Note
Date 29 December 2015 - 20 October 2016
Event ID 1045237
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Note
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1045237
This fort, which is situated on a hillock in a cleft in the Lammermuir escarpment immediately NW of the minor road crossing from Garvald into the valley of the Whiteadder Water, commands extensive views out over the Lothian Plain to the NW. Oval on plan, its defences comprise two main elements, an inner oval enclosure with a single rampart and ditch, encircled by a slightly eccentric outer pair of ramparts with a medial ditch. The inner enclosure measures internally about 70m from NW to SE by 51m transversely (0.28ha), its rampart forming a low mound to either side of the entrance on the SW but elsewhere reduced to little more than a scarp dropping some 2.4m to traces of an external ditch; evaluation excavations 2010-13 showed that on the steep NE flank the crest-line of the rampart covered a row of timber posts. Entrances are visible on the SE, SW and NW, in each case corresponding to gaps in the outer defences, which enclose an area measuring 95m from NW to SE by 73m transversely (0.6ha). The most recent topographical survey during the recent evaluations has identified no fewer than eighteen platforms within the interior. On the strength of ten radiocarbon dates from a range of contexts, the excavators (Cook and Connolly 2013, 25-7) argue for three broad phases in which the eccentric and short-lived inner rampart was inserted into an earlier enclosure about 400 BC, but that the platforms represent ongoing occupation possibly as late as the beginning of the 2nd century BC; a single radiocarbon date from the outermost rampart falls in this last phase.
Information from An Atlas of Hillforts of Great Britain and Ireland – 20 October 2016. Atlas of Hillforts SC3902
