The earthworks crowning Little Sodbury Hill enclose roughly eleven acres and tell a story spanning three millennia. The Dobunni tribe, the dominant Iron Age people of the Severn basin, built the original fort between 400 and 100 BC. Two banks and a deep ditch defended the exposed eastern approach, while the steep Cotswold escarpment provided natural protection on the other sides. The name Sodbury itself reaches back to the Anglo-Saxon period — from the Old English 'Sobba's burh', meaning Sobba's fortified place.
The Romans recognised the fort's strategic value and reshaped it to support their western frontier. The inner bank was straightened into a near-perfect rectangle with rounded corners, a telltale sign of Roman military engineering quite unlike the organic curves of Iron Age construction. Stand on the ramparts and you command views across the Severn Vale to the Welsh mountains — precisely why every occupying force wanted this ground.
“The inner bank was straightened into a near-perfect rectangle with rounded corners, a telltale sign of Roman military engineering quite unlike the organic curves of Iron Age construction.”
The fort's most dramatic chapter came in AD 577, when the Saxon army of King Ceawlin camped here the night before the Battle of Dyrham, fought a few miles to the south. That battle was a turning point in English history: the Saxons killed three British kings and seized the cities of Bath, Gloucester, and Cirencester, driving a wedge between the Britons of Wales and those of the south-west. The fort may have seen action again during the Wars of the Roses, though the evidence is less certain. Today, the Cotswold Way runs directly through the ramparts, and walkers tread the same ground as soldiers from four different civilisations.
