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PROCEEDINGS OF THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES OF SCOTLAND ISSN: 0081-1564 • e-ISSN: 2056-743X Interdisciplinary approaches to a connected landscape: upland survey in the Northern Ochils How to cite: Given, M, Aldred, O, Grant, K, McNiven, P and Poller, T 2019 'Interdiscipli- nary approaches to a connected landscape: upland survey in the Northern Ochils’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 148: 83-111. https://doi.org/10.9750/PSAS.148.1268 Click http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/psas/volumes.cfm to visit the journal homepage. Please note: This document is the publisher’s PDF of an article published in theProceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. This version has been peer-reviewed and contains all final editorial corrections and journal pagination. Copyright © 2018 rests with the Society and the individual authors. Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The permission to reproduce the Society's copyright-protected ma- terial does not extend to any material which is identified as being the copyright of a third party. Authorisation to reproduce such material must be obtained from the copyright holders concerned. Proc Soc Antiq Scot 148 (2018), 83–111INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO A CONNECTED LANDSCAPE | 83 DOI: https://doi.org/10.9750/PSAS.148.1268 Interdisciplinary approaches to a connected landscape: upland survey in the Northern Ochils Michael Given1, Oscar Aldred2, Kevin Grant3, Peter McNiven4 and Tessa Poller5 ABSTRACT The key to understanding a landscape is through its connections, which tie together people and environment within and beyond that landscape and across many different periods. This is particularly true of the northern face of the Ochil Hills in central Scotland, which is characterised by dense networks of connections between lowlands and uplands, local and regional. To trace those connections we integrate the results of walkover survey, aerial archaeology, excavations, documentary analysis and place-name analysis, revealing significant continuities and differences in the networks and relationships that have connected this landscape across time and space. Iron Age hillforts used their prominence and monumentality to guide people along very specific routes across the Ochils. Regular seasonal movements of cattle and herders in the medieval and post-medieval periods were closely related to the agriculture and settlement they encountered on the way: this interaction can be clearly seen in the elaborate intertwining of paths, braided cattle tracks, farmsteads and enclosures, most strikingly in the 18th century. Such intricate connections across the landscape are equally keyed in to the specifics of particular locations and to much broader networks and historical change. INTRODUCTION This article investigates connected landscapes in a range of periods from prehistory to post- The Ochil Hills in central Scotland are striking medieval, focusing on the northern slopes of not just for their topographic diversity and historical depth, but for the extent to which the Ochil Hills in Perthshire and using data they are highly connected across both place and acquired by the Upland Survey component of time. These connections run from the valley floor the ‘Strathearn Environs and Royal Forteviot’ to the Ochils’ central ridgeline, from the local project (SERF) (Illus 1). Specifically, we explore area to the wider region and sometimes across the the interrelationships between different land globe, and often from prehistory to the medieval activities, such as animal husbandry, settlement, and post-medieval periods. Routes, nodes and place-making and movement, by addressing meaningful places generate these connections by these questions: leading and propelling people and animals across the landscape, and by enabling both persistence 1. How do paths, tracks, enclosures and and transformation in people’s relationships with boundaries facilitate and constrain move- the landscape across time. ment between lowlands and uplands? 1 Archaeology, School of Humanities, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ. ORCiD: 0000-0002-4450-381X 2 Cambridge Archaeological Unit, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3DZ. ORCiD: 0000-0001-5207-7905 3 [email protected] 4 Celtic and Gaelic, School of Humanities, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ 5 Archaeology, School of Humanities, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ 84 | SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES OF SCOTLAND, 2018 ILLUS 1 Walkover survey in 2010 above Thorter Burn, looking north over Strathearn. The lone ash tree in the centre marks Scores Farm; the village on the right is Dunning (Michael Given) 2. What role do regular patterns of movement Local studies such as ours give resolution and play in the local and regional landscape, focus when the identification of broad regional society and economy? trends can smooth out such local particularities 3. How do earlier patterns of movement and (Campbell et al 2002: 113; Davies 2007), while activity within the landscape affect later simultaneously demonstrating that the intricacy ones, in the long as well as short term? and elaboration of social networks embrace all How can we understand the persistence of scales from the micro to the global (Orser 2009). places? The idea of artefacts and monuments having ‘biographies’ that express their changing Our starting assumption is that uplands such as the networks of connections is now a familiar one Ochil Hills do not have to be marginal, isolated (eg Gosden & Marshall 1999; Joy 2009; Witcher or remote (Campbell et al 2002: 111; Davies et al 2010). The same, of course, applies to 2007: 2053). Two 17th–19th-century farmsteads landscapes, though in a much more complex within our study area, for example, have been fashion than the usual term ‘palimpsest’ implies characterised as exactly that; yet the authors’ (see, eg, Samuels 1979; Gibson 2015; Kolen et al own analysis shows how integrated they are in 2015). We are interested not just in the process of a social and economic network stretching as far landscape change, but in the connections between as London and Barbados (Turner & Williamson different pasts and different presents, such as the 2015–16). Our goal is to identify and understand later impact of the Iron Age hillforts, and the the interconnections, rather than assuming either interaction between enclosures and tracks of marginality or integration. These connections are differing dates. Such a diachronic analysis gives particularly important when dealing with upland insights into the ways that material things and areas, where the key issue of relationship with the places persist and adapt to changing conditions lowlands is often neglected (Davies 2007: 2060). through time. INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO A CONNECTED LANDSCAPE | 85 To achieve a robust and nuanced under- human activity and occupancy across prehistory standing of this very wide range of connections and history. clearly requires the collaboration of researchers The ‘Strathearn Environs and Royal Forteviot’ from a variety of disciplines. Given the long project (SERF) was a major research and teaching establishment of disciplinary boundaries and the project that worked in Strathearn and the Ochils fast-moving nature of our research environment, from 2006 to 2017, led by the University of interdisciplinary scholarship has to be flexible Glasgow (Illus 2) (Driscoll et al 2010; Maldonado and fluid; this is, indeed, the ‘holy grail’ of 2017; Brophy & Noble nd; Brophy & Wright landscape studies (Jones & Hooke 2011). The nd). A key aim of the overall project was to collaborative writing of this article has worked develop a better understanding of the chronology towards the critical and reflexive integration and character of the early prehistoric complex of the different disciplines and perspectives of of ceremonial monuments at Forteviot and its its authors: aerial survey; systematic walkover influence on the later development of a Pictish survey; excavation and measured survey; royal centre. Fundamental to the understanding digital spatial analysis; place-name studies; of the ebb and flow of Forteviot as a centre of and documentary and cartographic history. power and ceremony in the past was a wider In what follows we synthesise the results of landscape perspective. A related aim of the SERF this integrated research to examine the issues project, therefore, was to examine long-term of connectivity and mobility in the Northern shifts of power, ceremony and settlement in the Ochils across time and space, rather than trying surrounding environs, covering a much longer to pursue every facet of the complex history of time frame. ILLUS 2 Location map showing the context of the research and places mentioned in the text. Background: EDINA Digimap (Oscar Aldred) 86 | SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES OF SCOTLAND, 2018 Brief surveys had already been carried out in walkover survey across six different areas of the our area, mostly preceding potential windfarm parishes of Auchterarder, Dunning, Forteviot and development or afforestation (Lowe & Dalland Forgandenny (Illus 3). A line of between four and 1998; Hind 2004; Turner & Williamson 2015– 14 walkers, 20m apart, walked across specific 16). RCAHMS carried out a rapid survey in the areas defined on the map (‘Areas walked’) and Glendevon area between 1996 and 1997; this was flagged any potential sites or