Archaeology Notes

Event ID 840874

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Archaeology Notes

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/840874

NX55NE 2.00 5888 5602

NX55NE 2.01 Cancelled

NX55NE 2.02 NX 5889 5601 Pictish symbols (Rock carving)

(NX 5889 5601) Vitrified Fort (NR)

(Symbol at NX 5891 5603) Sculptured Stones (NR)

OS 6" map (1957)

Excavations carried out in 1960 revealed occupation relating to two periods.

The first, an Iron Age fort; an area 50' by 80' on the summit being enclosed by a 4' wide timber-laced stone wall. An oval stone guard-hut built in a natural hollow outside the entrance on the SE and a massive rock-cut ditch across the neck of the promontory to the NE also belong to this period.

In the 6th - 7th centuries AD, additional ramparts of poorer type with external revetment only were constructed outside the entrance, and possibly timber huts inside. A group of class I Pictish symbols (NX55NE 2.02) are cut on a rock outcrop at the fort entrance, and now protected by an iron grille. No dateable finds were made.

J R Allen and J Anderson 1903; C Thomas 1961.

As described and planned above. There is another hut site, about 11.0m in diameter, on the W side of the entrance, but no trace of timber huts could be seen within the interior.

Surveyed at 1:2500.

Visited by OS (WDJ) 10 July 1970

This small fort occupies the craggiest summit of the Boreland Hills, an area of scrub and rough pasture to the W of Gatehouse of Fleet. Although the defences of the fort have been severely robbed, enough remains to show that they comprise a central enclosure with outworks on the NNE and SSE. The central enclosure measures about 23.5m from NNW to SSE by 15m transversely within a rampart reduced to little more than a grass-grown scarp. The results of excavations conducted in 1960 (Thomas 1961) suggested that this rampart is only about 1.2m thick, but it appears to be far more substantial than that and the pattern of robbing on the N implies a thickness of the order of 4m. Several pieces of vitrified stone are visible along the course of the rampart. The configuration of the inner defences around the entrance at the SSE end of the fort is uncertain. On the W side of the entrance the rampart extends beyond the rampart terminal on the E side, and there are traces of low banks dropping down on either side of the entrance-way; these banks were regarded as secondary to the inner rampart by the excavator, although the junction between them has never been excavated. To the S, the entrance-way drops down between two large rock outcrops, which have been incorporated into the defences of the fort by hornworks running along their crests and petering out on the E and W slopes of the hill respectively. Outside the hornwork there are traces of a third rampart which cuts across the hill on the crest of a rock outcrop some 1.5m in height. About 4m beyond it there is a fourth rampart, the greater part of it consisting of a rock outcrop. Excavation has shown that both these ramparts were externally faced.

On the NNE, the other easy line of approach to the fort, there is a rampart 3m thick and 0.5m high with an external rock-cut ditch 4m broad and from 1.5m to 3m deep. A section cut across this rampart and ditch in 1960 showed that the rampart has both inner and outer faces; a break-in-slope above it on the N side of the fort marks another line of defence. The only internal features of the fort are an excavated hut set between the hornwork and the inner rampart on the E side of the entrance, and the Pictish symbols (NX55NE 2.02) carved into the living rock immediately to the W (Anderson and Allen 1903).

Visited by RCAHMS (SPH), 21 February 1990.