Burrough Hill Iron Age Hillfort

Guardian of the Leicestershire Landscape

Rising to about 210 metres above sea level, Burrough Hill crowns a steep-sided ironstone promontory just south of Melton Mowbray, offering sweeping views across the Vale of Belvoir and beyond. This prominent position made it an ideal defensive site in the Iron Age, when a substantial univallate hillfort was constructed along the edge of the escarpment. The earth and stone ramparts, still clearly visible today, enclose a large oval area and feature an inturned entrance at the southeast corner, once guarded by a stone-built structure and cobbled track. The hill’s natural defensibility, combined with its commanding panorama, suggests it was a place of regional importance, possibly one of the closest things to a ‘town’ in this part of Britain before the rise of Roman Leicester.

Layers of Ancient Life

Human activity on Burrough Hill stretches back to at least the Early Bronze Age, around 2800 BC, when small structures and a C-shaped enclosure were built on the western edge of the promontory. Flint tools and arrowheads found here hint at early settlement, while later Iron Age remains include a large roundhouse and numerous storage pits filled with domestic refuse, pottery, loom weights, and hearth waste. One particularly intriguing pit contained a deliberately smashed rotary quern, possibly as part of a ritual closure of a building. Finds such as a bone dice, gaming pieces, a polished bone flute, and a beautifully decorated blue glass bead suggest a community with access to a rich material culture, distinct from smaller contemporary farmsteads.

From Hillfort to Farmland

After the hillfort’s main occupation in the later Iron Age, the site continued to be used into the Roman period, with evidence of a 3rd–4th century AD farmstead built among the ruins of earlier structures. In the medieval era, the interior of the hillfort and surrounding land were ploughed as fields, their ridge-and-furrow patterns still faintly visible in places. The parish was enclosed in the 17th century, ending large-scale farming on the hill, but local traditions persisted: in the 16th century, antiquarian John Leland recorded that Whit Monday celebrations, including dancing and games, were held on the hill. Later, in the 19th century, the Melton Hunt used the slopes for steeple-chasing, and the earthworks even hosted a fair and the 1873 Grand National.

Rediscovery and Modern Exploration

Though long known as an ancient site, Burrough Hill remained relatively poorly understood until systematic investigations began in the 20th century. Early excavations in the 1930s and later small-scale digs revealed human bones, pottery, and structural remains, but it was the University of Leicester’s renewed fieldwork from 2010 onwards that transformed knowledge of the site. These excavations uncovered a matching set of highly decorated bronze fittings from an Iron Age chariot, one of the most significant Iron Age metalwork finds in the East Midlands. Geophysical surveys also revealed a large Iron Age settlement just outside the hillfort, suggesting the community may have been much larger than previously thought. Today, the hillfort is protected as a Scheduled Ancient Monument and forms part of Burrough Hill Country Park, open to the public for quiet exploration and reflection.