There's nothing more universally deflating as a British child than being told you're going to see some ancient hill fort, letting your castle-filled imagination run wild, before arriving there after a long car journey, and just seeing a hill.
That's why some archaeologists "enhanced" their hills by adding "reconstructed" features that were probably never there in the first place:
> [...] O'Kelly concluded that they had made up a retaining wall, but had fallen from the face of the mound. As part of the restoration, this wall was "rebuilt" and the cobblestones were fixed into a near-vertical steel-reinforced concrete wall surrounding the front of the mound. This work is controversial among the archaeological community. [...] Neil Oliver described the reconstruction as "a bit brutal, a bit overdone, kind of like Stalin does the Stone Age". Critics of the new wall claim that the technology to fix a retaining wall at this angle did not exist when the mound was created.
Another nearby place to visit if you're in the Chichester area is Kingley Vale [1]. It too has a hill fort at the top, but even more impressive is the amazing 1000-year-old yew forest at the bottom. Planted (according to tradition) by the Saxons to celebrate a victory over the Vikings.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 22.5 ms ] thread> [...] O'Kelly concluded that they had made up a retaining wall, but had fallen from the face of the mound. As part of the restoration, this wall was "rebuilt" and the cobblestones were fixed into a near-vertical steel-reinforced concrete wall surrounding the front of the mound. This work is controversial among the archaeological community. [...] Neil Oliver described the reconstruction as "a bit brutal, a bit overdone, kind of like Stalin does the Stone Age". Critics of the new wall claim that the technology to fix a retaining wall at this angle did not exist when the mound was created.
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange)
Another nearby place to visit if you're in the Chichester area is Kingley Vale [1]. It too has a hill fort at the top, but even more impressive is the amazing 1000-year-old yew forest at the bottom. Planted (according to tradition) by the Saxons to celebrate a victory over the Vikings.
[1] https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/visiting-woods/woods/kingle...
ed: also check out the lovely country pub in the village of Stoughton at the bottom.
You can park close by, but it still feels like a hike to the top.