A community archaeology project enabled by GUARD Archaeology has been nominated for an Archaeological Research Project of the Year Award.

Working together with the Arthur Trail Association, local volunteers and heritage groups, and specialists from a variety of universities and institutes including the National Museums of Scotland and the Universities of Aberdeen, St Andrews and Stirling, the Drumelzier’s Hidden Heritage project investigated the archaeological roots of Drumelzier’s Merlin legend.

Until the fieldwork got underway in 2022, Drumelzier’s folklore was assumed to have simply originated from a wandering medieval minstrel, who had weaved random nearby landmarks into a local version of a tale that was widely known across medieval Europe.

The team of archaeologists and volunteers investigated Tinnis Castle, where according to the Drumelzier legend the protagonist was imprisoned by a Dark Age tyrant. The archaeological evidence they uncovered revealed that the hillfort underlying the castle was occupied around AD 600, precisely when the story was set and which has the hallmarks of a lordly stronghold of the time.

The team also undertook a geophysics survey of ground where according to the local legend the protagonist was buried on the banks of the Tweed and Powsail Burn. This survey revealed that while there is nothing at the spot marked on maps as the reputed location of Merlin’s Grave at Drumelzier (the red circle below) there is indeed an archaeological feature resembling a grave nearby to this.

The new archaeological evidence does not prove that the local tale was true, but it does demonstrate that the legend very likely originated in Drumelzier itself.

These awards are voted for entirely by the public – there are no panels of judges – so anyone is free to choose the projects, publications, and people they would like to win.

Voting closes on 10 February 2025, and the winners will be announced on 1 March as part of the Current Archaeology Live! 2025 Conference.

If you would like to vote, follow the link to the Research Project of the Year 2025: https://archaeology.co.uk/vote.

The excavation report, ARO56: Unearthing Ancient Tweeddale: Tinnis Castle, Thirlestane Barrows and Merlin’s Grave is freely available to download from www.archaeologyreportsonline.com.

The Drumelzier’s Hidden Heritage project was a collaboration between the Arthur Trail Association, local heritage groups, volunteers, specialists, Magnitude Surveys and GUARD Archaeology Ltd, funded by SSE Renewables Clyde Borders Community Fund, Fallago Environment Fund, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Dr Euan MacKie Legacy Fund, Glenkerie Community Fund, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Hunter Archaeological and Historical Trust, and the Strathmartine Trust.

An early medieval workshop built over the ruins of an earlier Pictish-style building reveals a snapshot of life in the early Scots kingdom of Dál Riata.

Recently published analysis of the archaeological evidence recovered by GUARD Archaeology Ltd from Coultorsay on Islay has revealed an iron smelting workshop located within the earlier remains of a figure-of-eight building. This hive of activity was dated to between the sixth and ninth centuries AD when Islay was part of Dál Riata, the early medieval kingdom of the Scots centred upon the royal fortress of Dunadd and which covered modern-day Argyll and Bute.

Metalworking waste, the upper part of a rotary quern, a bone needle and shale bracelet fragments were recovered from several of the features associated with the buildings. Shale bracelets are rare in the Inner Hebrides; these are the only examples known from Islay. The shale probably came from central Scotland.

Over time a change in function took place, from domestic use to that with an industrial focus, which took place after the domestic building had fallen into a state of disrepair. In contrast to many known metalworking workshops from early medieval Scotland, which were often enclosed within royal or lordly strongholds, the Coultorsay workshop was a relatively modest structure. It appeared to have been used for smelting bog ore to extract iron bloom which could then be made into tools and weapons somewhere else.

Very few sites dating to the early medieval period have been excavated on Islay with most known sites being ecclesiastical in origin, such as chapels and burial grounds, several with fragments of early cross slabs. This makes the figure-of-eight building particularly important and provides new information about those living on Islay out-with ecclesiastical sites. The similarity of the earlier figure-of-eight house to cellular Pictish buildings suggests that this form of architecture was more widespread across Scotland than previously envisaged.

The early medieval landscape of Islay was probably characterised more by slight buildings, such as the Coultorsay figure-of-eight house, in which the majority of the population resided but leave little trace, than the more substantial forts that are the more visible remnants of early medieval Scotland.

The GUARD excavation also revealed the remains of prehistoric structures and activity from the Mesolithic to the Iron Age across the hillside terrace where the workshop lay. The evidence seemed to suggest relatively transient activity during the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods before more settled occupation began in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age followed by a gap of about 500 years before occupation re-appeared during the early medieval period.

The full results of this research, which was undertaken in advance of new warehouses for the Bruichladdich Distillery, ARO58: Prehistoric Activity and an early medieval smelting workshop at Coultorsay, Islay by Maureen Kilpatrick has recently been published and is now freely available to download from the ARO website – Archaeology Reports Online.

Drumelzier has long been associated with the legendary Merlin, who was reputedly imprisoned there by a Dark Age King, killed and buried by the banks of the Tweed nearby too. At least according to the Vita Merlini Sylvestris – the Life of Merlin of the Forest – a medieval tale probably written in Glasgow during the twelfth century.

In 2022, a team of volunteers led by GUARD Archaeology set out to investigate the archaeological roots of this local legend. The results of their work have just been published and reveals the startling survival of the early medieval cultural heritage of the Britons of southern Scotland.

A geophysics survey revealed that there is an archaeological feature resembling a grave near to the reputed location of Merlin’s Grave at Drumelzier.

Excavation of Tinnis Fort, which overlooks Merlin’s Grave, found that this prominent hillfort was occupied around the late sixth and early seventh centuries AD when the story was set and that it has the hallmarks of a lordly stronghold of the time.

And excavation of the Thirlestane Barrows across the other side of the Tweed discovered that sometime between the late-third and late-sixth centuries AD a square barrow was added to a much earlier group of Bronze Age Round Barrows, within which two individuals of exceptional elite status were buried.

What the findings reveal is not that the local story was true, but that the Drumelzier legend, which contains pre-Christian customs and ancient Cumbric names, was associated with local sites where archaeology now shows could credibly have given rise to the story. The legend was not brought here as a wandering medieval tale but more likely originated in Drumelzier itself, perhaps originating as a folk memory, embellished over the centuries before it spread far and wide and changed out of almost all recognition.

Nor, given the archaeology encountered from the Late Mesolithic/Early Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age and medieval periods, was this the only trace of local stories that the Drumelzier’s Hidden Heritage project discovered.

A scatter of Late Mesolithic / Early Neolithic flint blade fragments was recovered from the summit of Tinnis, the barest traces of some of the earliest groups of people to ever climb this prominent hill and from its vantage point gaze across a Tweed Valley that looked very much different from the present.

The vitrified ramparts at Tinnis attest to the fall of a Late Iron Age hillfort, the forgotten victims of a forgotten conflict when prominent households vied for power and the foundations for petty kingdoms were being laid.

And in the fourteenth century, a castle was built at Tinnis by the fearsome Tweedies of Drumelzier, who held this castle for the Kings of Scotland from about 1366 until about 1525, a bulwark against English raids from the south.

Whether it was folk memory or stories that clung to the group of Bronze Age round barrows at Thirlestane, these monuments evidently had some meaning in the landscape for the square barrow to be sited so close after an intervening two millennia. The people of ancient Tweeddale were aware of the history beneath their feet and the people that came before and it was through local folklore that stories about their past were passed on.

The Drumelzier’s Hidden Heritage project was a collaboration between the Arthur Trail Association, local heritage groups, volunteers, Magnitude Surveys and GUARD Archaeology Ltd, funded by SSE Renewables Clyde Borders Community Fund, Fallago Environment Fund, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Dr Euan MacKie Legacy Fund, Glenkerie Community Fund, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Hunter Archaeological and Historical Trust, and the Strathmartine Trust

ARO56: Unearthing Ancient Tweeddale: Tinnis Castle, Thirlestane Barrows and Merlin’s Grave by Ronan Toolis, Amanda Gilmore, Thomas Muir, Laura Muser and Alun Woodward is freely available to download from Archaeology Reports Online.

The exhibition Unearthing Ancient Tweeddale at Peebles Museum will run from Saturday 8 June – Saturday 27 July 2024 (closed Wednesdays and Sundays). The exhibition will then be going on tour to Broughton, Drumelzier, Stobo, Traquair House, Eddleston, Moffat, Tweedsmuir, Kirkton Manor and Biggar over the course of August-October 2024.

An early Bronze Age cemetery discovered near Helensburgh by GUARD Archaeology has revealed long-lost secrets of burial rites from Bronze Age Scotland.

Following the excavation by a team of GUARD Archaeologists in 2020, the results of specialist analyses have only just now come to light.

The oldest of the stone-lined graves, or cists, was dated to 2467-2290 BC. Strangely it contained no human remains, but only fragments of pyre material, which appear to have been sufficient to represent the dead.

The largest of the three cists Cist 1, and Cist 3, were constructed at least three centuries later c. 2140-1930 BC. Both contained the cremated remains each of at least two adults and a child or young person, but with no grave goods.

‘The long span of time between these cist graves indicates the lasting memory of burials here,’ said Iraia Arabaolaza, the principal author of the GUARD excavation report. ‘The reuse of the burial place at different periods may have reinforced land ownership or connections to ancestors.’

The place was then revisited between 50 and 300 years after the cist burials, at a time in the first half of the second millennium BC when the burial rituals had changed again, to that of using a pottery vessel to hold the cremated remains then buried at the bottom of a pit. Most of the cremated remains that were found from this phase of use also included one or two adults and a young person together.

The remains of at least 14 adults and 6 young persons were recovered from the cemetery. The burials contained multiple individuals that had been cremated and then collected together and buried as part of the same rite.

‘The incomplete nature of each of the individual remains suggest that the rite of cremation and burial were more important than keeping/collecting and burying the person as whole,’ said Iraia Arabaolaza. ‘This cemetery complex is not only chronologically diverse, but it also reflects the differences in the burial rites and material culture. The burial of multiple people together, part of the same burial rite and possible part of the same cremation process indicates the importance of the cremation rite and the community rather than the individual and the preservation of its body as a whole.’ 

The GUARD Archaeologists discovered that this Bronze Age community were not the first people to occupy this site. A late Neolithic kerbed cairn from around 3500 BC and that had once been fronted by an impressive stone façade, had been cut into by the Bronze Age stone cist graves.

And the recovery of flint tools dating from about 5,000 years before even that, around 8,400 BC, indicate that some of Scotland’s earliest inhabitants, during the late Upper Palaeolithic or early Mesolithic periods occupied this site too.

The archaeological work was funded by Bellway Homes and was required as a condition of planning consent by Argyll and Bute Council who are advised on archaeological matters by the West of Scotland Archaeology Service, who considered there to be a potential for hitherto unknown archaeology to be buried at the site.

ARO51: A Bronze Age cemetery, Sawmill Field, Helensburgh, Argyll and Bute by Iraia Arabaolaza is freely available to download from Archaeology Reports Online.

A community excavation assisted by GUARD Archaeology has unearthed interesting new evidence for Iron Age lifestyles in Sutherland.

Following last year’s collaboration with Clyne Heritage Society, GUARD Archaeology’s Alan Hunter Blair led a dig of two roundhouses in the uplands around Brora, on the croft of Aultcraggie. The structures were first spotted by chair of the society, Nick Lindsay back in 2022 while walking the hills and confirmed on LiDAR. The team of archaeologists and volunteers returned in May 2023 to investigate after access was kindly granted by those working the croft, Fiona Ross and Allan Grant.

The dig focused on two roundhouses opening up trenches across the walls, floors and entrances of the structures. The aim was to find evidence of how people lived in these buildings. Successive floor layers were revealed from which charcoal was recovered (which will allow us to radiocarbon date the roundhouses). Analysis of soil samples recovered from the floor deposits can also tell us what fuel was being used for fires, what the inhabitants were eating and even potentially what wood was used for the structure and roofing.

The team of volunteers also recovered numerous flint tools, which may have been used for cutting and processing food, hide working and even as strike-a-lights for fire. Fragments of a saddle quern was found as well as a large pot was found that had been left where it fell on the floor. Specialist analysis of these artefacts will tell us something about the lifestyles of those who lived here, and how this compares with other similar sites in the region and across Scotland. This will provide new insights into Iron Age Sutherland, revealing aspect of life here buried beneath the ground for the last two and bit thousand years.

The dig saw hundreds of visitors and volunteers across the 12-day duration, including pupils from the local Brora Primary School. And as well as providing opportunities for local volunteers to participate in the dig, students from the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews took part, receiving training in archaeological fieldwork to the standards of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists, which will contribute towards their degrees.

The results of the dig will be reported on in due course, with a publication to follow once all the artefacts and samples have been analysed and dated.