Easter Dawyck

Notebook p62-3, planned.

This site is noted in the ‘List of monuments discovered during the survey of marginal land (1951-5)’ (RCAHMS 1957, xiv-xviii).

Information from RCAHMS (GFG), 24 October 2012.

This fort is situated on a low spur that forms a hillock on the NW flank of White Knowe dropping down above Easter Dawyck. Its defences display evidence of a several periods of construction, the two principal elements being an inner and outer enclosure, of which the inner is the later. Oval on plan, the latter measures internally 52m from E to W by 40m transversely (0.17ha) and contains four stone-founded round-houses, but while this was regarded as a later settlement by RCAHMS investigators in 1956 (RCAHMS 1967, 115, no.277), overlying the earlier rampart on the W, it has a wall in which the intermittent facing-stones indicate a thickness of some 3.6m, and should probably regarded as a fortification in its own right. The underlying fort is also oval, measuring about 88m from NE to SW by 67m transversely (0.42ha) within a single stone-faced rampart, which is accompanied around the SE and SW flanks by an external ditch, and where in places there is also an internal quarry ditch; these defences, in their view, had been demolished on the NE, and it is perhaps curious that they did not pose the question of whether the perimeter had ever been completed in this sector. There is certainly little trace of it on the ground and little continuity with the arc of the rampart on the N, which suggests that if ever completed the earlier defences had already been reconfigured into a roughly circular enclosure measuring about 67m in internal diameter (0.38ha), long before the construction of the inner enclosure. They believed, however, that this reconfiguration belonged to a later phase in which an annexe containing another three round-houses was added to the inner enclosure, but the narrow band of rubble forming the annexe wall is of altogether different character to the underlying rampart on the E and N. The true sequence here cannot be resolved without excavation but it is almost certainly more complex than perceived in 1956. The terminal of the rampart and ditch of the earlier defences on the NE appears to mark one side of an entrance, while a second entrance on the W seems to have served both the earlier fort and the inner enclosure; the annexe has its own entrance on the NE. Whether the visible round-houses are contemporary with any of the defences, or are an essentially unenclosed settlement superimposed on their ruins, is not known.

Information from An Atlas of Hillforts of Great Britain and Ireland – 18 October 2016. Atlas of Hillforts SC3573

Visibility: This is an upstanding earthwork or monument.

Information from Scottish Borders Council