Boom town Britain: The case for an urban-like settlement horizon at the north-western edge...
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 05/04/2023

James O’Driscoll & Gordon Noble (University of Aberdeen)

The study of early urbanism has been slow to develop in more peripheral regions such as 
Ireland or northern/western Britain, where large-scale population centres are not thought to 
have existed until the late first millennium AD. The large hillforts of these regions are thought 
to represent Late Bronze Age monuments and their dense internal settlements a result of multiperiod occupation. However, our on-going remote sensing surveys and excavations at the 
massive, densely populated hillfort of Tap o’ Noth in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, has begun to 
dramatically challenge this assumption, marking the site as the largest known native settlement 
of Late Roman Iron Age/early medieval (c. AD 200–600 AD) period of these regions. This is 
a period traditionally seen as a ‘Dark Age’, where physical or textual evidence for domestic 
settlement is difficult to identify, making the discovery of a complex, urban-like community of 
exceptional importance. Excitingly, Tap o’ Noth is not an isolated example, with a number of 
other morphologically comparable hillforts hinting at a previously unidentified settlement 
horizon that could be key to our understanding of the development of the social entities and 
kingdoms of the early medieval period of northern/western Britain and Ireland. This paper will 
outline and discuss the potential rise and fall of this previously unknown urban-like settlement 
horizon and question if these sites fit into broader narratives of early urbanism in north-western 
Europe.