Note

Date 3 April 2017

Event ID 1108067

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Note

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1108067

Atlas of Hillforts of Britain and Ireland

The palimpsest of cropmarks on a terrace above the S bank of the River Tweed at Sprouston includes a curious earthwork that has been variously interpreted as a ploughed out promontory fort or a Neolithic causewayed enclosure (Smith 1991, 266; Reynolds 1980, 50; St Joseph 1982, 192). The clue to this divergence of opinion lies in the character of the ditch revealed by the cropmarks, which is broken into at least five segments of varying lengths by both narrow and broad causeways. The broadest of the segments is up to 6m across, and they are strung out in a shallow arc to form a D-shaped enclosure backing onto the bluff above the river, enclosing an area measuring up to 180m fro NW to SE along the chord by 80m transversely (1ha). Field-walking by Ian Smith recovered scatters of flint artefacts from this area, which is slightly elevated above the rest of the field and bounded on the SE by a shallow gully, while the cropmarks elsewhere include a cluster of rectangular buildings probably of early medieval date and a burial-ground, but these have little bearing on the date or purpose of the earthwork. No causewayed enclosure has been confirmed by excavation this far north, and a more conventional explanation of the causewayed ditch might be an unfinished perimeter; there are certainly several other large earthwork enclosure backing onto the Tweed in Berwickshire, and an Iron Age context is perhaps a more likely interpretation until proved otherwise.

Information from An Atlas of Hillforts of Great Britain and Ireland – 03 April 2017. Atlas of Hillforts -SC3427.html