V. Gordon Childe

A Promontory Fort on the Antrim Coast

Larriban or Larry Bane Head is a limestone promontory rising sheer some 150 ft. above the sea in the townland of Knocksoghey, parish of Ballintoy, about a mile east of the caves recently examined by Dr. Jackson. The neck of the promontory has been cut off by a rampart and fosse about 100 ft. from its extremity. The fort thus formed gives its name to the headland, Leath Rath Ban, the Half White Fort. Before the war more than half the enclosed area and a section of the rampart had been quarried away and the original fosse materially altered. According to the report furnished by Thomas Fagan to the Ordnance Survey in 1838 the defended area measured ‘about half a rood’, and the ‘moat was on an average 23 ft. in width’. One of the workers employed at the quarry remembers that the entrance to the fort was near the centre of the rampart. It has now been destroyed. The quarrying has, however, left an instructive section through the rampart. In this section Mr. Blake Whelan found portions of a pot standing in what seemed to be a sort of kiln in the centre of the wall. The surviving portions of building here might outline the back of a guard chamber opening near the main entrance which must have traversed the wall close at hand (P in fig. I).

Excavations at Castlelaw, Midlothian, and the Small Forts of North Britain

The fort at Castlelaw is one of a group of four, strung out along a front of five miles on the south-eastern slopes of the Pentlands. Like the rest, it does not occupy the summit of the hill (which is just under 1,600 ft. in height) but is built some 990 ft. above sea-level on an elevated spur projecting from the main mass which rises steeply above the fort, just out of bowshot. The spur ends in a slight knoll the oval summit of which is 93 yds. long by 40 yds. wide. This area is enclosed within a very low Inner Bank, while a more conspicuous rampart, Middle Bank, supplemented on the north only by an Outer Bank, impeded progress up the slope. Two rock-cut fosses, superficially invisible, were revealed between the ramparts by excavations carried out during 1931 and 1932. A detailed report of these operations will be published elsewhere, but the results which concern Britain on both sides of the Border may be summarized here.