Prehistoric burials of the East Lothian coast

Prehistoric Burials

Scotland’s prehistory stretched for some 9500 years from the earliest settlers to around AD 1000. There was some written history during the last thousand years of that period, but so little that it was effectively still a prehistoric era, and we rely upon archaeology to provide details of how people treated their dead. I should note at this point that these are not the normal everyday people but people whose remains for some reason were treated in an exceptional way; in a way that provides us archaeological evidence. The majority of the people are not archaeologically visible. Their remains used in a way that rendered their decomposition complete. We will only be concerned here with the sites that have left physical evidence.

So let us now go in search of what remains of the prehistoric burials of the coast of East Lothian.

Barrows: Ancient burial mounds.

The earliest formal burials in Scotland that we know about, and which involved any kind of grave structure, took place after about 4000 BC. These took the form of a chambered tomb which were often constructed form large stones or as was the case in lowland Scotland, timber, turf and earthⁱ. Into these tombs would be placed the decomposed and disarticulated remains of the deceased. The chambered tomb was then covered with a mound of earth or a stone cairn. The later mounds were often round in shape but the earliest were long and rectangular. Evidence for such long barrows in our area of interest can be found (Table 1) near Luffness Mains (NE47 NE5) (illustration 1)and Aberlady (NT47 NE1).

RCAHMS SITE NUMBER	LOCATION OF FIND	SITE TYPE
NT47NW 1	Aberlady Parish	BARROW(S), CIST, LONG CIST(S)
NT47NE 1	Aberlady, St Mary's Chapel	BURIAL GROUND, CHAPEL, CIST(S), CROSS SLAB
NT48SE 1.01	Luffness House	CIST(S)
NT48SE 4	Luffness House	CIST
NT48NE 1	Gullane Links	CAIRN(S)
NT48SE 21	Gullane Sands	CINERARY URN, MOULD (CLAY)
NT48NE 6	Gullane Links	LONG CIST
NT48SE 19	Gullane Golf Course	LONG CIST(S)
NT48SE 24	Gala Law	CINERARY URN
NT48SE 53	Gala Law	BURIAL
NT48SE 5	Kilspindie Golf Course	CIST(S)
NT47NW 7	Longniddry Golf Course	CIST(S), BEAKER, CINERARY URN(S)
NT48SE 14	Park Hills (West Fenton)	CIST
NT58NW 6	West Links (not far from the Eel Burn)	CIST(S), CINERARY URN(S)
NT77NW 16	Broxmouth (Dunbar)	BURIAL(S), CIST(S)

Table 1: Prehistoric burials of the East Lothian coast

Illustration 1: Luffness Mains: RCAHMS Aerial Photography Digital Oblique aerial view of the cropmarks of the settlement and barrows, taken from the E. DP070181 Copyright RCAHMSImage


However, these sites have not been explored in any detail. For a well excavated site we have to go to Eweford near Dunbar, which was thoroughly excavated and revealed evidence of burial practice relating to this time period. Archaeological excavations were carried out between 2001 and 2004, in preparation for the upgrading of the A1 to dual carriageway between Haddington and Dunbar. At Eweford they found evidence that suggested people started to bring human remains to the site about six thousand years ago. Here they built and rebuilt a large mound and capped it with a stone cairn. Their funereal practices also involved the construction of a timber enclosure and successive mortuary structures; mortuary enclosures are considered to have been used for the exposure of human remains prior to secondary burial. These wooden constructions were eventually destroyed by fireⁱⁱ.

The long barrows are also considered to have had some sort of territorial symbolism; perhaps signifying that the area adjacent to the barrow is owned by the group whose ancestors are entombed insideⁱⁱⁱ. The burial mounds are very prone to erosion by the elements and stone cairns have often vanished due to the stone being robbed out for another purpose. The mounds that were in the fertile land of East Lothian are vulnerable to damage by ploughing; often it is just aerial photography that reveals where they once were.

On the other hand, the act of ploughing has revealed to us hidden graves, especially the stone lined box grave we know as a 'cist' and it is to this form of burial that we now turn.

Cists

The cist burial can be separated into two distinct types: the short cist and the long cist. The one main thing that they have in common is that they are basically a hole lined with stone slabs, into which was put human remains and sometimes artefacts. The trend towards placing remains in cists started in the late third millennium BC. The earliest form was the short cist, which was used for the burial of single, multiple, articulated, cremated and mixed cremated remains^iv. The Bronze Age short cist does not tend to have grave-goods^v but some have been found to contain cinerary urns (for it was at this time that the use of cinerary urns was being adopted in Scotland^vi) into which the cremated remains would be placed and then inhumed in the cist. Usually only the remains of one person would be placed in the urn but sometimes there would be two or more. However, at one site near Dunbar the remains of at least 21 individuals were found in one massive cist that dates to the Iron Age^vii. What is not known is whether these people died at the same time or were they kept aside until a specific person died and their remains would join the first?

The next phase of cist burial was the long cist. This was as the name suggests, a full length stone lined burial. These graves appear more frequently in the archaeological record from the first few centuries AD onwards^viii.

Cist burials are the most numerous of prehistoric burial types that are found in the Luffness and surrounding area and we should now take a look at the cist burials that have been recorded.

Coastal Cists

We can see from the excavations and finds that have been recorded that the coastal plain of East Lothian has numerous prehistoric inhumations of the short cist type. All along the coast from Dunbar to Longniddry, on the elevated spots of Kingston common (NT58SW 152) and around North Berwick Law (NT58SE 13) can be found short cist burials. In fact the site at Kingston has evidence of burials spanning the Neolithic to the early second millennium AD^ix.

If we move down the coast a little from North Berwick onto the West Links,there is an area near the Eel Burn (NT58NW 6) where Bronze Age cists were found. A total of twenty three cists, three of which had urns. Human bones without cists were also found at the burn side.

There is no evidence of burials from the Eel Burn to Marine Villa but a little further along the coast there is another site that was popular for cist burials in the Iron Age (NT48NE 1). The site was visited in 1902 and the investigators^x found bones protruding from the dunes and the remains of small cairns. Some of the cairns had cists underneath them (illustration 2).

Illustration 2: One of the cists was described as being of a different type from the others and had a 'circular flattish mound of sand and stones, about two yards in diameter and one and a half feet high.' This grave contained the well preserved skeletons of three adults.Proc Soc Antiq Scot May 12 1902. Page 654- 658

This site in 1902 was around 200m South of Eyebroughy, in a windswept valley between two sand dunes. In 1962 the cairns had vanished, believed to have been covered in wind blown sand. However, they were rediscovered (NT48NE 1) forty years later when the cairns became visible again. This just goes to show you the changing nature of this wind blown landscape.

Now we continue along the coast to the other side of Gullane where we find Gullane Golf Club. Here in 1968 there was discovered the site of a long cist cemetery (NT48SE 19).It is described thus:

'A group of long cists was discovered on the 26th December 1968 during the removal of sand on Gullane No 3 Golf Course. Four adult graves, each containing a well-preserved skeleton, aligned roughly ENE-WSW, were arranged in a row side by side, about 2ft 9 ins apart, and a fifth cist, 2ft 3 ins long, containing the inhumation of a baby, lay to the N. An exploratory trench to the W of these cists revealed the capstones of a sixth long cist, which was not fully excavated. The total number of cists at this site is unknown, but the fact that at least a second row of graves exists suggests that there is a well organised cemetery. There is no record of a chapel. Following the excavation, the cists were left intact, and covered over with sand and turf.'

It seems that the land under what is now the sacred turf of many a championship links course, once provided the community with a hallowed site to conceal the remains of their dead; or to put it another way – we have gone from burials to bunkers!

The Gullane burials could well have been visible from the vantage point of Gala Law, which is a place that has drawn people to it over the ages. Here was also found evidence of burial activity. Finds here have included several pieces of cinerary urn (NT48SE 24) which were found in 1880 and in April 1984 (NT48SE 53) two incomplete male skeletons were found by some children playing by the erosion face of a sandy bank. However, inspection of the site revealed no traces of a cist or pit, nor were there any artefacts.

Further down the hill we find the site (NT48SE 1.01) of the supposed Viking graves; these we discussed in the previous chapter. These were not the only graves found at Luffness as another skeleton was found in a long cist in a field between the house and the Avenue (NT48SE 4)though no claims are made about its origin. A little further inland at (NT48SE 14) Park Hills near West Fenton a cist was discovered in December 1943 when ploughing a field. This cist was about 1m deep and 50cm wide and contained the inhumation of a child, accompanied by a beaker. The beaker was thought to be from the Early Bronze Age.^xi

The practice of placing of beakers into graves is thought to have arrived from Scandinavia with the so called 'Beaker People' who it is suggested introduced metal working to Britain 4000 years ago. Beakers were fancy pots for drink or food. Another example from a cist containing a child's grave was found at Thornton at Innerwick^xii. It is thought to date from sometime between 2300 and 1800 BC. We can only surmise at the reasons why beakers were placed in graves.

I can't find any evidence for burials in the Nature Reserve area but I suppose that this isn't surprising given the changing nature of this landscape. Once over the Peffer Burn this all changes, as the coast from Aberlady to Longniddry was once a very popular place for burial. It was (NT47NW 1) described in 1792^xiii as having:

'…...a great many stone graves, all of them that have been opened containing human bones; particularly in Gosford Links, they are laid almost as thick as in a churchyard; many of them lie nearly south and north.'

The orientation of these graves indicates that they were Pagan due to the fact that Christian graves are usually orientated east west. The author also described the presence of two large tumuli close to the graves.

This abundance of ancient burials continues into the area that is now home to Longniddry golf course and into the private gardens of the residents of Longniddry (NT47NW 6, 7, 10, 13, 14, 39). Excavations at Longniddry have unearthed at least forty different cist burials. The largest of these was in the garden of a house called Four Winds^xiv, where a cemetery was found containing at least twenty seven graves. It is likely that the cemetery was in use from the first half of the fifth to the beginning of the eighth century AD. This time span shows a continuity of use into the Christian period and I wonder if it ceased perhaps when they moved to a burial site close to a chapel?

Continuity and conclusion

One of the most captivating elements of this subject is the continuity that can be found at different sites. A site such as the burial mound at Eweford was intermittently used for thousands of years; remaining significant throughout many different burial practices and belief systems. Archaeologists found evidence that when the mound at Eweford was two thousand years old, people started digging pits around the base of the mound and depositing burnt human remains in them. This practice is thought to have continued for about six hundred years. Then later generations covered these pits with stone cairns and into the cairn material they incorporated bone and other artefacts. A later generation then started removing stones from the cairn so that they could create hollows into which they placed human remains. By the time this was happening the mound was an ancient monument which had been the focus point for ceremony for millennia. It was to this site that the people came in 700 BC to start a new phase; they cut into the mound and placed a cist to hold the remains of a funeral pyre. Evidence for similar activity was found at a site close by called Pencraig Hill. This was the site of an ancient mortuary into which the people inserted a cist precisely in relation to the earlier monument, which had been built and burned a millennia earlier^xv.

However, the enthusiasm for such burials did not continue into subsequent generations. Burials in the Christian period moved into the churchyard in what was becoming the medieval world. Therefore, we must end our tour through the burial sites of time and place, even though we have just scratched the surface of this fascinating subject.

References

iHistoric Scotland Leaflet: Prehistoric Burials, 2011

iiThe Lands of Ancient Lothian, O. Lelong and G. MacGregor 2008. ISBN13: 978 0903903 417: Page xxi

iiiThe countryside Encyclopaedia. R. Muir. 1988. ISBN. 0-333-43621-0:)Page 118

ivThe Lands of Ancient Lothian, O. Lelong and G. MacGregor 2008. ISBN13: 978 0903903 417: Page 230

vThe Lands of Ancient Lothian, O. Lelong and G. MacGregor 2008. ISBN13: 978 0903903 417: Page 110

viHistoric Scotland Leaflet: Prehistoric Burials, 2011

viiBrothwell and Powers, D R and R (1967) 'A massive cist with multiple Burials of Iron Age date, Lochend, Dunbar, Part II:The Iron Age people of Dunbar', Proc Soc Antiq Scot, vol.98

viii Historic Scotland Leaflet: Prehistoric Burials, 2011

ix SAIR34Two prehistoric short-cists and an early medieval long-cist cemetery with dug graves on Kingston Common, North Berwick, East Lothian by Ian Suddaby: http://www.sair.org.uk/sair34/

xJ T Richardson and J S Richardson Proc Soc Antiq Scot May 12 1902. Page 654- 658

xi http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/arch-352-1/dissemination/pdf/vol_078/78_106_119.pdf

xii http://nms.scran.ac.uk/database/record.php?usi=000-100-035-072-C&scache=2f0361o2ki&searchdb=scra

xiii Roy, N (1792) 'Topographical description of the parish of Aberlady', Archaeol Scot, vol.1 Page 517

xiv Long cist burials at Four Winds, Longniddry,East Lothian: Magnar Dalland, Proc SocAntiq Scot, 122 (1992), 197-206

xv The Lands of Ancient Lothian, O. Lelong and G. MacGregor 2008. ISBN13: 978 0903903 417: Pages 115 - 124