'My 50-year puzzle of the East Lothian hill where ancient fires burned'

One of Scotland’s leading archaeologists has spoken of rewriting the story of a hill in East Lothian that is now known to have been occupied by Neolithic settlers who arrived from the Continent almost 6,000 years ago.

For decades, Doon Hill site in East Lothian was believed to have been the scene of an Anglo Saxon takeover of an elite British site in the seventh century, around the time of the capture of Edinburgh.

But following a long, intermittent pursuit by Professor Ian Ralston, emeritus Abercromby professor of archaeology at Edinburgh University, which included the retrieval of material linked to the site from a flat in Cambridge, the timeline of Doon Hill has been pushed back thousands of years.

A reconstruction of the great fire at the Neolithic hall on Doon Hill in East Lothian which may have been deliberately started to create a "spectacle" in the landscape. PIC: HES.

“What has been resolved is something that for much of my career was a real kind of nagging worry,” Prof Ralston said.

Doon Hill is now known to have been a site settled by early pioneer farmers around 3,700BC with their vast timber home – around 23mlong – then destroyed by fire, possibly in a deliberate “spectacular” show as the new arrivals moved on to pastures new. A few generations later, a second smaller building was constructed.

Prof Ralston first dug at Doon Hill in East Lothian as a schoolboy, with the site coming to the fore of his professional life in the early 1980s.

Professor Ian Ralston, Emeritus Abercromby Professor of Archaeology at Edinburgh University, has changed the narrative surrounding Doon Hill in East Lothian. PIC: Contributed

His investigations long pitted him against the findings of archaeologist Dr Brian Hope-Taylor, of Cambridge, who believed the second of two timber halls built on the hill was a Dark Ages stronghold in the vein of Yeavering in Northumberland, which served as a royal Anglo-Saxon residence.

A “stand-off” followed for many years with a breakthrough in the understanding of the site made following the death of Dr Hope-Taylor in 2001, when permission was given to Dr Ralston to remove papers and material linked to the site from his flat in Cambridge.

Radiocarbon dates then showed the first building on Doon Hill stood from around 3,700BC, with the second building constructed around 200 years later.

Professor Ralston at work in France in the 1980s.

Doon Hill now stands in a chain of around a dozen known giant Neolithic halls in Scotland, from Dumfries and Galloway to Moray, which were built by new arrivals during the Neolithic period and later destroyed by fire.

Questions started to emerge about Doon Hill after Dr Ralston excavated at Balbridie in Deeside, which was architecturally similar to the older of the two Doon Hill buildings and believed to be Pictish in origin given its location. But that working theory imploded when radiocarbon tests put the site to the fourth millennium BC.

Prof Ralston said: “Effectively we had the problem that Balbridie seemed to be the first farmers arriving in Scotland and Doon Hill was stuck up this godforsaken hill at the end of the Lammemuirs, which was supposedly from 500 or 600AD. Basically there was a stand-off for years about this because there were no radiocarbon dates and we weren’t able to get any until after Hope Taylor died.

"He wouldn’t hand the stuff over. He was still supposedly working on it. When he died I went down for his funeral in Cambridge and I got an agreement from his lawyers to go and see his flat and, with the help of the old Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, we managed to get all that material that he had repatriated to Scotland."

Archaeologists take flight: Professor Ralston and former colleague Ian Shepherd, then archaeologist with Grampian Regional Council archaeologist before an aerial reconnaissance flight from Aberdeen Airport, around 1980. PIC: Contributed.

Prof Ralston returned to the Doon Hill puzzle following his retirement from Edinburgh University in 2019.

He said: “There is now nothing on Doon Hill, which dates to the period to the first millennium period, the Dark Ages – call it what you will. There is nothing of that period on the site at all. It is a complete change.”

Prof Ralston said there was a whole “spectrum” of reasons why the Neolithic set fire to their buildings, from an accidental spark that took hold to a deliberate torching of the property.

He said: “Against a world which has no street lighting or anything of that kind where there is still plentiful forest, a really big fire must have been a very impressive site. It would have been the Las Vegas of its time.”

Prof Ralston is due to be honoured for his life’s work at the Prehistoric Society Europa conference in Edinburgh on Saturday where his keynote address – ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ – will focus on Doon Hill.

He has also spent time on large-scale excavations at Bourges in France, where a vast artisanal neighbourhood of bronze and iron jewellery makers constructed from sixth century BC has been uncovered. Meanwhile, excavations at Mont Beuvray in Burgundy were undertaken as part of President Mitterand's last Grand Project.

Professor Ralston and the vitrified wall experiment in an Aberdeen council depot that featured in Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World. PIC: Contributed.

In the 1980s, Prof Ralston embarked on an experiment in an Aberdeen council yard to demonstrate the phenomenon of vitrification, when stone is burned at such high temperature that it melts, with the process known to have occurred at several hilltop forts around Scotland. The experiment featured on Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World.

Prof Ralston said archaeological investigation of prehistory offered “a much clearer set of evidence or information about what people in the past were capable of achieving”.

He said: "I would now argue in parts of central Europe we have settlements. You might not call them urban and you might not call them cities, but they are pretty close, by 500BC – just about the same time as Athens and Rome are getting going.

"Any idea that people of Europe were savages just capable of agriculture and not very sophisticated at all until Rome arrived just doesn’t work. For centuries, indeed millennia beforehand, there are very substantial accomplishments, which you can see in architecture and artefacts.”