Iron Age ringfort.


The Ordnance Survey 1:2500 First Edition mapping of 1868 shows an incomplete sub-circular earthwork at this location, annotated 'Fort (Remains of)'.


The site is shown on poor or rough agricultural land with a gently sloping SE aspect. At the time of the Survey a boundary, running WNW-ESE, divided the site between two fields, approximately one third of the site lying to the north of the boundary and two thirds to the south.


The Survey shows an elliptical central platform, with maximum and minimum dimensions of approximately 34 and 28m. The platform is not clearly defined on the SE side, perhaps as a result of agricultural operations.


The Survey shows a ditch around the central platform, most clearly defined on the west side, where it is around 8m wide and for a short distance has a narrow outer lip. The outer edge of the ditch is shown, unhachured, on the SE side where otherwise the central platform and ditch are not differentiated.


When visited in 1938, JR Bruce recorded the central mound as being 130' (40m) in diameter, measured to the centre of the ditch, and the ditch as 1' deep and up to 40' (12m) wide, suggesting that its width was the result of erosion; he nevertheless recorded the survival of the outer lip on the west side, much as the OS depicted it 70 years previously.


OS field inspectors in 1955 estimated the central platform to have once been up to 30m in diameter and raised 0.6m above the surrounding field, whilst the ditch was then 7m wide and 0.3m deep. When Bruce subsequently revisited the site in 1964 he described the remains as quite perceptible, but by the early 1970s they were imperceptible.


Bruce's observations in 1964 also recorded the farmer, John Lowey of Lower Kirkill, recalling that a predecessor, William Corrin, had told him that, when digging a drain in the field in c. 1914, he had found 'old timber, like trunks of small trees' on the site.


The site is now not visible at ground level, and the boundary which once crossed it has also been removed. Some differentiation in vegetation is nevertheless still apparent on aerial photographs in 2016.