Castell Henllys Iron Age Hill Fort - BBC series "Surviving the Iron Age" - surviving the volunteers!

BBC series 'Surviving the Iron Age'- filmed on location at Castell Henllys Iron Age HillFort

'Surviving the volunteers!'

In September 2000 seventeen people from a wide range of backgrounds attempted to go back in time to the Iron Age at Castell Henllys Iron Age Fort in Pembrokeshire west Wales. They were challenged to do so by the BBC who filmed their attempt, to 'Survive the Iron Age'.

On the morning of Sunday the seventeenth of September, the seventeen volunteers waved goodbye to all their modern creature comforts, toothbrushes, underpants, cigarettes, toilet paper and so on and entered another world, a prehistoric fort with Iron Age defences, thatched roundhouses and other buildings reconstructed on their original foundations by archaeologists.

Castell Henllys Iron Age Fort ('the castle of the old, royal court') is owned and managed by Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority. The fort lies within thirty acres of beautiful woodland and river meadows in the north of the National Park. Castell Henllys is open to visitors between Easter and the end of October and, through innovative interpretation, helps visitors to understand what Iron Age life was like over two thousand years ago.

Presenting the past to the public at Castell Henllys is one thing, but to enable seventeen inexperienced and unwary volunteers to live in conditions similar to those of the Iron Age was a completely different matter.

They could not benefit from the generations of knowledge and experience that preceded real Iron Age people. Nor could they hope to understand the complexities of social rules and traditions that must have surrounded Iron Age people. And they would not be able to cast aside their freedom of thought and action in order to enter and survive the rigid social structure and daily rigour that dominated the Iron Age.

To help them in their attempt to taste Iron Age life we supplied the volunteers with materials, clothing and food similar to those of the Iron Age based on archaeological evidence. The group were to find well stocked roundhouses.

There were eighty five wooden bowls, plates and cups, one hundred wooden spoons and knives.
There were iron knives and antler knives, bronze needles and pins, iron axes and hammers, two small saws, chisels and gouges, tongs and bill hooks and a water trough.
They were given five iron cauldrons and a bronze cauldron, querns for grinding grain, leather hides, wooden buckets and tubs, bread ovens, candles and beeswax, forty woollen fleeces, eel traps, hemp rope and twine, two looms, a scratch plough, a sled, four antler pick axes

. . . and an outside latrine.

We supplied them with Iron Age period clothing based on surviving evidence from the archaeological record and descriptions in contemporary Roman and Greek documentary sources. Each volunteer was given a package containing a range of clothing made especially for him or her.

Typically a woman would have a long gown or a skirt with a long tunic and a cloak all in wool and then a belt and a pair of leather shoes or sandals.

Men would have a woollen tunic and breeches with a cloak, belt and leather shoes. Each had a pin or a brooch made from bronze, antler and, for the Chief, a special Iron brooch.

The group were given enough food to keep them going for the full seven weeks but, after the first few days they would have to prepare it themselves.

This meant grinding the grain to make flour before baking bread, skinning, butchering and hanging their own meat and then cooking it over an open hearth (on one occasion ending in dire consequences).
So did they survive the Iron Age?

Castell Henllys Iron Age Fort is the closest reconstruction of an authentic Iron Age site in Britain, which is why the BBC chose it for the location of the series. Of course it is impossible to truly experience Iron Age life from the twenty first century but what is certain is that our volunteers shared the same spaces and trod in the same foot steps as our Iron Age ancestors at Castell Henllys over two thousand years ago.