Mount Caburn is a 150-metre (492 ft) prominent landmark in East Sussex, England, about one mile (1.6 km) east of Lewes overlooking the village of Glynde. It is the highest part of an outlier of the South Downs, separated from the main range by Glynde Reach, a tributary of the River Ouse.
Enclosure
On the summit of Caburn are the remains of an Iron Age hill fort. The hill fort has been repeatedly excavated, by Augustus Pitt Rivers from 1877 to 1878, the Curwens from 1925 to 1926, and again from 1937 to 1938, and the Sussex Archaeological Society from 1996 to 1998. It may have the most excavations per site in Britain, with 170 trenches.
Pollen records (from peat at the southern base) indicate that prior to 2000 BC the hill was covered with dark yew woodlands. The fact that a single Neolithic leaf-shaped arrowhead is the only pre-Bronze Age find on Caburn, despite the extent and duration of excavations, suggests that there was little permanent occupation then.
Since before the first excavations, it has been assumed that this enclosure was defensive, making a conventional hill fort. However the most recent excavators have challenged this assumption, arguing instead that the site was a religious enclosure, rather than a military fort or fortified farmstead. They point to the contents of the small pits, the insubstantial rampart, and its weak defensive attributes. The most recent excavators argue that these are not random, or mere domestic rubbish, but are structured deposits and appear "ritually charged". The NE corner of the enclosure seemed to have special significance, because the high-status objects were mostly deposited there. That assumption has now been disproved. The excavation of trenches through the chalk dump (the spoil had been dumped in the adjacent valley instead of being used to build a bank) and a small internal bank turned up Romano-British pottery. Therefore, the outer ditch is Romano-British or later, perhaps a Saxon measure against Viking raids.
It appears that the Caburn was densely grazed during the Roman period, when the hill slopes around were a patchwork of rectangular ploughed fields. Then the hill probably returned to scrub, but by the Norman Conquest the Caburn was heavily grazed again and the hill slopes were ploughed into strips. Both the Roman rectangular fields and the medieval strips are still visible today.
- Some local accounts allege that by the 18th century it was called Carber, and before that it was called Calborough Hill.