| Curriestanes cursus | |
|---|---|
  Location of Curriestanes cursus in Dumfries and Galloway | |
| Coordinates | 55°03′36″N3°37′48″W / 55.060081°N 3.6299526°W |
| Designated | 28 September 1993 |
| Reference no. | SM5738 |
Curriestanes cursus (grid reference NX 95990 75170 ) is a large neolithic ditched enclosure on the outskirts of Dumfries, in the parish of Troqueer, Dumfries and Galloway. [1] It is visible only from aerial photography. It is, along with Pict's Knowe, one of two scheduled monuments in Troqueer parish. [2]
Curriestanes is an earthwork cursus. While familiar from cursus sites in England, these types of monuments are less common than timber cursuses in Scotland. Less than fifteen monuments of this type have been found in Scotland and only five including Curriestanes have been excavated. [3] Curriestanes is rare in having an entrance gap in one of its terminals, a feature known from only a handful of sites in the UK. [4] The cursus is particularly wide at 100m, with a known area of at least three hectares. [5] Only 3 other cursus monuments in Scotland are wider: East Linton, Brioch and Monktonhill. [6] The ditches are irregular and do not appear to have been intended to be exactly straight which suggests that they may have been built in short segments. [7] The ditches are wide, 7m, and shallow, no deeper than 0.6m. [8]
Unlike England, where cursus monuments have been known and studied for hundreds of years, the study of cursus monuments is a recent phenomenon. Before 1976, when RCAHMS began its aerial photography programme, only one definite cursus site was known in Scotland: Gallaberry in Dumfreis and Galloway. [9] Over 50 Scottish sites have now been identified. [10] These are found in two main geographical concentrations, in lowland Angus and Perthshire and another in Dumfries and Galloway, for the most part in and around the Nith valley. [9] Curriestanes is one of twelve such monuments in Dumfries and Galloway. [10]
200m to the south of the terminal of the monument, there is a ring-ditch, also only visible as a cropmark. [8]
A chambered cairn is a burial monument, usually constructed during the Neolithic, consisting of a sizeable chamber around and over which a cairn of stones was constructed. Some chambered cairns are also passage-graves. They are found throughout Britain and Ireland, with the largest number in Scotland.
The court cairn or court tomb is a megalithic type of chambered cairn or gallery grave. During the period, 3900–3500 BC, more than 390 court cairns were built in Ireland and over 100 in southwest Scotland. The Neolithic monuments are identified by an uncovered courtyard connected to one or more roofed and partitioned burial chambers. Many monuments were built in multiple phases in both Ireland and Scotland and later re-used in the Early Bronze Age.
Cursuses are monumental Neolithic structures resembling ditches or trenches in the islands of Great Britain and Ireland. Relics found within them indicate that they were built between 3400 and 3000 BC, making them among the oldest monumental structures on the islands. The name 'cursus' was suggested in 1723 by William Stukeley, the antiquarian, who compared the Stonehenge cursus to a Roman chariot-racing track, or circus.
Combe Hill is a causewayed enclosure, near Eastbourne in East Sussex, on the northern edge of the South Downs. It consists of an inner circuit of ditches and banks, incomplete where it meets a steep slope on its north side, and the remains of an outer circuit. Causewayed enclosures were built in England from shortly before 3700 BC until at least 3500 BC; they are characterized by the full or partial enclosure of an area with ditches that are interrupted by gaps, or causeways. Their purpose is not known; they may have been settlements, meeting places, or ritual sites. The historian Hadrian Allcroft included the site in his 1908 book Earthwork of England, and in 1930 E. Cecil Curwen listed it as a possible Neolithic site in a paper which attempted to provide the first list of all the causewayed enclosures in England.
In archaeology, an enclosure is one of the most common types of archaeological site – It is any area of land separated from surrounding land by earthworks, walls or fencing. Such a simple feature is found all over the world and during almost all archaeological periods. They may be few metres across or be large enough to encompass whole cities.
Dunragit is a village on the A75, between Stranraer and Glenluce in Dumfries and Galloway, south-west Scotland. Dunragit is within the parish of Old Luce, in the traditional county of Wigtownshire. The modern village grew up around the west gate of Dunragit House, an 18th-century country house, though there is evidence of Neolithic settlement in the area.
Dercongal Abbey was a Premonstratensian monastic community located in Dumfriesshire, Scotland.
Cargenbridge is a village located in Dumfries and Galloway, United Kingdom, southwest of Dumfries. It is in Troqueer parish, in the historic county of Kirkcudbrightshire.
Clachanmore is a village in the South Rhins of Galloway near Ardwell in the south west of Scotland. It has also been known as Low Ardwell.
Julian Stewart Thomas is a British archaeologist, publishing on the Neolithic and Bronze Age prehistory of Britain and north-west Europe. Thomas has been vice president of the Royal Anthropological Institute since 2007. He has been Professor of Archaeology at the University of Manchester since 2000, and is former secretary of the World Archaeological Congress. Thomas is perhaps best known as the author of the academic publication Understanding the Neolithic in particular, and for his work with the Stonehenge Riverside Project.
Troqueer is a former village and a parish in the historic county of Kirkcudbrightshire in Dumfries and Galloway on the west side of the River Nith. The eastern-side was merged with Dumfries to the east in 1929, and today eastern Troqueer is a suburb of Dumfries.
Old Luce is a civil parish in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. It lies in the Machars peninsula, in the traditional county of Wigtownshire. The parish is around 10 miles (16 km) long and 8 miles (13 km) broad, and contains 40,350 acres (16,330 ha).
The architecture of Scotland in the prehistoric era includes all human building within the modern borders of Scotland, before the arrival of the Romans in Britain in the first century BCE. Stone Age settlers began to build in wood in what is now Scotland from at least 8,000 years ago. The first permanent houses of stone were constructed around 6,000 years ago, as at Knap of Howar, Orkney and settlements like Skara Brae. There are also large numbers of chambered tombs and cairns from this era, particularly in the west and north. In the south and east there are earthen barrows, often linked to timber monuments of which only remnants remain. Related structures include bank barrows, cursus monuments, mortuary enclosures and timber halls. From the Bronze Age there are fewer new buildings, but there is evidence of crannogs, roundhouses built on artificial islands and of Clava cairns and the first hillforts. From the Iron Age there is evidence of substantial stone Atlantic roundhouses, which include broch towers, smaller duns. There is also evidence of about 1,000 hillforts in Scotland, most located below the Clyde-Forth line.
Bargrennan chambered cairns are a class of prehistoric chambered cairns found only in south-west Scotland, in western Dumfries and Galloway and southern Ayrshire. They form a separate group from the Clyde cairns which are found along the coast of western Britain. Unlike Clyde cairns, Bargrennan monuments are passage graves, with one or more chambers set into a round cairn. As well as being structurally different, Bargrennan cairns are separated from Clyde cairns by their siting and distribution; they are found in upland, inland areas of Galloway and Ayrshire. Murray suggests that there are around twelve Bargrennan monuments in south-west Scotland. She also notes that as sheep rees are often built into and over these types of cairns, more are likely to have been lost under shepherd's buildings.
Pict's Knowe is a henge monument in the parish of Troqueer, Dumfries and Galloway. It is one of a small group of henge monuments around Dumfries which includes Broadlea henge near Annan. Pict's Knowe is located 4 km SW of Dumfries on a small sandy bank in the peat covered valley of the Crooks Pow stream.
Broadlea henge is a Neolithic or Bronze Age monument in the parish of Middlebie, Dumfries and Galloway. It is one of very few henge monuments in southern Scotland. The only other well preserved site is the considerably smaller Pict's Knowe near Dumfries. While Pict's Knowe is a single entrance, Class I henge, Broadlea has two entrances, making it a Class II henge. It measures 50m by 45m inside its ditch, which is as wide as 10m. The banks have been flattened over time but still rise in parts to around four feet high.
Droughdool Mote is a Neolithic round mound in the parish of Old Luce, Wigtownshire, Dumfries and Galloway. The mound is oval in plan, measuring 60m by 50m at its base and rises to 10m in height. It is located 400m south of the late neolithic palisaded enclosure at Dunragit. It has been suggested that the mound may have been used as a viewing platform for activities at Dunragit complex of monuments. The most well known parallel the site has is Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, but is closer in size to the less well known sites at Conquer Barrow, Willy Howe and Wold Newton. The mound was originally built with stepped sides on top of a sand dune. Excavation between 1999-2002 revealed a round cairn at the top of the mound, similar to the nearby Mid Gleniron A.
Mid Gleniron is a prehistoric site in Dumfries and Galloway used in the Neolithic and Bronze Age. The site is a scheduled ancient monument that comprises a group of six burial cairns. Two of the cairns, Mid Gleniron I and Mid Gleniron II are chambered cairns of the Clyde tradition. These are of historic importance because of their multi-stage construction which provides evidence for the development of Clyde cairns at the beginning of the Neolithic period.
A causewayed enclosure was found at Abingdon in Oxfordshire in 1926. Causewayed enclosures are a form of early Neolithic earthwork found in northwestern Europe; they were built in England from shortly before 3700 BC until about 3300 BC and are characterized by the full or partial enclosure of an area with ditches that are interrupted by gaps, or causeways. Their purpose is not known; they may have been settlements, or meeting places, or ritual sites.