Archaeologists working in a Perthshire forest have made some “remarkable” prehistoric discoveries. The remains of this prehistoric homestead have been found. The second season of an archaeological dig has begun. The aim will be to excavate the interior of the enclosure and confirm whether or not the enclosure wall is surrounded by an external ditch. A nine-day archaeological evaluation was carried out, as part of Perthshire Archaeology Week in 2005, on a homestead found in the Black Spout Wood, Pitlochry, Scotland. The team was made up of volunteers and directed by the Trust’s archaeologists.
The site is situated on the edge of a cliff just below the Black Spout waterfall on the Edradour Burn just to the east of Pitlochry. The “circular building” was once interpreted as a ring-fort, the circular enclosure is around 20 m in diameter and has a stone-built wall around 2.5 m thick, and may well be type of site known as a Homestead. Homesteads are large circular enclosures, with a thick wall, which would have contained a substantial internal building. There are around sixty examples in Perth and Kinross where they are found along the glens of western highland Perthshire, particularly around Loch Tummel and Glen Lyon. It is possible that they date to the end of the late Iron Age to the Early Medieval period (the early to mid part of the first millennium AD). It is hoped that the excavations will tell us more about these sites a whole, and that the remains will form a visitor attraction within the wood in the future.
