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Shiplaw’s Stone Age Secrets...
In our first report, we described the work we are doing in order to record the historic graveyard at the Church. We mentioned how the survey of the Church is just one part of our Eddleston Parish Project. Over the next few years the Society intends to carry out an archaeological survey of the whole of the parish. Our aims at the end of the survey will be to produce not only a technical report but also a more popular account of the archaeology of the parish for the general public.
In 2001 our activities were seriously interrupted by the Foot and Mouth outbreak and since then our research group has been out and about at the north end of the parish around Kingside Farm, courtesy of the Cockburn family. However in this bulletin, we describe some of the results of our earlier work...
In March 2000, members of the Archaeological Society were examining Shiplaw Farm, by kind permission of the late Willie Bertram. During ‘lunch-break’ on a day of driving rain, our member Peggy Ferguson spotted a tiny chipped stone tool in a molehill on rough pasture north of the Shiplaw Burn.
 The find was a microlith, a characteristic stone-tool type of what archaeologists term the Mesolithic period (or Middle Stone Age). This was the time when Scotland was first settled by groups of hunters and fishers - that is after the last Ice Age (which ended about 12000 years ago) but before the arrival of the first farmers in Scotland (about 6000 years ago).
Peggy’s discovery of that single microlith was enough to suggest that a hunter-gatherer camp-site might be in the area, and a more thorough search of the molehills was begun...
More Mesolithic artefacts were found, and we therefore decided that some further investigation of the area would be worthwhile. We decided that the best way to do this would be to dig some ‘test-pits’ in order to see where exactly the site was, whether anything survived beneath the plough soil, and to recover more artefacts.
Test-pits are small trenches, usually only about 1 x 0.5m in size, cut through the plough soil, which is sieved to maximise the recovery of artefacts (such as flint flakes). In comparison to a larger excavation these test pits, or ‘keyholes’, are difficult to interpret – but they are a good way of finding sites in rough pasture!
With the ready permission of Willie Bertram, excavation was carried out over two weekends in June 2000. The work was directed by Graeme Warren (now a lecturer in Dublin but then a research student at Edinburgh University), with a labour force made up of volunteers from Peeblesshire Archaeological Soceity, Biggar Museums Trust, and the University.
 We dug 70 test pits, sometimes in atrocious weather conditions! There is nothing quite like pushing wet mud through a sieve, as you search for tiny chipped stone tools to test your enthusiasm for archaeology!
In the end we didn’t find any surviving archaeological features such as traces of structures or storage pits: centuries of ploughing had probably destroyed faint traces like these, leaving only the plough-resistant scatter of stone tools. And over most of the area we didn’t find that many stone tools either! But we did find a concentration of them on one knoll on the hill-slope and this may have been a small camp-site.
Mesolithic people did not live in one place for the whole year but moved around the landscape. We know the Tweed Valley was a popular place for these early groups of hunters, fishers and gatherers: salmon may have been important on the main rivers, animals were hunted for meat and skins, and plants such as hazelnuts were gathered for food. [In factm members of the Archaeological Society have recently discovered what seems to be an extensive and previously unknown Mesolithic site by the Tweed at Innerleithen!].
Although we do not understand the Mesolithic environment of Shiplaw in detail, the area would have been forested, initially with birch and hazel, later with oak, elm and alder. It was probably a varied landscape, with small lochans to the west, and wildfowl may have been another important resource.
The knoll at Shiplaw may therefore have been the site of a small ‘short-stay’ camp-site - somewhere a family may have stopped for a few days and done a little fishing or hunting, perhaps en route to a larger base-camp.
Our excavations were only small-scale, and we hope to do more such investigations during the course of the project. Future work at Shiplaw itself might allow us to refine our interpretation of the site; a larger sample of artefacts might provide us with a better idea of the range of tools or a better idea of the date of occupation.
Above all we remain indebted to the late Willie Bertram for allowing us to survey his land, for granting us permission to carry out the trial excavations, and for showing so much interest in our project. Like us, Willie was intrigued at the thought that our path by the side of the Shiplaw Burn may well have been taking us along a route first trodden by the very earliest inhabitants of the Eddleston area some seven or eight thousand years ago...
Graeme Warren & Trevor Cowie
May 2002
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