page_title: W. J. Varley
section_title: The Cheshire hillforts
hierarchical_section_title: W. J. Varley / Excavations / The Cheshire hillforts
caption_attribution_description: English: Atlas of Hillforts 3187 Photograph of the earthworks on the east side of Eddisbury hill fort
context_page_description: William Jones Varley, FSA was a British geographer and archaeologist, particularly known for his excavations of English Iron Age hillforts, including Maiden Castle and Eddisbury hillfort in Cheshire, Old Oswestry hillfort in Shropshire, and Castle Hill in West Yorkshire. He was also a pioneer of geographical research and education in colonial Ghana where he worked in 1947–56, and was involved in historical conservation there.
context_section_description: In the early 1930s, at the suggestion of C. F. C. Hawkes, Varley turned his attention to the hillforts of Cheshire. His excavation of Maiden Castle on Bickerton Hill was his first on a hillfort, and the first to be carried out by an archaeologist on any hillfort in the county. He started to excavate in 1932, aided by a group of his students from the University of Liverpool, but the main excavations of 1934 and 1935, supervised by Varley with J. P. Droop, were carried out under the "Bickerton Camp Scheme", which recruited an assortment of volunteers including unemployed Liverpudlians, school children and members of the Liverpool Ramblers' Association. The investigation concentrated on the hillfort's inturned entrance, where post-holes were found, suggested to be gateposts. Trenches were also cut through the double ramparts. The inner ramparts were found to consist of sand and carbonised oak timbers protected by a stone cap and revetments (retaining walls), which Varley compared with the murus gallicus method of construction, typical of Gaul. An outer revetment protected the outer ramparts, which had an internal line of turf, suggesting the possibility of multiple phases of construction. Varley described Maiden Castle as a promontory camp; he initially concluded that it dated from around 0–50 AD and had subsequently been strengthened in around 50 AD when Roman expansion began to threaten the area. By 1940, he had revised these dates substantially earlier, concluding that the hillfort was built in the 2nd century BC and had been strengthened in the 1st century BC; modern radiocarbon dating moves the dates earlier still. A contemporary review of his 1937 paper on the excavation describes it as "a valuable review of the problems of the life of Britain in the few centuries before the Roman conquest." Modern archaeologists Richard Mason and Rachel Pope describe his reports on Maiden Castle as showing "fairly meticulous archaeological reasoning".
  Varley declared the Bickerton Camp Scheme "a success, scientifically and socially", and he continued to employ volunteers under the scheme – mainly unemployed Liverpool dock workers – in his excavation of the much larger and more complex Eddisbury hillfort, on Eddisbury Hill near Delamere, which was carried out during the summers of 1936, 1937 and 1938. The investigation was hampered by part of the area being under cultivation with crops. Four major and seven minor trenches were dug, with investigations focusing on two potential entrances, a junction between parts of the earthworks, and the area known as Merrick's Hill, where buildings were visible at the surface. His interpretation of the excavation's results involved a complex construction history in several phases from c. 400–250 BC to the Anglo-Saxon period, with subsequent occupation extending into the post-medieval period. Some of his finds at Eddisbury, together with a model of his excavations, were displayed in the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities of the British Museum in 1937, but the Second World War and Varley's move to Ghana delayed publication of the results; the full report did not appear until 1950 and has significant problems, including lacking illustrations of his finds. Mason and Pope speculate that many of Varley's site records might have been lost during the war and that the 1950 paper might have been based partly on memory.
  Dan Garner has suggested that Varley might have started a preliminary excavation at Kelsborrow hillfort in April 1938, but any plans to excavate other Cheshire hillforts were presumably interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. All of the finds from his excavations of Maiden Castle and Eddisbury were long believed lost.
caption: Eddisbury hillfort
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