Burning Matters: The Rise and Fall of an Early-Medieval Fortified Centre. A New Chronology for Clatchard Craig

Abstract

ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENTS in early-medieval northern Britain was the re-emergence of fortified enclosures and settlements. As in western England and Wales, the fort rather than the hall formed the most prominent material manifestation of power of an elite and their client group. While fortified sites dominate our knowledge of the form that central places of power and governance took in the early-medieval period in northern Britain, our historical sources reveal little about the character, longevity and lifespan of many of these important nodes of power, and archaeological investigation has also tended to be limited. Hence only a handful of forts in northern Britain provide well-dated and investigated sequences for what are critical sites for understanding the character of post-Roman society in the north. As part of the Leverhulme Trust-funded Comparative Kingship project, a suite of new radiocarbon dates was produced using archived material from excavations at the now-destroyed early-medieval hillfort of Clatchard Craig in Fife, eastern Scotland (NGR NO 2435 1780); one of the most complex early-medieval forts yet identified in northern Britain. Some 35 years ago, Joanna Close-Brooks oversaw the publication of a report on the hillfort based on excavations which had occurred more than two decades earlier in response to the quarrying of this multivallate hillfort. 5 Due to the imprecision and scarcity of radiocarbon dating, a broad 6th to 8th + century ad chronology for the defences and occupation of the interior was obtained. With higher precision AMS dates and a new Bayesian model, a much tighter sequence of dating has been produced suggesting the development and destruction of the monumentally enclosed phase of the site centred on a much shorter period in the 7th century ad. The new chronology for the site, which suggests the fort was constructed and destroyed within a few generations at most, has important implications for the role of fortifications, and the character of warfare in early-medieval society. The burning of the fort suggests a catastrophic and rapid end to a site that is likely to have been constructed by the Pictish elite. The fort may have been a victim of the tumultuous and pivotal events of the latter half of the 7th century when southern Pictland came under Northumbrian control before being wrested back into Pictish overkingship in the aftermath of the Battle of Nechtanesmere of ad 685.