Note

Date 15 February 2016 - 31 August 2016

Event ID 1045344

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Note

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1045344

Atlas of Hillforts of Britain and Ireland

This fort is situated across a gentle slope dropping into the shoulder of a slight spur on the leading edge of Bunkle Edge above Marygold. The fort, which is almost certainly one of those depicted in 1771 on Andrew and Mostyn Armstrong's Map of the County of Berwick (1771), appears on the later map of The County of Berwick by T Sharp, Christopher Greenwood, and William Fowler of The County of Berwick (1826), but shortly after was planted with trees, thus escaping the attention of the OS surveyors who in 1857 annotated the large outlying enclosure on the NW as a camp. The latter, which was bulldozed in the early 1980s had a rock-cut ditch up to 3m deep (Strong 1988) and is one of a number of ditched enclosures found around forts in Berwickshire and East Lothian, though none has been dated and their relationships to the forts found within them are unknown. This is no less true at Marygoldhill Plantation, where the rectilinear enclosure measured 515m in length from NE to SW, with angles on the N and W, and enclosed at least 6ha upslope from the fort.

Now cleared of trees, the fort itself is oval on plan, measuring about 98m from NE to SW by 78m transversely (0.6ha) within twin ramparts with a medial ditch; the inner rampart stands between 1m and 2m above the level of the interior and up to 3m above the bottom of the broad ditch. There is a probable entrance on the WNW, where the E terminal turns slighlty inside the line of the W terminal, and probably a second on the opposite side of the interior on the ESE, though this sector has been mutilated by subsequent occupation and there are two gaps in the circuit here; another gap on the NNW is almost certainly relatively recent. The remains of the later occupation have two elements, namely a cluster of five stone-founded round-houses identified by James Hewat Craw on the ESE side of the interior, and an external rectilinear annexe on the NE, apparently springing from the counterscarp rampart adjacent to the western of the two gaps on this side, and returning on the NNW; though Francis Lynn's plan suggests it may have crossed in front of the entrance on the NW to mount the W terminal of the inner rampart. The interior of this annexe measures up to 90m across from NNW to SSE (0.3ha); it is subdivided by several banks and may also have contained several stone-founded round-houses

Information from An Atlas of Hillforts of Great Britain and Ireland – 31 August 2016. Atlas of Hillforts SC4104