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RCAHMS Afforestable Land Survey, Kale Water, Roxburgh

Date 1999 - 2000

Event ID 918930

Category Project

Type Project

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/918930

This survey fills a gap in the pattern of recent fieldwork in the Cheviots between Southdean (RCAHMS 1994) in the west and the Bowmont Valley Survey by Edinburgh University in the east. In line with other Afforestable Land Surveys, the structures located in the course of the fieldwork are being mapped with GPS to produce an accurate digital map of all antiquities.

This area of the Cheviots is notable for the extensive prehistoric farming landscapes that are preserved high up on the ridges, including both enclosed and unenclosed timber-built settlements, a series of scooped settlements, cord rig and cross-ridge dykes. New examples of all these monuments are being encountered and the range of funerary monuments has also been expanded to include ditched barrows, stony ring-banks and what appears to be a small square cairn. The area also contains the Roman temporary camps at Pennymuir, one of only a few locations in Scotland where such features survive as upstanding earthworks. The camps lie adjacent to Dere Street (the principal Roman road from England to eastern Scotland), which climbs up to the Border to the south of Woden Law. Here the survey has shown that the course of the road has been wrongly mapped and confused with a later trackway which follows a slightly different route to the watershed.

An extensive landscape of rig-and-furrow of medieval and later date has also survived in this area, largely on account of the long-established pattern of sheep farming in the Cheviots. This form of farming has created its own distinctive archaeology, represented by turf or stone stells and folds, shelters of various forms, and large turf enclosures. The rig has been plotted and characterised using aerial photographs, distinguishing between areas of broad reverse S ridging, various other types of straight rig. and 'grooved' rig, the latter defined by little more than a narrow furrow. Some of the rig was clearly designed to run partly along the contour, and has led to the formation of flights of low terraces. Fine examples of cultivation terrace systems are found at places like Chatto Craig. where there is also evidence of rigs overlying them. A pattern of medieval and post-medieval settlement is beginning to emerge also, in some cases partly reusing prehistoric scooped settlements and in others in new locations. The latter includes a medieval street village at Upper Chatto. Some of the buildings in this village are long, largely turf, structures about 20m in length, but others have a solid stone foundation. It is not clear if this observation has any chronological significance.

RCAHMS (DES 1999, 95-6)

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