9.3.2.3 Southern Highlands

There are fewer sites known from the southern Highlands, though undoubtedly results from the many excavations in Inverness over the past decades will augment this picture when fully published or extracted from excavation reports. Non-castle sites remain elusive apart from the burgh sites and Portmahomack. This area has also seen a great deal of metal detecting activity, particularly in the Dornoch area; Cromarty, Fortrose, Rosemarkie and Redcastle on the Black Isle; Ardersier, between Inverness and Nairn; and Kiltarlity/Beauly, the results of which make clear there were people in the area whose houses archaeologists have not discovered.

The extraordinary sequence of occupation at the Learnie Caves near Rosemarkie on the Black Isle continued into the medieval period, although use of the caves may have been less intensive than the early medieval Period. A final report is awaited once post-excavation work is compete, but radiocarbon dates show activity in several caves (see Table 9.3). At Learnie 1A medieval pottery was also found (Birch and Peteranna 2019). When combined with evidence from elsewhere in the Highlands, it is clear that there was wide activity in caves and rockshelters, even if its exact nature is often unclear.

After the early medieval period activity at Portmahomack, a range of activity occurred from around 1250, in the fields surrounding the church. A small fishing village marked by huge middens and a house platform, oven and a well were joined by the monastic enclosure being reworked and put under ridge and furrow cultivation. The middens were a combination of food, bait preparation and domestic waste, yielding fish bones butchered for preservation and a group of fishing equipment.  Evidence for textile working went hand-in-hand with the rise in sheep numbers among the animal bone assemblages. Coin evidence indicates date parameters of 1250 to 1350 for this activity. There followed a hiatus of about 100 years again indicated by coin-use profiles. Between 1450 and 1550 new activity is signalled. The middens were levelled and stone walls erected for cattle and for a smithy. Sites of buildings were indicated by curvilinear gullies, internal storage pits and occasional truncated postholes; the floor levels have been lost to the plough. Finds associated with this activity consisted of huge quantities of iron-working slags from smelting and smithing and three fragments from large rotary grindstones for sharpening large bladed items, probably swords (Carver et al 2016, 311ff). An attempt to fit this activity into the political situation in this area, still somewhat a frontier at the beginning of the period, is outlined in Carver et al (2016, 316ff, Case Study Portmahomack). The 100-year gap in evidence coincides with the environmental downturn and plague years.