 Inside
the Chieftain's House |
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This
is the largest roundhouse to have existed at Castell Henllys and it
totally dominates the fort and much of the surrounding landscape.
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This roundhouse has a diameter of thirteen metres and the apex of the massive conical roof towers nearly eight metres above the central hearth. We think this is where the Chieftains of Castell Henllys lived in the Iron Age. Inside the roundhouse you can see the luxury in which the Chieftain lived, with ornately carved benches around the formal hearth, grand iron firedogs and a bronze cauldron hanging on chains suspended from the roof. Thin wisps of smoke coil towards the roof eight meters above |
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Beyond the hearth there are three partitioned rooms with beds and colourful woollen hangings and blankets in a herringbone weave of red, yellow and blue; dyes used by the Iron Age people from madder, weld and woad. The walls are decorated with curvilinear Celtic art forms in ochre and other natural pigments. From these sumptuous surroundings, an Iron Age Chieftain would have ruled the territory of Castell Henllys. The territory probably extended to the local skyline encompassing around twenty square miles including pasture, small fields of crops and woodland; much of it would have been coppiced and pollarded to provide building materials. Within this landscape there were smaller defended enclosures with one or more roundhouses whose occupants may have been related to the Chieftain, perhaps they were farmers or they may have been given special permission to be sited so close to Castell Henllys for other reasons. Still more roundhouses might have been scattered around the landscape occupied by those who did not own their land, but evidence for these buildings is rarely found in our modern developed landscape because they leave little structural evidence in the archaeological record. The reconstruction of the Chieftain's roundhouse at Castell Henllys has helped us to better understand the relationship between buildings and the prehistoric landscape through the requirement of natural building materials. |
