Capel, Surrey

Capel is a village and civil parish in southern Surrey, England. It is equidistant between Dorking and Horsham - about away. Around Capel, to the west, skirts the A24 road. Capel is approximately north of the West Sussex border, south of London and southeast of Guildford and is in the Mole Valley district. The village is in the north of a landscape called the Weald, meaning forest, which forms a significant minority of the land today, particularly towards the Greensand Ridge.HistoryAnstiebury CampWithin the parish in Coldharbour there is one Scheduled Ancient Monument, a large Iron Age hill fort named Anstiebury Camp evidencing early occupation. Multivallate, defined by boundaries consisting of two or more lines of closely set earthworks, this relatively late hill fort constructed in the second and first centuries BC covers approximately. There is a triple rampart wall to the north and south-east where the ground is fairly level, a double terrace on the west and south where the ground is much steeper, and a single line of defences to the north-east. The entrance is mid-way along the eastern side, defined by a wide break in the main rampart. Trenches dug in the southeast, the entrance, and a few other investigations in 1972-3 revealed that the front of the main rampart had been set against and into the edge of the associated ditch and revetted with massive, irregular blocks of sandstone. The conclusion was that the purpose was to resist sling warfare due to the form and width, with rounded pebbles, foreign to the Greensand Ridge, being frequently found in the areas excavated. The archaeologist also considered that the entrance and the defences to the north of it were never completed, possibly linked with the deliberate demolition of the main rampart revetment, and possibly coinciding with Caesar's invasions of Britain. The site was re-occupied in the Roman period, probably at least a century after it was originally abandoned.