Pricing Change
New pricing for orders of material from this site will come into place shortly. Charges for supply of digital images, digitisation on demand, prints and licensing will be altered.
Note
Date 16 July 2014 - 16 November 2016
Event ID 1044742
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Note
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1044742
This small fort occupies a steep-sided hillock that forms the NW extremity of a promontory on the S bank of the Kilbride Burn not far above the point where it debouches onto the shore. The construction of a large house in the late 1880s or early 1890s has bitten back into the SW flank of the fort, and the surrounding area has also been subjected to varying degrees of landscaping to create a garden. Thus the top of the hillock has been levelled to form a lawn, emphasising the height of the rampart surviving at its SE end, which is about 3m in thickness and stands to height of about 3m internally; it falls away externally here into a shallow hollow separating the hillock from the spine of the promontory. Elsewhere the ground drops steeply on all sides, and while the rampart can be seen to turn back along the NE flank, nothing of it is visible elsewhere. According to a plan drawn up by Robert Munro following the excavations of 1880, two walls were found along the SW flank of the knoll, each 'about 5 or 6 feet thick, and only a few yards apart', but in view of the scale of the rampart at the SE end it is possible that these were no more than the inner and outer faces of the same thick wall, which came together at the NW end. From his plan, the interior measures about 30m from NW to SE by 12m transversely (0.03ha) and in its SE end they found a substantial stone structure with a paved floor. Most of the finds, which included a rotary quern several pieces of worked shale and artefacts of iron, bronze and glass, a bronze stud and several sherds of Roman wares, came from within this structure. Evidently domestic, it is unclear whether it represent the remains of a round-house or, possibly a more substantial dun inserted into an earlier fortification.
Information from An Atlas of Hillforts of Great Britain and Ireland – 16 November 2016. Atlas of Hillforts SC1237
