Note
Date 8 January 2016 - 3 April 2017
Event ID 1045182
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Note
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1045182
The craggy outline of Traprain Law, which is a distinctive landmark along the Lothian Plain, has been tailored to a series of fortifications that rank amongst the largest in Scotland, at its maximum extent enclosing an area of about 16ha. While noted in 1792 by the minister of the parish of Whittingehame, who recorded what was probably the rampart known as the Cruden Wall and speculated that it had been constructed as a place of safety against the Danes or the English (Stat Acct, ii, 1792, 349-50), the antiquarian record is curiously mute, and the fort is not annotated on any county maps, nor the first two editions of the OS 6-inch map. making its first appearance with a perceptive depiction of the ramparts on the revised edition of the first OS 25-inch map (Haddingtonshire 1907, sheet 11.1). This depiction evidently formed the base for Alexander Curle's first plan (1915, 141, fig 1), produced at the outset of the campaign of excavations 1914-15 and 1919-23, and the plan subsequently published with the addition of contours, and a summary probably written by Curle, in the County Inventory for East Lothian (RCAHMS 1924, 94-9, no.148, fig 137). The extent of these excavations and subsequent interventions in 1939 by Stuart Cruden (1940), and 1947 by Gerhard Bersu (Close-Brooks 1983), were depicted on a plan drawn up in 1955 by two teams from RCAHMS and published by Richard Feachem (1956, opp 286, fig 2), and it is this plan that has formed the basis for all subsequent discussion of the defensive sequence (Hogg 1975, 95-9; Jobey 1976; Close-Brooks 1983, 207-9). In essence Feachem postulated a series of four perimeters, expanding from what is now confirmed in the most recent campaign of work (Armit, Dunwell and Hunter 1999) to be the remains of a rampart enclosing about 10 acres on the summit. Apparently, open along the cliff-edge that forms the SE flank of the hill, the line of this rampart can be traced along the SW lip of the summit area before returning across the slope on the NW for a distance of up to 300m, where it variously forms a low stony scarp or a line of boulders, the latter apparently outlining an entrance facing out NNW towards North Berwick Law, though the alignment on this other East Lothian landmark is not as precise as some would wish to believe. The lip of the summit area is also adopted by what is probably an 8ha enclosure, following the natural crest-line down across the slope on the NW before turning back along the northern flank where it can be followed as an intermittent terrace back to the edge of the quarry that scars the NE tip of the hill. This rampart was exposed in three trenches by Cruden (1940), along with a lower rampart reduced to a terrace that descends the slope westwards. The possible junction between these two ramparts that lies a little further ENE and has not been excavated, but Feachem proposed that this was part of a later 12ha enclosure that had been subsumed on the W into the massive rampart that forms a bold terrace extending along the NW flank of the hill and swinging southwards along a pronounced lip on the SW face of the hill to enclose an area of about 16ha. Joanna Close-Brooks expressed some doubt as to the existence of this 12ha enclosure (1983, 209), though its slightness is perhaps accounted for in the robbing that must have taken place to build subsequent ramparts, and whether it is really embedded in the line of the largest enclosure, or perhaps cuts across the slope along a terrace intersected by a trackway mounting the slope on the NW, can only be demonstrated by further excavation. What is certain, however, is that a stone wall, the Cruden Wall, built along the line of the massive terrace rampart of the 16ha enclosure on the SW, mounts the slope on the NW, not only crossing the line of the supposed 12ha enclosure here, but also that of the 8ha enclosure, this latter stratigraphic relationship demonstrated by Cruden (1940); this wall takes in about 12ha and was extensively examined by Cruden above the quarry on the NE, not far from where the wall turned back onto the cliff-edge on the S and was pierced by an entrance. Elsewhere, the Cruden Wall exploits three earlier entrances through the terrace rampart on the WNW and W, albeit that the passage through the southern of the two gaps on the W appears to have been narrowed, while a fourth entrance through the terrace rampart lies on the N adjacent to the quarry. These entrances have witnessed heavy traffic and are approached on the NW and W by heavily worn trackways. Within the interior one trackway climbs obliquely up the slope from the narrowed entrance to a natural cleft in the lip of the summit area near the cliff-edge on the S, which is likely to have been an entrance into both the 4ha and 8ha enclosures, while a second track mounts the slope from the NW entrance, firstly to reach the plateau area where Curle and James Cree dug extensively, and then obliquely NE to a gap in the rampart on the NW of the 8ha enclosure, its course picked up by a line of stones flanking its NW side and leading towards a string of three or four rectangular buildings. Elsewhere, on the slope forming SW flank of the interior, Feachem recorded numerous small elongated platforms that appear better suited to rectangular structures than circular ones. The excavations by Curle and Cree encountered deep stratified deposits on the plateau area halfway up this slope, recovering numerous hearths and fragments of both circular and rectangular structures, though the record of their discoveries is too all intents and purposes irrecoverable. The area had certainly been intensively occupied during the Roman Iron Age, providing a wealth of Roman goods that far outstrips any other site in Scotland and, unusually, seems to have prospered from the 1st century AD through at least the 3rd and 4th centuries into the 5th century. Mainly excavated in spits, from the lower levels they also recovered a large assemblage of Late Bronze Age metalwork. While these finds suggest two principal horizons of occupation on the hill, the dating of the ramparts is imperfect, though single entity radiocarbon dates from contexts below the rampart of the 4ha enclosure on the summit fall in the Late Bronze Age, and an indistinguishable date was returned from an ashy deposit that accrued against its inner face (Armit, Dunwell, Hunter and Nelis 2005). Otherwise the Roman finds from the terrace bank, clearly place this in the early centuries AD, though Close-Brooks has queried whether these items relate to material that has accrued behind an earlier, perhaps pre-Roman, rampart a little further down the slope, rather than from the rampart core itself; this possibility becomes stronger in the light of the unpublished radiocarbon dates returned more recently from samples recovered in 1986 by Peter Strong from the outer defences adjacent to the quarry on the NE. Nevertheless, 3rd and 4th century finds recovered by Bersu and Cruden clearly provide a terminus post quem for the Cruden Wall, while Close-Brooks also suggests that a pin excavated by Cruden from an earlier structure above the quarry might place its construction in the 5th century AD. However, in the light of an excavation carried out in 1986 at the foot of the hill on the NE, which found that two palisade trenches had been replaced by a bank and ditch and finally superseded by an earthen rampart with an external stone revetment (Strong 1986), it would be naive to suggest that the plan of the visible elements of the defences can be understood with a simple model of expansion or contraction, and that the narrow trenches excavated to date provide any real insight into their construction or chronology. Whether the Late Bronze Age activity attested by the finds on the western end of the hill fell within a Late Bronze Age enclosure, has yet to be demonstrated.
Information from An Atlas of Hillforts of Great Britain and Ireland – 03 April 2017. Atlas of Hillforts SC3932
