PROFESSOR IAN RALSTON, Abercromby Professor of Archaeology, School of History, Classics & Archaeology, University of Edinburgh.

In July 1959, while Brian Hope-Taylor, Ministry of Works digger and soon-to-be Assistant Lecturer in Archaeology at Cambridge, was still in course of excavating the great Anglo-Saxon palace complex at Yeavering in Northumberland, his future colleague, Dr Kenneth St Joseph, recorded from the air the first evidence for the foundations of a similar timber building, here within a stockaded enclosure, in Scotland. This lay on Doon Hill, near Dunbar, on a hill which effectively closed off the eastern end of the Lothian Plain. In the mid-1960s, with three labourers and a small crew of Cambridge undergraduates, and at the zenith of his career as an excavator, Hope-Taylor investigated Doon Hill, identifying not one, but two superimposed, timber buildings, the polygonal palisaded enclosure, an external cemetery of long graves, and some other features. Having been presented by Hope-Taylor on the first extended TV series on British archaeology, his Who were the British?, the Doon Hill evidence was subsequently marked out on the ground in coloured concrete by the antecedent bodies to Historic Environment Scotland.

Doon Hill was initially presented to the public according to Hope-Taylor’s interpretation of what he had found: as a ‘native’ British, post-Roman hall site, burnt down and taken over by the Northumbrian Angles, who constructed their own hall there to a plan very similar to the Yeavering examples. The replacement would have happened c. AD 640, when the early English extended their control northwards to Lothian. Hope-Taylor died in 2001, without having published the site. His hypothesis has, bit by bit, crumbled over the intervening fifty-odd years. The speaker, who first dug at Doon Hill as a schoolboy, will outline the winding path that has led from ‘the-past-as-wished-for’ in the context of what was known archaeologically half a century ago to the radically different interpretation of the site today.