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Note
Date 23 September 2015 - 16 August 2016
Event ID 1045319
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Note
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1045319
This fort is situated on Kip Knowe, a rocky hillock rising out of the steep E flank of Hairny Law. It is almost circular on plan, measuring internally about 55m from NW to SE by 50m transversely (0.21ha), but the defences do not encircle the whole hillock, forming a belt from between 25m and 30m deep across the easiest lines of approach around the NW half of the circuit, but petering out as the slopes get progressively steeper on the S and NE slopes, and disappearing entirely on the steepest slopes on the SE. The innermost of the ramparts, which is flanked by an internal quarry, stands little more than 0.8m high internally, but falls away externally some 2.3m into the bottom of a ragged external ditch with traces of a counterscarp bank. The medial rampart forms a bank 5m thick by 1m high and is again accompanied intermittently by a ragged external ditch, as is the outermost rampart; it is unclear whether the three ramparts are all contemporary. The RCAHMS investigators in 1947 postulated two entrances, one on the NE with a clearly defined worn passage dropping down the slope, and the other where the ramparts peter out on the the S, but a more recent survey by Roger Mercer was unconvinced by the second and speculated that another gap in the innermost rampart on the N was possibly an earlier entrance blocked by the addition of the later ramparts; the latter is equally unconvincing, though the intercutting timber round-house stances in the interior raise the possibility that occupation and alteration of the ramparts may have taken place after the defences fell derelict. In all the stances of at least eleven round-houses can be seen within the interior, mainly comprising shallow platforms encircled by shallow grooves and banks. These evidently represent several periods of construction, and one on the NW is not only set into the internal quarry behind the innermost rampart, but also probably cuts the rampart itself.
Information from An Atlas of Hillforts of Great Britain and Ireland – 16 August 2016. Atlas of Hillforts SC3499
