The Maiden Bower, off the A5 about 100 yards (90m) up the road going towards Sewell, began life as a Neolithic causewayed camp on which a small Iron Age plateau fort was constructed later. More or less circular, it was originally enclosed by a great earthen rampart with accompanying ditch.
Worthington Smith in Dunstable (1904), recorded what purported to be the local origin legend:
A certain queen made a wager with a certain king that she would encamp an army within a bull’s hide…The queen …carefully cut a bull’s hide into extremely narrow strips almost as thing as thread. These she dexterously joined together end to end, and, with the assistance of her maids, drew the thread out…in Maiden-Bower field. She then bade her maids to carefully form a circle with the thread…[and]ordered an army to march inside. This the army did, and the king was so struck with admiration…that he ordered the soldiers to throw up a high bank of chalk on the…line of the thread, so that the queen’s skill might be remembered forever.
The archaeologist Leslie Grinsell comments, ‘It seems too ingenious a story to be genuine folklore’, but points to the similar Welsh legend of Lled Croen Yr Ych (‘Width of the Ox Hide’), the exposed retaining wall of a round barrow in what is now Powys. Both legends appear to be adaptations of the ‘oxhide’ story told at least as early as the 16th century as the original of Caistor, Lincolnshire.
The story of the hide was also told in the Middle East – indeed the practice of measuring land in this way was known as far afield as China. It appears to be an old international tale located in various pplaces indlucing in Roman times Carthage. According to Virgil’s Aeneid, Queen Dido, on landed with her followers on the north coast of Africa, bought from the inhabitants as much ground as could be covered with the hide of a bull. She cut the hide into narrow strips, with which she encompassed the area on which the citadel of her new city, Carthage, was to be built. The citadel was said to have been called Byrsa, the Greek doe ‘a hide’, in commemoration (though the name probably means something like ‘fortified place’).
The ‘Maiden’ in Maiden Bower remains unexplained. The name is a variation on Maiden Castle, a name given to earthworks both in England and Lowland Scotland. An explanation advanced in the early 18th century said that the name contained the Celtic words Mai-Dun, meaning ‘great hill’, or else ‘fortress of the plain’, but this was just pure speculation. The antiquary Joseph Holland in 1599 suggested that the fortress of Maiden Castle, Dorset had acquired this name because it had never been captured according to local tradition. Other possibilities are that ‘maiden’ denoted a refuge for women and other non-combatants in time of war, or that the name is an echo of the legendary Chastel des Pucelles or ‘Castle of Maidens’ in French Arthurian romance.