Standing at the topograph on Haresfield Beacon, you are at the tip of an extraordinary V-shaped promontory jutting westward from the Cotswold escarpment, with the ground falling steeply away on three sides. The three-dimensional direction finder identifies landmarks visible on a clear day: the Malvern Hills, the Forest of Dean, the Brecon Beacons, and the silver curve of the River Severn far below. But the real depth here is underfoot. The site has been occupied and modified for at least four thousand years. Bronze Age round barrows sit on the western end of Ring Hill, marking the burials of people who lived here two millennia before the Romans arrived. East of Ring Hill, a substantial earthwork known as the Bulwarks crosses the neck of the spur — a single bank 45 feet wide and 7 feet high with an outer ditch 40 feet wide and 7 feet deep. This unexcavated hillfort is a scheduled monument. Just metres from the car park stands a brick observation bunker from the Second World War, a reminder that this commanding viewpoint has served military purposes into living memory. The National Trust acquired the estate and commissioned an archaeological survey in 1994-95 by Charles Parry of Gloucestershire County Council. The veteran beech trees in nearby Shortwood are over two hundred years old, and records show the woodland was owned by Gloucester Abbey as early as 1297. Seven centuries of recorded ownership — and several millennia of human presence before that.
“East of Ring Hill, a substantial earthwork known as the Bulwarks crosses the neck of the spur — a single bank 45 feet wide and 7 feet high with an outer ditch 40 feet wide and 7 feet deep.”
