The hill-village of Burpham, in Sussex, is clustered near an oblong promontory fort (Class A) constructed on a tongue of land, around which a loop is formed by the river Arun. A gigantic vallum and exterior fosse cross the neck of the peninsula. The early Norman church of the village stands but a few yards beyond an entrance breach in the northern rampart. Mr A. H. Allcroft, pursuing the “method of exhaustions,” declares the earthwork to be Danish, and Mr P. M. Johnston suggests that the church occupies a pagan site. At all events the juxtaposition can hardly be considered casual.
Immediately to the east of Hathersage churchyard, Derbyshire, may be seen a simple circular earthwork, consisting of a high rampart with a moat outside. It is classed by Dr J. C. Cox in the division C of the scheme above-mentioned[58], namely, the division which embraces round enclosures of a defensive character. An analogous earthwork adjoins the churchyard of Tissington, also in Derbyshire[59].
Without pursuing this quest further, one or two pitfalls must be pointed out. Entrenchments found near a parish church may sometimes represent portions of the “ring fence” of a Mediaeval settlement; and the banks, which once bore a hedge or palisade, might be hastily ascribed to an earlier period. Mr Allcroft, in the work just mentioned, cites numerous warning examples. Again, banks of boulder clay or glacial drift may assume a false appearance of ridging, as if due to the work of man. To glacial action I venture to assign the surface irregularities near Ludborough Church, Lincolnshire, though they may represent the partially erased banks of the Mediaeval village. Close by the neighbouring churchyard of St Lawrence at Fulstow, one sees similar unevenness of the ground, the most important hillock being perhaps a grave wherein were buried some sixscore parishioners who died of the sweating sickness in the early seventeenth century. Once more, the traces of earthwork, military or agricultural, below the church of St Michael, on Glastonbury Tor, Somerset, may not be very ancient, and I should not connect them in any manner with any ideas which were held by the Gothic architects.