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Field Visit
Date August 1971
Event ID 1176628
Category Recording
Type Field Visit
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1176628
NM 923 349. The Black Crofts are situated on the SE perimeter of the Moss of Achnacree, overlooking the narrows at the mouth of Loch Etive. Behind two of the crofts there are the remains of a field-bank which is built on the old land surface beneath the peat, and thus antedates the formation of the moss. Three trenches were dug by the Commission's officers in order to examine this feature, which is visible behind Croft number 3 as a low bank (about 1·8 m in width and 0'3 m in height), and which may be traced from the edge of the moss for a length of 62 m; beyond this point it has been destroyed by recent building. A short stretch of a similar bank, running obliquely to the first, is visible 88 m to the WNW, behind Croft number 1. The main bank was 1'5 m in width, covered by peat to a depth of 1'1 m, and consisted of a core of earth and stones revetted on either side with granite boulders (Pl. 11E) (GAJ forthcoming). The core material had been scooped out of quarry-ditches on either side and a deposit of grey silt in the ditches suggested that they later served as drainage channels. Two radiocarbon dates, the first for a sample taken from the original soil surface sealed beneath the bank, and the second taken from the base of the peat elsewhere on the moss*, suggest that the field-bank was constructed in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC.
RCAHMS 1975, visited August 1971.
*Base of peat deposit, 980 bc +/- 80 (N-1468); original soil surface, 1359 bc +/- 50 (SRR-219). The Commissioners are indebted to Dr G Whittington, Department of Geography, University of St Andrews, for permission to quote these dates.
