Crib's Hill - Howdenpot Knowes

NT43SE 12 4745 3222 to 4583 3202

(NT 4745 3222 - NT 4583 3202) Catrail or Picts' Work Ditch (NR) (Site of)

OS 6" map (1900)

Linear Earthwork, Howdenpot Knowes to Cribs Hill: This earthwork, which is probably a land-boundary, consists of a ditch and bank of slight dimensions and for the most part very poorly preserved. It has been confused with the "Catrail" or "Picts' Work Ditch" (F Lynn 1898), but is quite distinct from that monument and runs on an independent course from a point about 100 yds W of the mouth of Howdenpot Burn (NT 475 322) to the W edge of Raelees Wood, on Cribs Hill (NT 458 320).

Nor was any evidence found to connect an old field-road, which follows the course of the earthwork in its W part, with the hollow track noted on the ridge joining Sunderland Hill with the NE shoulder of Peat Law. Its length is some 1900 yds and it is laid out along, or just below the crest of, a slope which rises steeply from the right bank of the River Tweed.

At its W end it returns northwards, at right angles to its previous course, and does not continue westwards as stated by Lynn and as suggested by the O S map; 40 yds below this corner it turns again at right angles, and fades out after running E for 100 yds. A small burn rises near the upper corner and runs N down the steep slope to the Tweed, but as the returned sections of the earthwork cross and ignore this feature it is probably not to be regarded as the W boundary of an area otherwise enclosed by the earthwork and the river.

The work has been much interfered with by cultivation and by use as a road, being everywhere greatly spread, and for some 250 yds E of the Peebles - Selkirk road it has been entirely obliterated. Where measured, the ditch varied in width from 5 ft to 7 ft and the bank from 6 ft to 8 ft, the differences in the levels of crest and ditch bottom being slight; in places ditch and bank are broken down to a kind of terrace, about 12 ft wide over all.

The suggestion that this feature is part of a longer, continuous earthwork is based on a complete misreading of the remains. The northward return of the work at NT 458 320 is unquestionable, and the alleged continuation of the work on the NE shoulder of Peat Law is not an earthwork, but an old road, and even so, there is a gap of at least 1100 yds between the two last-named points.

RCAHMS 1957, visited 1947

Where extant, this earthwork appears almost certainly to be the remains of an old plantation bank. Course as described by the R C A H M.

Visited by OS (WDJ) 19 January 1961