Note

Date 21 October 2015 - 20 October 2016

Event ID 1044966

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Note

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1044966

Atlas of Hillforts of Britain and Ireland

This fort is situated on the summit of Milkieston Hill, which was taken into a series of decorative plantations in the early 19th century but is now under rough pasture. The fort itself, however, has been heavily quarried and robbed of stone, so much so that the evidently complex sequence has been rendered almost incomprehensible, and while the threefold sequence proposed by RCAHMS investigators in 1959 (RCAHMS 1967, 131-3, no.304, fig 118) cannot be entirely correct, its simplification by the OS into two phases has failed to observe several nuances in the surviving remains. What can be beyond doubt Is that there are two inner enclosures, though whether contemporary circuits as assumed by both the RCAHMS investigators and the OS is not clear, and two outer circuits. Contrary to the OS view, these represent at least two periods of construction, demonstrated at the E entrance and on the SSE, but the RCAHMS investigators are mistaken in their observation of the stratigraphical relationship between the innermost of the outer ramparts and the outer circuit of the inner enclosures, and indeed in showing the second phase ditch cutting on the same line as the inner of their phase three ramparts at the entrance on the NE. Furthermore, their suggestion that both their phase 2 and phase 3 schemes were left unfinished, fails to take into account not only the impact on the appearance of the surviving remains of relatively recent quarrying and stone-robbing, but also of demolition in antiquity. For the purposes of description, the fortifications are best separated into the two inner circuits, and the three or four outer ones. The innermost enclosure has been devastated by the later disruption, which has reduced its rampart to at best a grass-grown mound of rubble and round most of the circuit a ragged stony scarp enclosing an area measuring about 49m from NNW to SSE by 37m transversely (0.13ha). It now has one entrance on the E and a second on the SW, though the latter opens into an area of internal quarrying and is likely to be later, and in the surviving part of the interior there are two probably house-platforms and a low stony ring-bank, this last probably overlying the ruined rampart on the N. The second rampart, pursuing a roughly concentric course around the inner enclosure, has been equally heavily robbed, at best forming a low spread mound of rubble. There is no reason why this should not have been a free-standing enclosure taking in a much larger area measuring about 88m from NNW to SSE by 73m transversely (0.51ha); it too has entrances on the E and SW, and in this case both are likely to be original. This circuit was almost certainly reduced to its present state in antiquity, for in it robbed form that it is apparently overlain by the innermost rampart of the outer enclosure on the NW, which itself can be seen overriding an earlier configuration of these outer defences on the W. This scheme had no fewer than four ramparts around the N half, flanking two wide-spaced medial ditches some 4m in breadth by 1.8m in depth, the whole system returning and uniting on what must have been the N side of a major entrance on the W. Of the other side of this entrance, not a trace is visible, and though this led the RCAHMS investigators to suggest the scheme was unfinished, the area to the S shows every sign of heavy disturbance. A second entrance lay on the NE, but it is unclear if the ramparts and ditches ever returned and united here in the same way, despite the depiction by the first OS surveyors in 1856, and it is apparently blocked by another short length of rampart. The character of the defences on the S, nominally relating to a later scheme on the strength of the sequence where the innermost blocks the entrance on the W, is very different, comprising a belt of three close-set ramparts with intermediate ditches; traces of an earlier defence on this line can be seen between the inner and middle of these ramparts on the SSE. There are apparently entrances through the outer ditch on the ESE and SSW, at each of which there are traces of the outer rampart uniting with the middle rampart on one side of the entrance, but in each case the middle rampart carries on across the gap, and if original features the entrance way must have doglegged, on the ESE to expose the visitor's left side, and on the SSW the right side, at the latter making for a gap in the innermost of the three on the SW. Despite the evident complexity of these defences, the enclosure they form measures 110m from N to S by 85m transversely (0.74ha).

Information from An Atlas of Hillforts of Great Britain and Ireland – 20 October 2016. Atlas of Hillforts SC3663