Corinium Afternoons: Salmonsbury

The Hillfort You'd Never Guess Was There

Walk the flat meadows at Greystones Farm, outside Bourton-on-the-Water, and there's little to give it away: cattle, wildflowers, the River Eye pushing through the reeds. Underneath is one of Gloucestershire's more substantial Iron Age hillforts, flattened by two thousand years of farming and known today mostly through geophysics and the odd skeleton that turns up during building work.

This is the closing talk in a year-long project pairing the Corinium Museum with Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust and a group of artists, led by the museum's Collections and Education Manager Caroline Morris. Survey work has traced the site back past the hillfort to a Neolithic causewayed enclosure, used for gatherings, cattle corralling and feasts around 5,500 years ago. Iron Age farmers built over it around 100BCE, adding double banks, ditches and a large annexe reaching down to the marsh, before the site was abandoned once the Romans laid the Fosse Way close by. Burial pits found during recent building work at the farm are now part of the museum's collection. The talk covers what a year spent on the archaeology, the landscape and the people living there has actually turned up, ahead of an exhibition of the resulting artwork at the museum.

Six thousand years of people using one patch of Cotswold meadow, told in an hour.

Thursday 24 September 2026 · Corinium Museum, Park Street, Cirencester, Gloucestershire GL7 2BX · Starts 2:00pm