A deep ditch round a natural flat hill top, has made a steep walled camp. There are four entrances, north and south, these in the middle of the long shaped enclosure, and east and west, both these flanked by a pair of large artificial mounds. It is all probably of early British make, for the Roman invaders certainly used it, as fragments of pottery and brick tiles of that date, and a canRead ‘coin’ ? have been picked up, while more particularly two puzzling bases of Roman period masonry work were uncovered by Mr. Jos. Quarrell, who owns the Walls, when he was planting his thousand and one plum trees on its slope.
This stone work is on the top of a western mound: it is not part of any building or gateway, and round it Mr. G. H. Jack found bits of Roman period pottery alongside it.
What is known about the history of Sutton Walls is thin and hazy. For the glibly told tale that King Offa had a palace on the top, and it was there that King Ethelbert was murdered, there is no archæological support, and according to Canon Bannister, who gives a long report on it in the Woolhope Transactions, the historical evidence for the tale is very weak and very doubtful. There is no evidence of any buildings on the camp.
More than a year ago, standing on the western mound, I noticed that the two churches of Marden and Wellington which he below in the Lugg Valley, almost aligned to the mound, but not quite. By walking south, the exact point to which they did align was found to be in the highest corner of the deep ditch fortifying the camp. This indicated an ancient straight track (long before Roman times), which so often touches the edge of a camp. At Dinedor, for instance, standing on the mound at the Camp corner, the spire of All Saints’ aligns so exactly with the Cathedral tower that it seems to spring up between its broken pinacles. I therefore at the time marked on the 6in. Ordnance map the line through the churches, and noted that to the South-East it went through Over Court (at the foot of Sutton Walls), the White Stone, Withington, and Weston Beggard Church. Also, by sighting over rods, that it terminated in the highest hill point on the Woolhope Hills (probably Seager Hill), and at the other end, on Derndale Hill.
On November 19th last Mr. Quarrell came to me on Hereford Corn Market to tell me that he had seen in a newly ploughed field an ancient road going straight up the hill for the camp from near the “Old School House.” I went out the next morning and found the squire of Sutton Walls cider-making, and as I tasted a sample of his draught perry, “mixed fruit with some smoky Huffcaps in it,” gave a mental toast: May your shadow never grow less nor your snuff-box empty, and may your rough little dogs and you get many more badgers from their holts while you wait for your plums to bear fruit on the “Walls.”
His lad came to point out the track they had seen. The harrow had been over most of the field by this time, but the dark mark at the top went, not for the mound, but for the dip to the right in the camp ditch, exactly where I had found the churches to align up. I asked where the track pointed to at the hill foot. “To that oak tree on the road.” Going there, I sighted up with rods, and found that the spot was exactly in the line between Marden Church and the camp notch. Mr. Quarrell (coming on later), and a ploughman on the field confirmed the exact position of this dark mark, the supposed trace of an ancient road or track.
The interest of this bit of evidence is that neither of these three persons knew anything of my previous observations on
the spot, and yet the ghost of a track which they plainly saw lay exactly on the very line which many months before I
had marked on the map on the evidence of the church alignment as being the probable course of an ancient trackway. It
did not go into the camp, but was there before the camp was made, and helped to decide its site.
A. W.
Source info: MS note by AW “H Times Dec 13th 1924”.
Watkins describes the finding of an old track aligning on the Sutton Walls earthwork. This account is more detailed than that in The Old Straight Track, pages 191–192.