Friday 16/4/04
In front of me hangs a menacing bible-black sky, to the left, the Edinburgh City Bypass and to the right a landfill site. I follow the line of the pylons until it opens to a golf course. Heading up a small hill I am soon hidden by trees and following the arrow on my trusty GPS. The hill soon becomes a tangle of trees and bushes and it's a bit of a scramble through it all. Somewhere in here are the remains of 111 cists, at least one of which was built with a cup and ring marked stone and many contained Neolithic and Iron Age remains. The GPS tells me I'm on the site, but there is nothing on the ground I am standing on. I explore further as the site once stretched along the ridge of the hill. Unfortunately, a quarry has destroyed the SE section. It looks like the remainder has disappeared under the tree growth. I do, however, find rectangular indentations running approximately NE/SW- one of the few remaining graves? A mostly destroyed site unfortunately. Most remains have gone, no cup and ring marks and very little ground evidence.
Details of the cup and ring marked stone from RCAHMS CANMORE;
In 1965 a cist containing a Food Vessel (RMS, EE 156) was found (at NT 2994 6740) during the excavation of the Parkburn long cist cemetery (NT26NE 28). Aligned N and S, the cist was built of four large sandstone slabs and measured 0.8m by 0.45m and about 0.45m in depth.
The E side-slab was in re-use, for it bore part of a heavily weathered multiple ring-mark (RMS, IA 49). The Food Vessel is bipartite, with four lugs and all-over decoration.
From RCAHMS CANMORE;
This long cist cemetery is situated on England's Hill, some 600m ENE of Parkburn. A large part of the cemetery has been destroyed by a sand and gravel quarry (now disused), but it probably extends into the strip of woodland immediately NW of the quarry, where cists were discovered in 1885. Excavation in advance of sand extraction in 1954 and 1956 revealed 111 cists, all of them aligned roughly ENE to WSW. Two principal groups of cists were identified, separated by a wall running from NE to SW along the crest of the hill; the S group comprised forty widely-spaced cists, most of them well-built with substantial slabs; the N group, which comprised fifty cists, the majority built of slighter stones, was more compact and there was evidence of disturbance and successive construction. The only finds from the cists were part of a jet armlet (RMS, FN 189), a small fragment of iron, possibly a knife blade (RMS, IA 49) and fragments of six rotary querns, three of them in re-use as cist slabs (RMS, BB 115-20). Since the excavations a further six long cists and a Bronze Age cist (see No. 26) have been discovered. One of the cists, which was found in 1962, was built of dressed stones of Roman date, including three arch voussoirs, probably removed from the bath-house of the Flavian fort at Elginhaugh (No. 102); the cist was aligned roughly NE-SW and there was a small sherd of Neolithic pottery (RMS, EO 983) in its fill.
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