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| Where was Hengestesdun? |
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Page 2 of 3  A map detailing possible movements of the Saxon and Celt forces in 838AD. In 838AD, the eastern Cornish border was still on the Exe-Taw line and it was to be nearly another century before Aethelstan was to push it back to the east bank of the Tamar where, of course, it remains today. The whole of Dartmoor and the South Hams was still exclusively Cornish territory. In August 825, Ecgberht stated in a Charter involving lands in Hampshire that he was signing it in a place called Creodantreow (thought to be close to Crediton) where he was “among the enemy, the Britons”, confirming that the Exe-Taw line remained the border. Both the 815 raid and the Gafalforda battle were likely to have been rapid in-and-out campaigns and the Creodantreow record implies that Ecgberht considered it too risky to base himself any further west. As a soldier and commander, King Ecgberht of Wessex was vastly experienced and nobody’s fool. In 829 he had even taken the large Saxon kingdom of Mercia by force. Would such a man really have taken such a huge and foolhardy risk venture deep into largely unknown territory, and west of the deepening Tamar valley, far from safety, to hit a combined Cornish-Viking force 50 miles or more inside enemy land? It is my belief that he would never have entertained the idea for a second, and the battle site was not west of the Tamar, but much closer to that ancient border than previously assumed. There is another aspect to this argument. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles clearly state that the Danes and the Cornish teamed up to make a move against Ecgberht who only responded once that intelligence reached him. He would not have been anywhere west of Crediton or Exeter and the only realistic goal for the Cornish-Viking alliance would be to wrest those places back from his control. There was no other target west of those places. This means that intelligence travelled 40 or 50 miles up to Ecgberht, by land or by sea, after which he mustered his forces and marched the same distance westward. The current assumption asks us to believe that, in the time it took for all that to happen, the Cornish-Danish army had travelled only 10 miles or so to Kit Hill, deep inside their own territory and greatly remote from any West Saxon activity. It simply does not stack up. We need to look again at the whole scenario. Why should a Viking fleet come to the Cornish in friendship? Was it that the Cornish were providing safe havens for the Danish fleet to use as bases from which they could sail out and attack West Saxon ports along the Channel coast? Into which harbour did this “great ship army” arrive? We will probably never know, but the outstanding candidate is Plymouth Sound, then well within Cornish territory, yet conveniently placed for mounting attacks upon Wessex ports. The Cornish Hingston Down lies 10 miles north of the Sound but, more importantly in this scenario, Plymouth Sound lies at the southwestern end of an ancient trackway route (now largely followed by the B3212 road) that crosses Dartmoor in a virtual straight line towards Exeter. |
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