Perhaps the most mysterious site in the Bournemouth-Christchurch area is the site known as St Catherine's Hill. Few today know why it is so named: after a chapel that once stood there, built sometime back when the church was the major local landowner, with its administrative centre Christchurch Priory.
      Off the tourist track, this hill overlooks Christchurch, the lower Avon Valley and the New Forest to the east and, to the west, what is now Bournemouth. Today it is a Town Common Nature Reserve, a place where local people go to exercise their dogs or horses, or just have a pleasant walk along the bridleways and footpaths that criss-cross the hill through its woodland cover.
      But it remains a slightly strange place, its pre-20th C. history largely unknown. Its steepness, fortunately, has precluded normal industrial or residential development. The only modern additions are a pair of microwave towers and two concrete monstrosities - water reservoirs painted with graffiti of werewolves etc. But there remains no sign of any ancient native Neolithic, Bronze or Iron Age hillfort atop what would have been a natural stronghold. There is a set of low earthworks in one area – the Council website says that “Bronze age settlers and Iron Age farmers may have built the enclosure just to the south west of the radio mast.” And nearby are the banks of a Roman fort believed to have held a small garrison manning a two-way signal station. The Council website also says the hill “has most likely been used as a look-out and beacon since prehistoric times.” This is probably because it is the highest ground for miles, and because beacons were put there in Tudor and Napoleonic times.
      Yet there is no evidence that in pre-Roman times it was encircled by a defensive ditch that could hold the populace and their herds in time of attack. (Maiden Castle hillfort for example could hold an estimated 4,000 people.) This is despite the fact the steep-sided 160-foot high hill would have been easier to defend than many places that did have hillforts, and it stood at a more strategic spot than most. It commanded a view of the area just inland of Hengistbury Head and Christchurch Harbour, which archaeologist Prof Sir Barry Cunliffe has argued was Britain's busiest Iron Age port, the path and river route inland leading north up the River Avon to the interior of Wessex. The ancient route passed Stonehenge, which had an avenue leading to the Avon near the spot where Amesbury Abbey was built, and may well date back to the days when Stonehenge was in use. All we know about the hill's human usage pre-1900 is from a few archaeological notes, a couple of references in church records, and a much-cited local legend. The evidence of this could be interpreted to mean that it was not fortified as a military site as it was a sacred one.

The Original Priory Site?
The legend relates how when Christchurch Priory was first being built, the hill was the originally chosen site. But when the workers carted the foundation stones up the hill, the next day they found them back down at the foot of the hill again. After this happened twice, it was taken as a hint by unnamed supernatural forces that the church should be built below. The Council website adds the detail that “On the third night one of the monks had a dream in which he was instructed to build in the valley bottom.” The Priory was built instead on the flood-plain delta between the confluence of the rivers Avon and Stour at the site which gave the town its Saxon name, Tweoxneam, Thuineham, or Twynham, meaning village 'tween the waters. The legend has been interpreted as local 'heathens' protecting their turf, implying a pagan cult using the hilltop in the 1090s.
      Some neo-pagan sites suggest it was known as the Hill Of Keridwen, though I can trace no authority for this identification. It does give us a pagan deity name reminiscent of its Christian name, supporting the theory it was redesignated by the church. Of course, you'd have to accept that the local pre-Christian population would acknowledge "Catherine" as another name for their goddess Keridwen - the two names don't sound all that similar. In British myth, Keridwen was the magician who gave birth to Taliesin, the bardic figure whose verses are characterised by riddles involving transmogrification of people into animals. Though there's little evidence Taliesin existed as an historical figure, this could account for an odd claim the Welsh bard came from this area. (For an account of the Keridwen legend, see here.)
      The "rationalist" explanation given of the site-relocation legend is that it was inspired by what happened up the Avon Valley, at Sarum, where the Cathedral church was relocated from the hill now known as Old Sarum, down to its present site at New Sarum - the present Salisbury. But the Sarum move happened later (1220-), the circumstances well-known and not in the least mysterious. There was no moving-stones legend attached to the Sarum site. This is not surprising as the Cathedral was in fact successfully built, and only fell into disuse later when there was less need to have it inside an overcrowded fortification. (For details, see our page on scenic ruins.)
      On the other hand, mythographers argue that big stones mysteriously moving down a hill is a common folklore motif, a relic of pagan beliefs, akin to legends of stone circles 'dancing' or coming down to drink at night. There are similar legends elsewhere. (The closest one I know of relates to Godshill on Wight.) Of course the re-location legend could be rationalised as a folk memory of an ancient taboo. (‘Superstition’ literally means something ‘standing over’ i.e. from an earlier time.) Taboos play a major role in Celtic lore (break a géasa or taboo and you’re doomed, however strong of heart or arm you are). The Celtic word for taboo, géasa, used in the Irish legends seems to mean literally an earth-pole. Asa meant a pole, with the prefix gé- as in geography, geology etc., and Saxon gewissae, land-folk, ie peasants]. The asa could be a tribal totemic pole where members swore sacred oaths.
      We could 'rationalise' the relocation downhill as the result of superstitious locals who refused to build on the hill as they feared the ancient powers of nature alive on the hilltop, in ‘wood and stone’. (I’m alluding here to the church’s 6th century complaint about the officially-Christian southern Saxons still worshipping at pagan sites built of wood and stone.) But the Priory foundation stones were not sacred pagan stones. They were 'scrap' or rubble from the older Saxon church which stood where the Priory is today, when it was demolished - or more likely built over. (For evidence of this latter theory, see here.) This has led to the argument that the legend dates from the building of an earlier church here, either the Saxon Priory, or even the “primitivam ecclesiam” [primitive church] which some argue preceded it (as at Glastonbury).
      One local historian has argued there could have been no church here because the locals didn’t have any stone quarry nearby (the Norman Priory stone largely came from Quarr Abbey area on NE Wight), and they (presumably Celtic Britons) didn’t know how to build in stone even if they had any. But a “primitivam ecclesiam” would be more likely built of wood and thatch, or wattle-and-daub - a type of construction that dates back to the Neolithic. (The Priory's 'Miraculous Beam' legend and relic may be relevant here, but this isn't the place to delve into that mystery.)

Of Serpents And Flying Dragons
In Celtic lore, there were also bars on activity of a different type, where the protagonist has to overcome a magical difficulty to proceed. In the legend of the British over-king Vortigern as preserved by Nennius, there is a similar tale of stones being moved back down a hill selected as a stronghold. Vortigern tried to build an impregnable fortress for self-protection from his people after he fell from favour. (He had given away half his kingdom to Hengist and his Saxon mercenaries in exchange for gaining the hand of Hengist’s daughter Renwein or Rowena).

The king ... travelled through many parts of his territories, in search of a place convenient for the purpose of building a citadel. Having, to no purpose, travelled far and wide, they came at length to a province called Guenet; and having surveyed the mountains of Heremus, they discovered, on the summit of one of them, a situation, adapted to the construction of a citadel. Upon this, the wise men said to the king, "Build here a city: for, in this place, it will ever be secure against the barbarians." Then the king sent for artificers, carpenters, stone-masons, and collected all the materials requisite to building; but the whole of these disappeared in one night, so that nothing remained of what had been provided for the constructing of the citadel. Materials were, therefore, from all parts, procured a second and third time, and again vanished as before, leaving and rendering every effort ineffectual. Vortigern inquired of his wise men the cause of this opposition to his undertaking, and of so much useless expense of labour? They replied, "You must find a child born without a father, put him to death, and sprinkle with his blood the ground on which the citadel is to be built, or you will never accomplish your purpose."

His counsellors brought a fatherless boy to be sacrificed to remove the curse in the traditional way, but the boy turned out to be the future Romano-British leader Ambrosius, who was gifted with special insight. He explained to Vortigern he first had to excavate a pit inside the hill where two dragon-serpents, a red one and a white one, were fighting. The symbolism here is blatant, the red dragon being the Welsh national emblem, whereas the Saxons had a white one (later trampled in the dirt at Hastings). The boy tells him, "depart from this place, where you are not permitted to erect a citadel; I, to whom fate has allotted this mansion, shall remain here; whilst to you it is incumbent to seek other provinces, where you may build a fortress."
       The Nennius version sets the tale in Guenet, or Gwynnedd in North Wales. Of course, Vortigern like other rulers of the time would have travelled a court circuit around his domain. “Wales” would in Vortigern’s time have stretched all the way down to here - even the Saxons used the term Welsh or wealh as a generic one for the Britons, hence local place names like Bournemouth's university campus site of Wallisdown, “Welsh Hill.”
       In the following century, the Avon Valley would become very much the front line in the Saxon Wars. It was the defeats up the Avon Valley, at Charford [Cerdicesford] in 519 and Sarum [the hill-fort that Salisbury supplanted] in 552, that allowed the Saxons to advance west into the "Welsh" areas. His nemesis Hengist would get his own local place-name dedication, Hengistbury Head, and there is a legend of both men attending a fatal peace conference up the Avon Valley at Amesbury, leading to the Saxon coup known as the Night Of The Long Knives. The placing of these events locally is regarded as a later elaboration on Nennius by Geoffrey of Monmouth in 1135 - Nennius does not specify a setting.
      One “miracle” legend that local heritage does not play up is that Christchurch, like Vortigern's citadel, was reportedly consumed by fire from heaven - no doubt because the reason given is that it was devastated by a fire-breathing dragon sent to punish the town for its wickedness. An account by a visiting French monk, Herman of Laon, has the town being burnt by a fire-breathing flying dragon in 1112/1113. Herman came here with a group touring SW England to raise funds to rebuild their home church, but got an unwelcome reception here. As Herman's group left, they looked back and were pleased to see the town being burnt up by a dragon in revenge for the insult to their Lady of Laon!
      Dragons are often associated with “fire from Heaven,” but despite new-age attempts to equate dragons with ‘serpent lines’ (rather than ley lines) of esoteric or geomantic force, no link with St Catherine’s Hill is apparent, Herman’s dragon rising from the sea. There is a local land-based serpent-dragon legend, but it is localised across the valley at Bisterne (which means beast’s or pest’s secret place). Or at least the family whose ancestor supposedly slew it resided at Bisterne, with the dragon carved on their stone gateposts in commemoration, the dragon itself alighting at Burley Beacon nearby to drink the milk the fearful locals left out for it. (For more on dragons and the theory they are linked to ley lines, see Here Be Dragons (2008), by Michael Hodges, author of the history of St Catherine's Hill pictured right.)
      The notion of the hill as a still actively pagan site in the Middle Ages is supported by some slight circumstantial evidence. At some point a chapel was built on the hilltop either in addition to, or else instead of, the planned hilltop priory church. This is despite the fact the downtown Priory site had up to nine chapels or altars there already. One theory is a hilltop church was erected to displace ongoing pagan use of the hill. It was the policy of St Augustine that the early Saxon church should take over ‘wood and stone’ pagan sites and give them a cosmetic makeover to convert them into Christian ones, beginning around 600. The Saxon church of Twynham is thought to date from the 7th C., but there is no record of the hilltop chapel for 6 more centuries. The first mentions of the chapel in the historical record are from the early 14-C, of the Prior being admonished for holding mass up there, when the chapel was not approved to keep the necessary accoutrements for this there (presumably as its remoteness would make it vulnerable to theft).
      The official record notes that Bishop Stratford “inhibited” the Prior of Christchurch on 19 November, 1331, “from celebrating in the chapel of St. Katharine on the Hill of Rishton, constructed on the soil of the priory, on account of the lack of certain formalities. Licence for celebrations [i.e. of mass] in the chapel was not granted until 1 February, 1332.” (History Of The County Of Hampshire). If the Prior felt it necessary to do so against the wishes of the Diocese, the implied reason would most likely be to counter residual pagan influence. Sceptics like to point out there is no evidentiary mention for such early events as Saxon-era churches or chapels, but as no actual records survive anyway from earlier eras, this is a deceptive, self-serving argument.

Why St Catherine?
But why St Catherine? She was patron saint of spinsters (as a Virgin Martyr) as well as lawyers, librarians, teachers, and theologians etc – her legend says she was clever at argument. Her cult was founded in the 4th C. at the foot of Mount Sinai, so hills or mounts may have come into the legend early on. She was certainly used as a patron saint at other hilltop sites in the region. One is on the fortified hill overlooking the ancient English capital, Winchester. Another survived demolition in the Reformation (left standing as a sea-mark to guide shipping) above Abbotsbury's now-ruined monastery on the west Dorset coast [pictured, below right].
      The fact the chapel was dedicated to a female saint of doubtful historicity by a male-oriented church has suggested a female saint was used to help blur the original dedication to a pagan goddess with a similar name. The trouble is, if you don't accept the church quietly turned "Keridwen" into "Katharine"(the spelling in the County History quoted above), we don’t have a distinct goddess name the way we have with Brigit becoming St Bridget, etc. The other "goddess" name that has been suggested is Cat Anu, a name that appears elsewhere in British lore, and is given as Fighting Anu or Ana. This name may be related to the Indo-European goddess Ana, whose name survives in that of the legendary Irish nation, Tuatha de Danaan. This has been given as "people [tuatha] of the deity Ana," with the -an ending the Irish genitive or possessive case, and the initial d- in Danaan an adaptation of the personal name to reflect the fact the holder is divine, a deity, giving us literally "Tribe Of The Deity Divine-Ana."
      An alternative suggestion, from local historian Michael Hodges, who lived just below the hill for many years, wrote a booklet on it, and conducts guided walks there, is that the Britonnic place name was Katterns, perhaps from Cadrhyn, ‘battle hill’. A rhynn is a promontory hill in Gaelic, as in the Rhinns of Galloway or Rinns Of Islay in Scotland, the argument being there was a similar word in the local dialect. The surviving examples in Gaelic cited imply it meant a coastal-peninsular promontory, more like Hengistbury Head. The final -s in the ‘Katterns’ interpretation also doesn't seem to fit even as a possessive, the genitive case ending in Celtic languages being -an, though one can surmise the terminal -s was added mistakenly by non-Brittonic speakers, making the original Cattern. This could be cognate with Gadarn, an appellation used in a late Welsh Triad to describe Britain as the Island Of The Mighty (Hy Gadarn), though it appears a masculine epithet, possibly a Q-Celtic form related to Latin paternus, father. There is only one letter difference however with words meaning mother - mater, maternus, maternal etc. Parallel terms like mater and pater (Latin) may be what philologists call "doublets"   - two words deriving form the same root, here meaning a parent who could be a mother or father. There seems no obvious obstacle to making the ancient site-dedication feminine.
      The root Cat- in Brittonic is indeed usually given as fighting or battle. In modern terms the root cat- in English usually derives from Greek for pure, as in Catholic. We also have French Cathare (the ‘th’ being pronounced just as ‘t’ in French and Latin) from Greek katharos, pure. Cad- as a corruption of coed or coit, ‘woodland’ is possible, but that doesn’t fit here as official conservation studies indicate the hill was bare of trees till relatively modern times. (The current fir-tree cover is now being culled as unnatural.)
     More productive seems to be cader as a possible root, the Welsh for seat (as in Cader Idris in Wales), meaning court-seat of a monarch. Early monarchs were peripatetic, travelling about with their court staff, and this location would make geographic sense if the hill was at the boundary of two Celtic-Brittonic kingdoms. Nancy Bell's 1916 history From Harbour To Harbour notes '... the legend that an abortive attempt was made, before the building of the predecessor of the Priory Church, to erect a chapel on Kaeder-Ryn, now known as St Catherine's Hill". So here we have a reference to 'Kaeder-Ryn' being transformed into "Catherine". This would seem at first glance to neatly solve the mystery of the placename. But were all such St Catherine Hills, e.g. those overlooking Winchester or Abbotsbury, really called Kaeder-Ryn hills? Or is it itself a back-formation, a rationalisation of the name resulting from antiquarian speculation when first writing down the legend?
     The first problem is the oddity of the word Kaeder. This is close to early Welsh cader, an old Brittonic word for "chair" used as a placename in Wales (e.g. Cader or Cadair Idris) for a hill that was the seat of a ruler, giant, or other mythic figure - which could refer to a law-giving court held there. The Welsh mountain Cader Idris takes its name from a giant chair-shaped depression, and the word Rhinn was used for a coastal promontory. Perhaps the notion was to imply a place name meaning something like Chair-shaped Promontory? This doesn't fit the hill's appearance. For any construct meaning Chair /Seat of [insert ruler or deity name here], the word order would make "Kader Rynn" the "Seat Of Rynn". There was a male Brittonic name Rhun, and a famous 6th-7th-C. prince of the Scottish Borders, Rhun son of Urien, who helped bring Christianity to northern England, and may have written parts of Nennius's Historia Brittonum. But apart from the fact he may have a hand in writing up the story of Vortigern cited above, this doesn't get us anywhere.
     The problem remains: why Kaeder and not Kader? The -ae- dipthong is pronounced to rhyme with Kaiser (from Caesar), so we get 'Kaider'. It begins to look like the name was created by a pretentious English antiquarian who thought it looked more like an authentic old "British" name with the -ae- diphthong from the similar Welsh placename-prefix word caer, used for a stronghold. However English antiquarians transcribed Irish-Gaelic words in a way bearing little resemblance to the way they were pronounced, so the diphthong may still just misrepresent an authentic old name for chair or seat. Law-giving royal courts were then what Americans would later call circuit courts, with the king and his retinue circling his realm to dispense justice, etc. This would make the notion of other, coincident Cader-Ryn > Catherine hill names seem feasible. Yet I can't recall ever seeing direct evidence of a St Catherine name-change in the old records the way other place names have evolved. Of course, if the church was systematically, per St Augustine's policy, overwriting 'pagan' names on the map with Christian-saint dedications, their aim would be to obliterate evidence of earlier names, not preserve them.

The Missing Ruins
The Royston example, with its man-made cave where religious refugees could worship, might suggest to the imaginative the exciting prospect of a lost cave on St Catherine’s Hill, perhaps linked to the Templars. There's no escaping references to the Knights Templar these days, but it has to be said there's no record of any Templar presence in the locality, apart from the lone captive knight who was kept at the Priory from 1319 till his death some twenty years later.(For details, see On The Trail Of England’s Last Templar.)
This of course does not preclude an earlier cave, used by Templars or other refugees. In terms of religious establishments, what would make sense for a hilltop site, chapel aside, is a hermitage, perhaps a hillside cave. (The main part of the ground hereabouts is gravel, which makes a natural cave impossible.) This could also serve a practical secular civic or military purpose as a sheltered lookout post. The hill's original summit, called Toothill, was excavated in the industrial revolution to quarry its clay, and part of this is now a water-filled claypit [pictured]. Toothill is usually given as a "Celtic" name, related to tuatha, tribe or people [compare French tout, everyone], though Alfred Watkins in his classic work of antiquarian speculation The Old Straight Track had a theory such toponyms were even older, and may relate to the Germanic todt, dead: Hill Of The Dead.
     There may have been Bronze Age barrows atop this hillock, which could tie in with the idea of a court-seat, as oaths were taken on "ancestral" sites. (There is a description of such a site, the Mound of Narberth, in the Welsh folktale collection The Mabinogion, being used for a vigil at a critical time.) No other ancient buildings are known, though there were some "squatters'" cottages on the SW slopes facing Bournemouth.
There is a reference to a group of 6 thatched cottages here in the memoirs of John Arnell, a local soldier's son, a quarter-mile up from the Fairmile Road. In the 1920s two of these 2-bedroom thatched cottages were sold off by landowner Lord Malmesbury for £40-£60 each. (What happened to to the earlier residents - presumably the "squattters" mentioned - is not recorded in this source.) The ceiling was so low you could touch it, and John Arnell's father excavated the floor to create more headroom. This may have been due to buildup of the floor level as well as people being smaller in earlier times, but both causes suggest the cottages had already been there for a long time. There was certainly nothing modern about the cottagers' lifestyle. The only lighting was an oil lamp hung from a central beam; the well was down the hill, the windlass-n-bucket type, and the cottages came with adjoining pigsties to raise pigs for slaughter at market. Arnell says the 6 cottages were inhabited by the same 6 families for many years. There were also three gypsy families living in mule-drawn caravans just down the track.
In 2007, some dog-walkers told me of a ruin visible from the trig point, but on closer inspection two possibilities here turned out to be optical illusions - either a prominent corner of gravel pathway or an eroded sandstone bluff. Nevertheless, there are some intriguing references to an east-facing ruin in the poems of Poet Laureate Robert Southey, who lived at Burton opposite the hill in the 1790s.
      Southey wrote a set of notes as a basis for future poems, several dealing with the Avon Valley. His "For The Banks Of The Hampshire Avon" had been inspired by another planned “poem of place,” his “Inscription For A Tablet By The Hampshire Avon.” (“From the near hill you see the ocean, to which the river is running. The trite allusion, - where'er we go, we're journeying to the tomb. But this is not the less true for being trite.”) His poem "Banks Of The Hampshire Avon", comparing the river to a serpent, was composed from the viewpoint of St Catherine's Hill:

... yon heathy hill
That rises from a vale so green,
The vale far stretching as the view can reach
Under its long dark ridge, the river here
That, like a serpent, thro' the grassy mead
Winds on, now hidden, glittering now in light.
Nor fraught with merchant wealth, nor fam'd in song,

He wrote another called "For A Cavern That Overlooks The River Avon." It describes a cavern which is an ivy-covered “rude portal” or "arch'd rock" overlooking the Avon, by a “high-hanging forest” (which I take to mean a steep, wooded hillside):

Enter this cavern Stranger! the ascent
Is long and steep and toilsome; here awhile
Thou mayest repose thee, from the noontide heat
O'ercanopied by this arch'd rock that strikes
A grateful coolness: clasping its rough arms
Round the rude portal, the old ivy hangs
Its dark green branches down, and the wild Bees,
O'er its grey blossoms murmuring ceaseless, make
Most pleasant melody. No common spot
Receives thee, for the Power who prompts the song,
Loves this secluded haunt. The tide below
Scarce sends the sound of waters to thine ear;
And this high-hanging forest to the wind
Varies its many hues. Gaze Stranger here!

His "arch'd rock" could refer to one of the sandstone bluffs [see photos, right] that New Forest naturalist Heywood Sumner described as 'terminals to buttress-like projections from the hill-scarps'. These formed an overhang with a natural cavern beneath, protected from further erosion by being overgrown with vegetation, and perhaps tunnelled into to make more of a shelter for a lookout or hermit. Obviously, there is still more than one mystery remaining here, but we will have to leave it for now, pending further discoveries.

St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury, which survived the Reformation as it made a useful sea-mark for mariners. The planned original Priory, intended to replace the now-vanished chapel on Christchurch's own St Catherine's Hill, may have been meant to dominate the landscape thus, the hill not then being so tree-covered as today.