Luke Winter surveyed the site: a clearing on the crag, where 15-or-so people were wielding axes amid a ring of tall, bark-stripped posts. “I’ve known bits of timber I could have married,” he confessed, nodding at the naturally, wonderfully irregular bits of wood. “You have your favourites; they all have their own character. It makes you weird.”

But Luke isn’t weird; he’s the experimental archaeologist in charge of one of English Heritage’s boldest new interpretation projects: to build an authentic Bronze Age roundhouse at Beeston Castle, Cheshire.

Beeston is one of the most spectacularly located medieval ruins in the country. From the top of its 100m-high eyrie you can look right across the Cheshire plain – as far as the Welsh Hills, Liverpool and the Pennines on a clear day. Little wonder, then, that man gathered here long before the 13th-century fortress was erected.

The site’s Bronze Age remains were found by accident, when a 1970s excavation to look for medieval artefacts unearthed bronze blades and the post holes of nine structures dated to around 900BC – not medieval at all, but the latter stages of Britain’s Bronze Age, which spanned from around 2500 to 800BC. Until now Beeston’s prehistoric legacy has been overshadowed by the site’s more recent, more tangible history. But the construction of a replica roundhouse should change that.