This field between Bleachfield cottage and Leitchestown farm in Deskford, Moray, is most famous for the discovery of the Deskford carnyx (an Iron age war trumpet) around 1816. A labourer (great great grandfather of a man who lived in the cottage where I write this text) was digging for peat and came across fragments of the carnyx two metres down. Since the carnyx was deliberately broken up, it is assumed that it was buried on purpose, for ceremonial reasons.
But there is much more, this location seems to have been a long-term sacred centre, Following an archaeological dig in the 1990s, Fraser Hunter and his team stated this site has a history of ritual use, even perhaps starting in the mesolithic, certainly from the neolithic onwards until the carnyx was put to rest.
Hunter and colleagues detailed their research in the looong 2019 article Context for a carnyx: excavation of a long-lived ritual site at Leitchestown, Deskford, Moray, north-east Scotland (Let me know if you can’t access it and I’ll send it over). They report finds from the Mesolithic (admittedly a flint which may be a stray) until c. AD 800–1200. They found evidence for pits being dug for deposits then filled in again in Neolithic times.
So why would this place in particular have such a long usage by humans? There must be something with the location which is hard for me to recognise with my modern eyes. It’s even hard to think of ho things looked before the road and field boundaries. I’ve been driving and cycling through art various times, trying to puzzle out an answer. It’s certainly not a site I owuld choose for riutal deposits, I feel like I would go for a much more remote spot likea mountain peak or a cave. But I’m starting to I think this could have been an Earth Mother site. It sits is beside the Deskford burn at the point where the small stream opens out into a valley, before taking an abrupt 90 degree turn and entering the sea at Cullen. This then means that there are hills on almost all four sides when you look around so this could be a tucked away location. Plus between the ritual spot and the bnurn, there’s a small ridge created by glacial erosion; its most likely always been boggy (although the peat came later), so perhaps there’s something about depositing offerings between the dead water of the bog and the living water of the burn?
Hunter, who describes the site as “enigmatic”, thinks that the ceremonial uses over time have no link between them but it seems much more likely (to me at least) that a sacred site would be re-used over generations if it kept whatever gave it its wonder, or i supose if it conoitnued to mutate in interestig ways.
Maybe there’s an entire sacred landscape here. Very nearby (just a stone’s throw up the slope to the south), there’s a platform marking the ruins of what is thought to have been Inaltry Castle – only one massive wall remains. George Anderson Clarke wrote in his 1993 pamphlet ‘Deskford Parish: Loons, lairds, preachers and teachers’ “Excavations at Inaltry in 1788 uncovered a deep circular chamber thought to be a dry pit for holding prisoners, as in medieval castle dungeons.” Incidentally it was Clarke’s great great grandfather who found the carnyx, but my eyes lit up at the word “pit”, perhaps that might have been a Neolithic pit. And the platform could have been a good viewijg spot for the shenanigans going on at the deposit site.
Just across from the modern road from the castle was a law hillock or cairn. At the top of the hill to the east, there were two stone circles (possibly RSCs) about 50 metres apart namely Gaulcross south and Gaulcross north. They were both blown up by the farmer in the early 19th century. A Pictish hoard was discovered in the debris and when the area was excavated in the 2010s, more silver fragments were found. Clune Hill to the east has the Gallowes well and Cotton Hill to the south apparently used to be covered in cairns, although nothing remains. Ha’ Hillock is close by too.
Perhaps many places in Scotland when put under scrutiny would reveal just as many interesting human interventions (that’s what John tells me anyway), yet still I have to say I am intrigued both by the specific location of this site and its longevity of use.
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