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Main image: Photo: Roger Cornfoot, Wikimedia Commons
Wooston Castle is an earthwork hillfort in Fingle Woods, above the Teign gorge near Drewsteignton. It is a scheduled monument (Historic England list entry 1003822). It has long been assumed to be Iron Age.
A dig in April 2018 (9 to 21 April) was run by the National Trust and the Woodland Trust as part of the Heritage Lottery funded Fingle Woods project, with AC Archaeology. It found no dating evidence for the Iron Age assumption. A radiocarbon date of 1160-1255 AD is reported from charcoal in the upper fill of the ditch.
The upper fill is a later layer, so that date shows the ditch was in use or being filled in the 13th century or so. It does not date the building of the fort. The Iron Age date is unproven rather than disproved. The date given here comes from a summary of the excavation report (Hughes 2018, AC Archaeology), which has not been read in full.
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