THE EARLY MEDIEVAL LANDSCAPE OF DONSIDE,

Iain Fraser and Stratford Halliday

Introduction

The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of (RCAHMS) has conducted a detailed survey of Donside in north-east Scotland, aimed at recording and interpreting the land- scape from the source of the Don at the foot of the Lecht to its mouth at , some 70km to the east. Initiated in 1995, most of the fieldwork was completed by 2001, but the process of interpretation and synthesis has been more drawn-out, and the volume containing a synthesis of the results, In the Shadow of Bennachie, was not published until autumn 2007 (RCAHMS 2007). The choice of Donside was partly driven by the concentration of Pictish symbol stones that are known along the banks of the lower Don, the Urie and the Gadie Burn. This, however, was but part of the opportunity that Donside appeared to offer. Its catchment embraced the core of numerous distributions of prehistoric artefacts and monuments in the North-East, and a rich vein of medieval documentation offered the possibility of reconstruct- ing parts of its later landscape in some detail. For those who do not know the topography of Scotland, Aberdeenshire lies beyond the Mounth, the mountain barrier that sets the North- East apart from the eastern lowlands of Angus to the south. The land- scape itself is particularly ancient and the underlying topography of mountains, hills and basins is inherited from long before the last gla- ciation some 10,000 years ago. Nevertheless, the imprint of its glacial history is all too evident. While the Dee, the southernmost of three rivers draining eastwards from the , was deeply scoured by the principal flow of ice, the lowlands of the Don are choked with thick deposits of glacial till. These underpin Donside’s wealth, for they are mineral rich, giving rise to fertile, if stony, soils. The Dee and the Don debouche into the North Sea some 4km apart at Aberdeen, while the mouth of the third river, the Ythan, lies a further 15km north along the sandy strand that forms this stretch of the Aberdeenshire coast. Each river catchment presents a rather different character; the 308 iain fraser and stratford halliday

Don forming the middle ground between the sluggish meanders of the Ythan to the north and the rugged glens of Deeside to the south. The Dee retains its sense of a mountain glen almost to the sea, but the Don quickly enters more open rolling country, punctuated by granite bosses of higher ground. Here, improved farmland extends well back into the hill ground and the land is patently rich and fertile, as we see it today. The contrast with the Dee is reflected in a popular rhyme dating from at least the nineteenth century—‘a mile of Don’s worth twa o’ Dee, except for salmon, stone and tree’. The Garioch, the basin drained by the Urie and the Gadie Burn, was reputedly ‘the meal girnal of Aberdeenshire’, a ‘girnal’ being a meal chest in old Scots. The principal town in the Donside hinterland of Aberdeen is Inverurie, a royal burgh founded by Earl David of Huntingdon at the caput of the Lordship of Garioch, which he was granted around 1178 by his elder brother, William the Lion (Stringer 1985, 30; see also Carter 1999). This has always been a key strategic location in the North-East, its importance in the medieval period marked by the mas- sive motte-and-bailey castle known as the Bass of Inverurie. Roman armies are known to have passed this way, their passage marked by the remains of marching camps at Normandykes on the banks of the Dee, Kintore lower down the Don, and Logie Durno a little north of Inverurie. Indeed, the topography of the confluence of the Urie and the Gadie Burn and the Bennachie range has been presented as a likely site for the , the scene of Agricola’s triumph over the Caledonians around AD 83–84 (St Joseph 1978; Maxwell 1990, 104–10). The massively defended fort on the Mither Tap o’ Bennachie occupies one of the most distinctive and commanding landmarks in the North-East.

Traditional approaches to the early medieval landscape

With the greater proportion of the land under plough, visible traces of earlier periods are always at a premium in lowland landscapes. This raises a question as to how an archaeological survey can expect to create a sense of landscape for any period. In Donside, the principal archaeological evidence for the early medieval period was forty-one symbol stones, three cross-slabs, two massive silver chains and a hand- ful of early Christian crosses. Traditional approaches by archaeolo- gists to populate the landscape around the carved stone monuments