Archaeology Notes

Event ID 687505

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Archaeology Notes

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/687505

NO33SW 7 3321 3279

(NO 3321 3279) Hurly Hawkin (NAT)

Broch (NR)

OS 6" map, (1971).

A multi-phase occupation site comprising a promontory fort, a palisaded enclosure, a broch and a souterrain, excavated by Taylor between 1958 and 1967.

The promontory fort was formed by cutting off a steep-sided tongue of land at the junction of two streams with a double set of ramparts and ditches. The ditches apparently ran together on the west and descended into the galley.

Either contemporary with the fort or slightly later was a palisaded enclosure composed of posts 22cm in diameter, set 30cm deep and 45 to 60cm apart in a clay bank 0.5m high which ran in a slight arc and underlay the wall of the broch on the west. Twenty-seven post holes were identified. Paving followed the line of the bank and also partially underlay the broch well. Taylor suggests this may have been a hut about 15m in diameter. The only pre-broch find was a small perforated bone plate.

The building of the broch entailed the demolition of the inner rampart, the broch wall on the north overlying it. The broch itself had been quarried away almost to foundation level but enough remained to indicate its measurements - 12m diameter within a wall 5 to 6m thick - and some of the structural details - the remains of a mural chamber or stairway on the north; the fragmentary remains of a possible second mural chamber on the SE, and the entrance in the SW. Paving in the SE quandrant overlay post-holes in the original clay surface, which may have been pre-broch but did not form part of the palisaded enclosure. Finds from the broch date it to the end of the 1st or beginning of the 2nd c A D and include, among a quantity of metalwork a possible patera-handle, now in National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland (NMAS). The interior had been previously excavated by Andrew Jervise in 1860 and by Lord Gray still earlier.

An 'Angus-type' souterrain 25m long and 1.8m wide, with paved floor, was discovered in the innermost ditch. Its walls remained to a height of 1.5m. The entrance, which had been deliberately blocked was in the west and had opened into a paved courtyard whose construction had involved cutting away the outer rampart and filling the ditches with rubble from the broch. The souterrain had been destroyed by throwing the roof-slabs down into the passage (where they lay on a 45cm thick layer of silt) and finally filling the passage in. Finds included pottery similar to the finer native wares of the souterrain at Ardestie (NO53SW 1) and Carlungie (NO53NW 14) and indicated the possibility that, like Ardestie, the souterrain in its original form had been associated with surface dwellings which were demolished in the later re-use of the site. This close comparison with Ardestie suggests a similar date, possibly late 2nd or early 3rd century AD.

Stratification of the site was much disturbed by trees but 1st and 2nd century Roman pottery was found. Miss Robertson (1970) suggests that the earlier pottery came from the broch and the later from the souterrain.

A Jervise 1868; D B Taylor 1958; F T Wainwright 1963; A Robertson 1970; D B Taylor 1971.

Bronze spiral finger-ring.

E W MacKie 1971.