by Ian Ralston, Abercromby Professor emeritus of Archaeology, Edinburgh University

A lecture given to the Society on Saturday 19th October 2024

Kenneth Taylor (1923-2001), later Brian Hope-Taylor, grew up in Surrey and – in his early twenties – undertook excavations around Croydon in leave periods during the war and thereafter. In the 1950s, he was admitted to the Society of Antiquaries of London. As well as being a talented artist, he was a site director of excavations for the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, most notably at Anglo-Saxon palace complexes at Old Windsor (Berkshire) and Yeavering (Northumberland). Admitted to Cambridge as a doctoral student to research and write up Yeavering, he was soon appointed (1961) to an Assistant Lectureship there. He continued to excavate in Northumbria from his University post. Doon Hill, above the eastern end of the Lothian plain, where fieldwork was completed in 1966, was his most northerly site and is now laid out as a visitable Historic Scotland monument. His interpretation of it, expressed only in brief interim accounts but formalized in concrete on the ground, has however been completely overturned in recent years. We shall examine how it has come to pass that the remains on Doon Hill are now considered to be – for the most part – over four thousand years older than their original excavator proposed. 

This was an exciting lecture because the Society was working to record Hope-Taylor’s excavation at Old Windsor and Ian Ralston had actually worked with him on Doon Hill.The excavations at Doon Hill took place in 1964-66.

Ian’s presentation included lots of pictures of the excavation and of Hope-Taylor presenting the results on television and at local lectures as being an enclosure with a gateway, a British 7th century hall, a later Anglo-Saxon Hall, a temple and a cemetery.From 1977-1982, Reynolds and Ralston excavated a site at Balbridie, Kincardinshire and revealed a large early Neolithic hall. These finds were comparable with the evidence found at Doon Hill and started a very public debate as the dating of the two sites.

This debate has concluded that the hall at Doon Hill was also Neolithic with other features on the site dating to the Bronze Age and to Early medieval times.

This lecture gave insights into how Hope-Taylor came to interpret the evidence from Doon Hill and the reaction of fellow archaeologists both at the time and more recently.

Ian Ralston began his digging career as a schoolboy with Brian Hope-Taylor at Doon Hill in 1965. Hope-Taylor’s advice, which he followed, was to study archaeology not at Cambridge but at Edinburgh University with Stuart Piggott. This he did, being thereafter appointed to Aberdeen University where he spent ten happy years before, as part of an early UGC rationalization, being moved to Edinburgh, from which he eventually retired as Abercromby Professor of Archaeology in 2019. His main interests have lain in Scottish pre-Medieval archaeology of all periods, archaeological resource management and the European Iron Age. His major excavations since the 1980s have been in and around major French hillforts and oppida, notably at Mont Beuvray in Burgundy and on the periphery of the city of Bourges in Berry. His most recent book (with Professor Gary Lock, Oxford) is the Atlas of the Hillforts of Britain and Ireland. Some fifty years on from his first contact with Doon Hill, in retirement, he is writing up two major timber buildings there and at Balbridie and hopes, at last, to have a coherent and convincing story to explain them.

More information is available at www.ianralston.co.uk