It appears that during the Iron Age, settlements were constructed within ditched or banked enclosures. The enclosed areas could be quite large and contain one or more circular huts, rubbish pits, wells and grain storage pits.  However, if the ground was damp then a granary raised on four wooden posts, to prevent rats and mice eating the grain, would have been constructed.

Recreation of an Iron-age Homestead Photo courtesy Butser Farm

The huts were little different from those constructed in the Bronze Age (see Bronze Age page for details).  Hut posts were not always dug into the ground so post holes are not always found.  Within the enclosure one would expect to see corn grinding, weaving, leather working and basketry.  Animals may even have been kept inside the enclosure.  

By the Iron Age, the landscape was essentially full.  Population pressures caused people to expanded into even the poorer soils.  It is likely that the population density in our area was similar to that at Domesday - 1500 years later.  Thus there were approximately 35 families inhabiting the area which we know as Surrey Heath.  They probably lived in about 20 scattered homesteads.

The Windle Brook valley provides, as it did in the stone age, the only definite evidence of Iron-age human habitation in our area.  Two enclosure ditches were found in the Windlesham Arboretum together with fragments of Iron-age pottery jars which suggest use in the period third to first century BC ¹.   During excavations at Bagshot, a few shards of late Iron Age pottery were found.²

Although most people probably lived in simple scattered homesteads, at the turn of the millennium, local Iron-age peoples set up a considerable town (oppida) at Calleva (Silchester).  This site is currently being investigated by the department of archaeology at the University of Reading.

References:-

1.    Reading the Earth at Lightwater.  Geoff Cole,  Surrey Heath Archaeological & Heritage Trust, 1989.

2    Surrey Heath in the Dark Ages,  Phil Stevens, 1994. p4