The Grim's Ditch Complex in Cranborne Chase

Abstract

Many of the Grim's ditches and others of similar character in East and South England have been tentatively dated to the Late Roman or Saxon periods. The question of their date and purpose has frequently received attention in Antiquity, notably by Sir Cyril Fox and Mr O. G. S. Crawford.But all these Grim's ditches need not be alike, and the group of linear earthworks known by this name in Cranborne Chase is especially distinctive. Parts of it can perhaps best be compared with the Grovely Grim's ditch, with which it is almost certainly associated, and which was described by Mr Crawford in his article on ‘Our Debt to Rome’ as being pre-Saxon. Since then Sir Charles Oman has suggested a later date for it, and put forward the view that Grim's dyke, and other ditches in the southeast of Wiltshire ‘were thrown up to mark the limit of the Saxon frontier’.