exist in self-sufficient agricultural harmony.
Not that they always did, of course. Immigration was by no means a recent phenomenon – isotope analysis of teeth found near Stonehenge has shown that many of those buried there were born in what is now Switzerland – but during the early Iron Age, Britain's population was swollen by a steady influx of continental Celts: some of them economic migrants or refugees, others determined invaders with conquest in mind. (On behalf of all those irked by the global spread of the Irish pub, I'd like here to emphasise that the word 'Celt' was coined only in the eighteenth century, and the concept of a united Celtic culture contrived only in the nineteenth, partly to endow the very German Prince Albert with some sort of ancestral link to Britain. In fact, beyond vague similarities in language and religious ritual, there's little to connect what are commonly described as 'Celtic' peoples.)
This was the era of the great hill forts – I'd driven past one at Lydney Camp, just down the road from Cinderbury – though rather uselessly, no one is sure whether these were built by encroaching 'Celts' or retreating native Britons. It seems, though, that by about 300 BC the shakedown had endowed most of Britain with a largely integrated populace, albeit one generally under the aegis of regional warlords.
A modest, ring-fenced farmstead such as Cinderbury, generally home to a single extended family, was the default Iron Age settlement. The small, ordered fields the inhabitants worked – such a distinctive feature of the English countryside even then that Caesar commented on them after his abortive invasions in 55 and 54 BC – would have
The problem for our prehistoric forebears was that this miracle metal's grubby, utilitarian appearance belied a production process considerably more complex than anything they had previously mastered. The temperatures required to coax liquid metal from the rocky ore were stupendous, and procured only a hopeless, spongy material whose impurities had to be wearyingly hammered out. Even then you had a substance that remained a poor match for bronze until reheated, and in a precise manner that caused charcoal to combine with the iron to produce a bar of crude but highly resilient carburised steel. Take that, and after several further hours of highly skilled red-hot battering, you might finally have a knife.
Producing decent iron was a royal pain in the ancient behind, but less so than trying to skin a boar with a pebble. The widespread availability of decent hand tools, heatproof cookware and above all agricultural equipment – principally the iron-tipped ploughshare – had a profound impact on daily life. And in a strangely circular manner, so did the arduous complexity of the iron-making process itself. Once your tribe or extended family had pitched up near a supply of ore, and set up its forges and furnaces, you'd want to stay put. You'd clear woodland to make charcoal, and plant crops in the space left behind. The itinerant lifestyles still prominent in Bronze Age Britain became gradually redundant: after centuries of having to supplement their diets and lifestyles through trade or plunder, communities around Britain found they could co-exist in self-sufficient agricultural harmony.
Not that they always did, of course. Immigration was by no means a recent phenomenon – isotope analysis of teeth found near Stonehenge has shown that many of those buried there were born in what is now Switzerland – but during the early Iron Age, Britain's population was swollen by a steady influx of continental Celts: some of them economic migrants or refugees, others determined invaders with conquest in mind. (On behalf of all those irked by the global spread of the Irish pub, I'd like here to emphasise that the word 'Celt' was coined only in the eighteenth century, and the concept of a united Celtic culture contrived only in the nineteenth, partly to endow the very German Prince Albert with some sort of ancestral link to Britain. In fact, beyond vague similarities in language and religious ritual, there's little to connect what are commonly described as 'Celtic' peoples.)
This was the era of the great hill forts – I'd driven past one at Lydney Camp, just down the road from Cinderbury – though rather uselessly, no one is sure whether these were built by encroaching 'Celts' or retreating native Britons. It seems, though, that by about 300 BC the shakedown had endowed most of Britain with a largely integrated populace, albeit one generally under the aegis of regional warlords.
A modest, ring-fenced farmstead such as Cinderbury, generally home to a single extended family, was the default Iron Age settlement. The small, ordered fields the inhabitants worked – such a distinctive feature of the English countryside even then that Caesar commented on them after his abortive invasions in 55 and 54 BC – would have
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