Field Visit
Date 21 February 1990
Event ID 918711
Category Recording
Type Field Visit
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/918711
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.
