Why this matters
A local mountain or hill; wider significance not recorded.
Overview
Highdown Hill holds a late Bronze Age enclosure, an Iron Age hillfort and an early English cemetery whose rich glass and metal finds changed knowledge of settlement in Sussex. Later smuggling stories, a miller's tomb and wartime use added new layers to the same commanding summit.
Who made it and when
People enclosed the summit around 1000 BC and replaced that work with a banked Iron Age fort around 600 BC; an early English community buried its dead there from about AD 450.
How it was made and used
Banks and a ditch defended the hilltop, while the later cemetery placed graves within the old fort; the height also served watching, signalling and local movement.
What was found
Edwin Henty's tree planting exposed graves in the 1890s. Charles Hercules Read then recorded 86 burials with beads, weapons and an unusually rich group of glass vessels.
What remains
The rounded bank and ditch remain visible around the summit, John Olliver's eighteenth-century tomb stands nearby, and finds are held by Worthing Museum.
Why it mattered
Highdown mattered because one hill preserves changing use from prehistoric defence to burial, farming and lookout, while its cemetery gives rare evidence for early English life and overseas links.
History checked 16 August 2026 against the named sources below.
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