So as you can view, below, aside & before this article are dozens of links on hillforts, for this ultimate links page directory, for across the web on the subject, but here is the article for this page that I mentioned. 

So castles are a structure that is the most famed and celebrated of ancient military installations. No wonder when you see many of them's their grandeur, and known history. Most people interested in history are fans of them. They it has to be said were the successors to hillforts in many cases. Why hillforts stopped being used is a open question.

The likeliest answer though is number 1, armies of greater technology, and often structures, such as the Romans, and in later times the Medieval armies of Scotland, England and Wales, made them useless. Sometimes by conquest, but sometimes just as those forces using hillforts realised better options were, and had to be used. Such as how in Wales and Scotland, many great castles are on old hillfort sites, I go into this further in my story. There are various other elements to this, such as hillforts lack of being able to cope with sieges, compared to many castles, and how armies became more structured to force sieges in the newer eras, but this paragraph summarises those.

Number 2 Walled towns were another competitor, after all as the famous Arab saying goes, if Mohamed won't come to the mountain, why not move the mountain, well what I mean there is, why not build a defence as good as a mountain by a port, or riverside, that is economically more viable, and closer to where many people in for instance economically important lowland sites live.

Number 3 The biggest of all, castles replaced them.


So all in all, castles are the successors to hillforts. Though not entirely, they are more than that, as there are places famed for castles which never had many hillforts, which kind of says how effective and useful castles are. Indeed, some hillforts fell into disuse, and became barely even ruins, just intriguing ditches and banks, on hillsides, and hilltops, while some luckier ones, metamorphized into the castles that lasted across the Middle Ages, and into part of the more modern era. As indicated by some of my other pages on hillforts.co.uk


So hillforts were of use, and likely they were the successors of previous fighting systems. They were successors to some small tribe building a fenced enclosure and hut on a hilltop, and in a arms race developed from there. As the hillfort eras went on, in cases they became more complex, and of course were followed by castles and walled towns, which themselves had their successors. As similarly castles had successors, in some cases, palaces, such as Prague Castle, or the mansions of Britain, and even they had successors such as more modern walled forts, and army bases, or just modern mega cities. Like for instance in Tudor England, and later Scotland the beautified mansion replaced the more foreboding castle. Which indeed of course would have their successors, in the big cities and the new landscape, and totally different society and economy of modern times.