It is easy to walk past a motte without registering its significance; these flat-topped or rounded earthen mounds, raised by the Normans as platforms for timber fortifications, are the bones of an entire system of colonial settlement, and this one once anchored a place called Hollywood with its own burgesses, its own legal customs, and presumably its own commercial life.

The documentary evidence is precise, if slim. A reference dating to somewhere between 1256 and 1266 records that the burgesses of Hollywood held their rights according to the customs of Breteuil, a franchise originating in Normandy that was widely granted to new towns across England and Ireland as an incentive to attract settlers. It standardised things like rents, fines, and trading rights, and its appearance here suggests Hollywood was a properly constituted borough, not merely a rural hamlet. That legal identity has long since dissolved. The motte survives. The parish church at Dragoonhill, to the east, is thought to occupy the site of an earlier church, possibly the one that served the medieval settlement, though the building that stands there now carries no obvious trace of those origins.