Taming the landscape

Settling down: Eddleston's earliest farmers

‘Leaf-shaped’ flint arrowhead typical of the earlier Neolithic period - the time of the first farmers. The change in lifestyle was gradual and hunting continued to be an important food source. Fieldwalking find, Wormiston.

The hunting-fishing-gathering lifestyle lasted thousands of years. But in the centuries after 4000 BC, ways of life changed dramatically.

Using axe and fire to clear the forest, family groups would have begun to establish small farms. It is likely wheat and barley were grown and primitive breeds of cattle and sheep were reared.

So far, our only clues to where they settled in Eddleston are a few axes and arrowheads. And yet the origins of today’s farming landscape can be traced back to those first farmers in the area!

Overlooked by the ancestors

Artist’s impression of a Bronze Age burial in a cist, built of stone slabs. A pottery vessel is being placed with the dead person, with food or drink for the afterlife.Drawing by Alan Braby.

At the moment, we seem to know more about where the early farmers were buried than where they were actually living.

Prehistoric graves have been found at several places, for example around Black Barony and Darnhall. Burial cairns still survive at Harehope and Stewarton and elsewhere in the parish - including new ones which we have discovered at Spurlens and even on a hill just above the village.

The figure is standing on the remains of a burial cairn, showing up as a low mound in the evening sunlight. This one survived because it lies on the edge of the cultivated land above Eddleston village.

Burial places like these would have stood amidst or on the edge of an expanding patchwork of pasture and small fields. They were built to cover the graves of important members of the community. The presence of the ancestors would have helped the living to stake their claim to land and territory.

Overlooking the ‘tamed’ farming landscape, large burial cairns were even constructed on the summits of some of the higher hills like Dundreich and White Meldon.

Pottery vessel found in one of three burial cists discovered in the 19th century during gravel-digging. The site lay near the knoll known as the Gallow Law, above the Black Barony. Copyright National Museums of Scotland.