Combe Hill: Eastbourne’s 5,000-Year-Old Neolithic Enclosure

What is a causewayed enclosure?

Causewayed enclosures are among the earliest large monuments built in Britain. They were constructed in England from shortly before 3700 BC until at least 3500 BC — the early Neolithic, when the first farming communities were settling the landscape and beginning to shape it in permanent ways. Each enclosure is defined by one or more rings of ditches that are deliberately broken by gaps, or causeways, of undug ground, with banks raised from the excavated chalk.

Several hundred are known across Europe, but only around 70 to 80 have been identified in Britain, most of them in southern England. Sussex holds a notable cluster, and Combe Hill is one of them — listed by early researchers among the first causewayed enclosures ever recognised in the country.

The Combe Hill monument

The enclosure occupies a saddle of high ground between the two summits of Combe Hill, on the northern edge of the South Downs above Willingdon and close to Jevington. It takes the form of a double circuit of ditch segments, each length running between roughly 10 and 35 metres, with an earthen bank raised on the inner edge of each and a causeway of undisturbed chalk separating one from the next.

The inner circuit encloses an area of about 1.1 hectares, though it does not appear to be complete — the slope on the northern side is very steep and shows no earthworks on the surface. The outer ditch survives as visible earthwork to the east and west of the inner ring, but there is no surface sign of it continuing across the steeper northern and southern ground. In total the monument covers around 1.7 hectares. The banks survive today to a maximum height of about 0.8 metres — worn low by five millennia of weather, grazing and footfall, but still traceable across the turf.

How it was discovered and studied

The earthworks on Combe Hill have been noted for well over a century. The antiquarian Hadrian Allcroft included the site in his 1908 book Earthwork of England, describing its form without recognising its great age. Prehistoric identification came a generation later through the work of E. Cecil Curwen, one of the pioneers of Sussex archaeology.

In 1929–30 Curwen surveyed the site using the “bosing” technique — pacing and probing the ground to trace buried features without excavation — and detected around 16 interruptions, or causeways, in the inner ditch circuit. His published accounts described Combe Hill as a Neolithic camp and helped establish it as one of the earliest causewayed enclosures then recognised in southern England.

The enclosure has since been excavated twice. In August 1949, R. C. Musson directed a dig on behalf of the Eastbourne Natural History and Archaeological Society. In 1962, the archaeologist Veronica Seton-Williams — better known for her work in Egypt and the Near East — carried out a second excavation, using it partly as a training exercise for volunteers.

What archaeologists have found

Despite only limited excavation, Combe Hill has yielded finds that firmly date and characterise the site. Charcoal fragments recovered from Musson’s 1949 dig were later radiocarbon-dated to between about 3500 and 3300 BC, placing activity here squarely in the earlier Neolithic. Musson also recovered a substantial quantity of Ebbsfleet ware — a distinctive early pottery style — from one of the ditches.

Seton-Williams’s 1962 excavation produced three polished stone axes, tools that were both practical and, quite possibly, prized objects of exchange and display. Intriguingly, some Early Bronze Age beaker pottery was also deposited in one of the ditches — evidence that people returned to the enclosure and marked it with offerings long after its original Neolithic use, perhaps a thousand years or more later.

What was it for?

This is the great unanswered question — and not only for Combe Hill. The purpose of causewayed enclosures across Britain remains genuinely uncertain. They may have served as seasonal meeting places, sites for feasting and exchange, arenas for ceremony and ritual, places to process the dead, or some combination of all these things. What they rarely seem to be is ordinary settlements.

Combe Hill fits that pattern. There is no clear evidence that people lived here permanently, and its hilltop position and interrupted ditches would have made it useless as a defensive stronghold. That absence of a practical function leads many archaeologists to lean towards a ceremonial or ritual role — a gathering place set apart from everyday life, where scattered farming communities could come together at particular times of year.

The site’s later use as a focus for Bronze Age activity reinforces this reading. Long after the original enclosure fell out of use, people continued to regard the spot as special, siting later monuments nearby and leaving offerings in its silted ditches. Whatever it meant to those who built it, Combe Hill held a lasting place in the sacred geography of the Downs.

The Butts Brow connection

Combe Hill does not stand alone. Just along the ridge lies Butts Brow, a popular downland viewpoint that concealed its own prehistoric secret. In 2017, as part of the nationwide Festival of Archaeology, the Heritage Eastbourne team excavated a second enclosure here and recovered Neolithic flint tools.

The Heritage team questioned whether that enclosure, too, had been built for esoteric reasons, since it showed no sign of settlement or defence. Crucially, the two sites are intervisible — Butts Brow sits on a slope directly facing Combe Hill — raising the tantalising possibility that they were linked, perhaps forming part of a single ceremonial landscape used by the same communities. During the dig, East Sussex County Council archaeologist Greg Chuter led a guided walk between the two sites to explore that bigger picture.

Combe Hill also sits amid a wider scatter of prehistoric monuments on this stretch of Down — bowl barrows, the round barrow cemetery at Foxholes Brow and the barrows on Willingdon Hill among them. It belongs, too, to Eastbourne’s broader prehistoric story, alongside the Bronze Age timber platform at Shinewater and the barrows above Beachy Head.

Visiting Combe Hill today

Combe Hill is open access downland, free to visit on foot at any time. The most popular approach is from the Butts Brow car park above Willingdon, from where a walk along the ridge brings you to the enclosure — a route that also delivers some of the finest views over Eastbourne and the coast. The banks and ditches are subtle rather than dramatic; low evening or winter light, when shadows pick out the earthworks across the turf, is the best time to make sense of them on the ground.

For anyone interested in how the landscape came to look as it does, Combe Hill is a rewarding place to pause and reflect. It is a reminder that the Downs above Eastbourne were not empty wilderness but a peopled, meaningful landscape thousands of years before the town below existed — shaped by communities whose beliefs we can only partly reconstruct from the banks and ditches they left behind.

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