Northshield Rings

The strongest defences at Northshield Rings are the outer ones, and that is the puzzle the site sets.

Ordinarily a hillfort is strengthened from the inside out: the original enclosure is kept and new banks are thrown up beyond it. Here the inner rampart is the slightest work on the hill, rising only half a metre above the interior and 1.5 metres above its external ditch, while the outer ramparts are considerably more substantial, with external quarry-ditches — the trenches dug to supply material for the banks — creating a defensive depth of up to 20 metres.

The spacing settles the argument. The gap between the inner rampart and the outer defences is up to eight metres wide, and that gap would not exist if a builder had simply added new works outside an existing circuit; new ramparts are placed close, to keep the defence continuous. A wide empty band between the two means they belong to different schemes, and the likeliest reading is that the outer ramparts came first and the inner rampart was added later, inside them. At least two phases of construction are represented.

The fort itself sits on a rounded hill a short distance south of Portmore Loch, near Eddleston and about ten kilometres north of Peebles. The inner enclosure measures 73 metres north-north-west to south-south-east by 64 metres, taking in 0.35 hectares, and there are three entrances — north-west, south and south-east.

Inside, seven slight depressions between six and nine metres in diameter have been found, and these are thought to be the sites of timber round-houses. That is the usual way such buildings survive: not as walls but as hollows, where the ground was scooped level for a floor and never quite filled back in.

The defences are described as well preserved, which for a Borders hillfort means the shape of the whole thing can be walked and read without much guessing. The site is a Scheduled Monument.

No excavation has dated either phase, so the sequence rests entirely on the geometry of the earthworks. That is a common position for Borders hillforts, and it is worth stating plainly: the argument here is about spacing and relative strength, not about anything recovered from the ground.

What can be said without any excavation at all is that this hill was fortified twice, that somebody at some point decided a smaller enclosure inside the existing works was worth building, and that seven timber round-houses stood within it. For a site known only from its surface, that is a reasonably full account.