Wednesday, 15 January 2025
Visitors are invited to travel back in time to the Iron Age, when rarely seen finds from two East Midlands hillforts will be on display in a brand-new free exhibition at the University of Nottingham Museum at Lakeside Arts.
The exhibition Life at an Iron Age Hillfort: Investigating Breedon Hill & Burrough Hill, which opens on Friday 17 January 2025, brings together items discovered during excavations at Breedon Hill and Burrough Hill hillforts, both in Leicestershire.
A range of fascinating objects associated with craftworking, food production and social activities will be featured in the exhibition, offering visitors glimpses of hillfort life over 2,000 years ago. The finds are cared for by Leicestershire County Council Museums who are loaning them for the exhibition.
At the centre of the display sits a rare and spectacular collection of decorated fittings from an Iron Age chariot and horse harness which shows that some hillfort residents were wealthy – possibly nobles or warriors – and well-connected with other areas of Iron Age Britain. The fittings, along with a group of iron tools, had been gathered together as a hoard and deliberately buried in a container as a religious offering at the bottom of a deep pit at Burrough Hill and were discovered during excavations in 2013.
Excavation of an Iron Age roundhouse, pits, and a cross-section of the hillfort ramparts at Burrough Hill, ©ULAS.
The finds from Breedon Hill were recovered during excavations in advance of quarrying between the 1940s–1960s by pioneering archaeologists Dame Kathleen Kenyon and John Wacher, while the Burrough Hill artefacts are from several excavations at the hillfort, most recently by archaeologists and students from the University of Leicester, between 2010-2014.
A wintry view of Burrough Hill, with the hillfort earthworks perfectly highlighted in the snow, including the impressive in-turned entrance in the top right-hand corner, ©Leicestershire County Council.
Deputy Director of the University of Leicester Archaeological Services, John Thomas, who is also Co-Director of the Burrough Hill excavations and curator of the new exhibition, said: “The discovery of the Burrough Hill Hoard was one of the highlights of the excavations we carried out at the hillfort. It was amazing to see these objects coming out of the ground in such good condition after they had been buried for so long. Curiously, there had been a deliberate attempt to destroy everything in a fire, as we found ash and scorching of the pit sides around the hoard. That must have been part of the ritual process, but it had not fully worked, and the ash helped preserve the decorative detail so that we can learn from it today.”
Hillforts often survive as striking and recognisable monuments from the Iron Age due to their impressive earthwork banks and prominent positions in the landscape, but their distribution is uneven across Britain, and there are few examples in the East Midlands. Many of the hillforts that do exist in the region were clearly important centres, but few have seen substantive or recent investigation and our current understanding of them is poor.
Excavation of an Iron Age roundhouse, pits, and a cross-section of the hillfort ramparts at Burrough Hill, ©ULAS.
Archaeologists have studied Iron Age hillforts for over 150 years, but there is still much to be learnt about these important sites and the people who built and used them. Hillforts are often thought of primarily as defended sites, but excavations such as those at Breedon Hill and Burrough Hill have shown that they could have been used in a many different ways – domestic, agricultural and religious – which the variety of finds featured in the exhibition aims to illustrate.
This is the first dedicated Iron Age exhibition at the University of Nottingham Museum, and I am delighted that we can display these exciting regional finds. I am grateful to the University of Leicester Archaeological Services and Leicestershire County Council Museums for this wonderful opportunity.”
Helen Sharp, Curator (Archaeology), Leicestershire County Council Teaching and Learning Team, added: “It is wonderful to be able to share Leicestershire’s archaeological discoveries further afield, collaborating with our colleagues in the wider East Midlands. We thank the University of Nottingham Museum for the opportunity and continue our close working relationship with University of Leicester Archaeological Services.”
The exhibition runs from Friday 17 January 2025 to Sunday 13 July 2025 at the University of Nottingham Museum, Lakeside Arts, and admission is free. Opening times, 12 noon-4pm Thursday to Sunday. Closed Monday to Wednesday.
Alongside the exhibition there is a Public Programme of events which starts with a Free Family Drop-In Event on Saturday 22 February, from 12 noon-3:30pm, where visitors can explore the world of Iron Age art and undertake artwork inspired by the artefacts; and an accompanying talk Ramparts, Roundhouses & Rituals on Wednesday 12 March 2025 at 1pm at Lakeside Arts. Booking and more information can be found here.
Story credits
More information is available from Clare Pickersgill, Keeper of the University of Nottingham Museum, via clare.pickersgill@nottingham.ac.uk; John Thomas, Deputy Director of University of Leicester Archaeological Services, via jst6@le.ac.uk
Notes to editors:
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