| abstract
| - Cholesbury Camp is a large and well-preserved Iron Age hill fort on the northern edge of the village of Cholesbury in Buckinghamshire, England. It is roughly oval-shaped, covers an area of , and measures approximately north-east to south-west by north-west to south-east. The interior is a fairly level plateau and has been used as farmland since the medieval period. The fort is now a scheduled ancient monument. The fort is of the multivallate type, in other words having two or more lines of concentric earthworks. Most examples of such forts were built and used during the British Iron Age period between the 6th century BC and the Roman invasion of Britain in the 1st century AD. The date of Cholesbury Camp's construction is unclear, but may lie in the 2nd century BC during the Middle Iron Age. It was previously, though erroneously, attributed to the Danes and until the early 20th century was known locally as "The Danish Camp" and incorrectly recorded as such on maps. It has also been suggested that it may have been constructed on the same site as an earlier, "Bronze Age" defensive structure. The fort is located in the Chiltern Hills at an altitude of over . The porosity of the ground in the area severely limited the availability of surface water, essential for livestock, and therefore precluded year-round settlement adjacent to most of the upland pastures. However, close to the centre of the fort is a water source, called the Holy or Bury Pond. The constancy of this supply, over many hundreds of years, is cited as being crucial to the decision as to where to site the hill fort and for the early establishment of the isolated community at Cholesbury.
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