‘Enclosures’ is a broad term used in archaeology to describe any area that is surrounded by a boundary (for example a ditch, bank, wall, or palisade). This catch-all term can include settlements, livestock corrals, ritual sites, agricultural areas, or defensive structures. Not all enclosures are fortified or defensive.
Many of these enclosed spaces, such as Traprain Law, Chester (Drem) and Eildon Hill, continue to dominate the landscape, their upstanding ramparts and ditches still visible today. But there are far more examples of enclosed spaces. In many areas, such as East Lothian and Midlothian, the great majority are known only as cropmarks, the upstanding components removed by the plough, and now only identified as negative features through several decades of aerial photography and, in the rare occasion, excavation (Reader and Armit 2013, 479; Cowley 2009, 2016).
During the Iron Age there were several types of enclosed places dispersed across the region. Thus, enclosed places are often separated into a variety of types but rarely are these classes mutually exclusive and involve a degree of subjectivity (Reader and Armit 2013, 481). Further, there is a significant overlap or continuum between sites conventionally termed enclosed settlements, and between different sizes of enclosed settlements. Crucially, many enclosed spaces were reformed, grew and contracted, during their repeated use over many generations.
Form
The variety of form of enclosed spaces in South East Scotland is highlighted by the analysis of East Lothian. Regarding form, 68% were curvilinear, 28% were rectilinear and 4% were D-shaped. In turn, these can be further sub-divided into smaller sub-sets (see Reader and Armit 2013, 482 for summary). Enclosed sites can be univallate, bivallate and multivallate, though the degree of vallation may represent the superimposition of multiple periods of activity. The vast majority of enclosed sites were defined by ditches although some were defined by a palisade. Indeed, palisades, walls, wall-and-fill ramparts, dump ramparts and ditches, each displaying a variety of forms and scales (eg with and without timber lacing) were all widely used in varying combinations or singly to enclose places in Scotland. In other words, unlike 70 years ago, we cannot assume that across the area there was a simple linear sequence through time from palisade, to univallate to multivallate, first mooted by Piggott in the 1940s. What is becoming apparent is the sheer variety of site histories across the area and indeed within individual regions and individual sites.
It is also not unusual for enclosure cropmarks to occur in close proximity, sometimes forming noticeable clusters. A good example occurs at Fishers Road, Port Seton, where there are three separate enclosures all within a few hundred metres. Other notable clusters occur around the Garleton Hills, near Haddington. In other areas sites are rare or non-existent, area just east of Traprain Law being a good example.
Scale
Unsurprisingly, the enclosed sites vary in size. Sites like Traprain Law dwarf many of the sites in our study area. Reader and Armit’s study of East Lothian showed that 81% of the enclosed sites ‘…are very small, at less than 0.5ha…with only a handful over 0.8ha’. In other words, the vast majority of enclosed sites in East Lothian are half the size of an international rugby pitch (2013, 483). The internal areas of bivallate and (to a much greater extent multivallate sites) tend to be significantly larger than univallate examples’.
Harding (2017) reminds us that ‘…most hillforts, certainly within the South Eastern Borders’, are relatively small and hard to differentiate from enclosed homesteads or small enclosed villages, though their enclosing earthworks, not massive in absolute terms, may sometimes be disproportionately substantial relative to the area enclosed’. Harding concludes that ‘…the very fact that archaeological classification has difficulty in drawing a dividing line between small hillforts and enclosed homesteads perhaps suggests that this was not a distinction that reflected the social order of later prehistoric settlement in the Borders’ (2017).
Date
Before the widespread application of radiocarbon dating of enclosures, or rather hillforts, was reliant on very meagre material assemblages from which tenuous comparisons were made with southern Britain accordingly most sites were cautiously assigned to the closing centuries of the pre-Roman Iron Age (Stevenson 1966; Harding 2017).
East Lothian is arguably the only part of Scotland with a well-documented, whilst admittedly, skeletal chronology of enclosed places (see Connolly, Cook and Kdolska 2021). At least in East Lothian it is likely that the great majority of enclosed sites were occupied (whether continuously, episodically or fleetingly) between around 800 BC and AD 200 (Reader and Armit 2013, 481). While they would not all have been in occupation at any one time, it is likely that many of them were, particularly during the later 1st millennium BC. Although there are far fewer dates from Edinburgh and the Borders it is likely that the floruit of enclosure sites was also during this broad time period.