Edin's Hall Broch

Long before any tower stood on this hillside, the summit of Cockburn Law was already a defended settlement. During the pre-Roman Iron Age, builders raised double ramparts and ditches around an oval hilltop enclosure measuring roughly 135 by 75 metres, with its entrance on the west side, and a large circular roundhouse near the centre may have served as the site's principal building before anything else replaced it.

At some later point, the character of the hilltop changed dramatically. Builders cut through the northwest stretch of the existing ramparts to raise a massive circular stone tower in their place, transforming rather than abandoning the older fort. The result, at some 28 metres in external diameter, ranks among the largest brochs known anywhere in southern Scotland.

Dating the tower precisely has proved difficult, because 19th-century antiquarians cleared the site of rubble and artefacts without recording the soil layers that would normally let archaeologists reconstruct its history, destroying much of the evidence in the process. Archaeologists instead date it by comparison: excavations at Torwoodlee Broch elsewhere in the Borders showed that tower was built and destroyed during the 2nd century AD, in the unsettled years between two periods of Roman occupation, and Edin's Hall, standing in the same frontier landscape with similar architectural features, is generally placed in that same phase of construction.

Life on the hill continued to change after the broch itself was built. Across the enclosure, low stone footings of smaller houses can still be traced in the grass, and some of these were built directly over the earlier ramparts, showing that the settlement kept evolving long after the hillfort's original construction and possibly after the broch had fallen out of use.

By the late 18th century the site had passed into local memory as "Woden's Hall" or "Woden's Castle", named for the Anglo-Saxon god Woden rather than any recollection of its Iron Age builders. A later renaming, to Edin's Hall, appears to draw instead on the legend of the Red Ettin, a three-headed giant recorded in Scottish tales and ballads.

In the 19th century antiquarians "cleared" the broch, removing rubble and recovering a stone spindle whorl, a fragment of a jet ring, an amber bead, animal bones, an oyster shell and a piece of glass bracelet, all of which were donated to the National Museum of Scotland. In 1976 a metal detector survey inside the broch turned up two copper ingots derived from local copper mines, one of which also entered the National Museum's collection, pointing to a possible source of wealth for the people who lived there.

In 1996 an archaeological survey with a sample excavation returned to the site, recovering a further scatter of finds including coarse pottery and another stone spindle whorl, adding modestly to a record that 19th-century clearance had already left badly incomplete.