Members were taken by Deborah Overton for a stroll up Bredon Hill at their Speaker’s Evening on May 28.

This was a walk taken in our imaginations, however. As we “walked” up the hill, starting at the abandoned medieval village of Woollashill (near Woollas Hall), Deborah, a retired landscape archaeologist, guided her audience on a trip back through time to the Neolithic period.

Woollashill village was abandoned in the 16th century. The village was never very prosperous, standing as it did on only marginally fertile land, and it was no cataclysm that led to its abandonment, rather a gradual decay as people died or migrated to find better conditions.

The Jacobean Woollas Hall probably stands on the site of the medieval manor house to which the villagers paid rents.

Ascending the hill, you pass the location of St Katharine’s Chapel, which served the village, and of the Holy Well which was the only source of water for the dwellers in the Iron Age Hill Fort at the summit.

Before we arrive at the summit, however, we have to remark that Bredon Hill also boasts Saxon and Roman remains – a pagan Saxon cemetery at Bredon’s Norton for example, Roman farmsteads dotted around the slopes of the hill, and a high status villa also at Bredon’s Norton. Apparently Worcestershire is scattered with Roman farms, some of them very prosperous, but the really high-status properties are to be found in the Cotswolds (not a lot changes).

Parson’s Folly Tower (immediately identifiable from a distance) stands at the centre of the Iron Age Fort – Kemerton Camp. The remains of Iron Age round houses are scattered within the fort. Also near the summit, a round barrow dating from the Beaker Period and excavated in 1963 yielded the remains of a man and a woman, though these burials were not contemporary with one another.

One could go on for some time, listing all the significant archaeological remains to be found on Bredon; certainly next time I take a walk on the hill, I shall view it with new eyes, as will all of Deborah’s listeners.

This was the last Historical Society talk of the current season. Our next season starts at the end of September with an update on recent research into the history of Evesham Bell Tower.

GERRY HARTE