Note
Date 28 May 2015 - 13 October 2016
Event ID 1044580
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Note
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1044580
This fort is situated on a local summits that stands forward from of the ridge that makes up the Hill of Finavon and thus occupying a vantage point with a commanding outlook NE, NW and SW across Strathmore. The fort itself is notable for the massive vitrification of its walls, which first led Gordon Childe to excavate here in 1933-35 (1935; 1936), followed 30 years later in 1966 by Euan MacKie (1966; 1967), the latter to recover charcoal samples for some of the first radiocarbon dates returned form a Scottish fort (MacKie 1969). The vitrified wall, which has been reduced to a bank of heavily-quarried rubble up to 15m thick by 4m high, forms an elongated lozenge-shape enclosure, measuring about 135m from ENE to WSW by little more than 25m transversely (0.35ha). The mouth of a dug well can be seen within the ENE end of the interior, while at the WSW end the walls span the head of a deep natural gully that may well have provided another source of water; what may be the entrance also utilises the topography of this gully on the SSE, though this is the line taken by a later trackway cutting across the fort. The arrangement of the defences at the WSW end of the fort, however, is probably the result of a secondary reconstruction, and what has otherwise been described by some writers as an outer bailey on the SE quarter (Cotton 1954, 66) is the remains of an earlier circuit. At the ENE end, this circuit appears to form an outer rampart separated from the vitrified wall by a broad ditch, but it too has been heavily quarried, both in antiquity and more recently, and no more than a low band of rubble can be traced along the lip of the summit above the cliffs along the SSE flank of the hill. If this interpretation of the remains is correct, the original fort was oval on plan, measuring about 95m from ENE to WSW by as much as 50m transversely (0.45ha). Childe found evidence of occupation in the interior, finds including a large assemblage of coarse pottery, a whole crucible and fragments of others, an iron ring and blade, flint tools, flakes and microliths, six spindle whorls, a single upper stone from a rotary quern and several other coarse stone tools; a shale ring and crushed fragments of a human skull were recovered from the fill of the well, which was 6.4m deep. MacKie opened trenches against the walls on both the N and the S (1969), but only at the latter was able to locate the deep charcoal-rich deposits found by Childe behind the line of the wall; their relationship to the wall itself, however, rests upon Childe's observations of the stratigraphy. Modern calibration renders the three radiocarbon dates obtained useless for chronological analysis, but there is any case a possibility that Childe misunderstood both the structure of the wall here and its relationship to the deposits he too be fallen rubble. While the faces that he found appear to be those of a wall 6m thick, and still standing in places 2.7m high, it is also possible that this rubble was part of the core of a much thicker wall, and that the deposits beneath it relate to an earlier phase of occupation, and perhaps the earlier fort that has already been postulated above.
Information from An Atlas of Hillforts of Great Britain and Ireland – 13 October 2016. Atlas of Hillforts SC3083
