"At midday they came to a hill whose top was wide and flattened like a shallow saucer with a green mounded rim." J.R.R. Tolkein, Fog on the barrow-downs, Fellowship of the Ring.
The first evidence for use of the Hillfort comes from the Bronze Age. Four barrows can be found within the ramparts (see map). These disk barrows are burial mounds typical of those to found across major ridges of the South Downs and other Chalklands in Southern England. The mounds probably date to around 1,500 BC. The mounds indicate that the hill was a sacred area and burial ground for local Bronze Age tribes for almost a millenia before the site developed in a defended settlement. The mounds all appear to have been emptied by looters and there are probably no human remains left.
While today the barrows can be seen as gentle mounds in the downland turf (two of them barely discernable,) they would have originally been built as highly distinctive and visible funerary monuments. The construction area would have been de-turfed, a circular ditch cut and the spoil used to build the chalk mound, which may well have been cylindrical, the material being fenced in by a wattle wall. The four barrows may have been accompanied by cremations or inhumations, the whole hill forming a burial ground and sacred area close to the sky, with views across the sea and highly visible to the surrounding tribes.
In 1825 a labourer digging flint from the site found a hoard of bronze metal-work which may have come from one of the barrows, the artefacts were said to have been found under a low mound of earth. The hoard consisted of four armillae, a broken torque (neck ring) and three spiral finger rings. In addition to these ornaments was a deliberately broken bronze axe-head. The obvious value of this collection suggests that it was buried either as grave goods for someone of status or as a votive offering in its own right. The deliberately broken axe and torque echoes the widespread celtic practise of ritually breaking or 'killing' objects offered up to the gods. This practise extended to people as witnessed by the sacrificial victims found as bog-bodies across northern Europe.
There are other similar finds of metal work in the Brighton area: a hoard at Black Rock contained eight axes, two spiral rings, and the remains of two bronze knives, while between Lewes and Brighton a barrow conatined a skeleton and two arm rings similar to those from Hollingbury along with a lozenge shaped pendant. Yet the Hove barrow, which once lay in a garden Palmeira Avenue, produced the most astonishing finds; here, within a partially preserved wooden coffin, lay the body of an adult male alongside a bronze knive, a stone macehead, a whetstone and a beautiful amber cup which might be of Danish origin. The mound, recorded prior to destruction in 1821 by the Rev.J.Skinner, was some 4.5m high and reportedly 75m in diameter (which I personally find hard to believe). Even if the Hove barrow was half this size, the grave undoubtedly belonged to someone of great rank, whose magnificent mound overlooking the ocean has now long since given way to the town.
There is still something evocative about these barrows despite their denuded state, their treasure looted and the bones of the chieftains now dust.