Doonhill Homestead

On a windswept hilltop two miles south of Dunbar, with wide views over the East Lothian coast, coloured concrete markers in the grass trace the outlines of two great timber halls found from aerial photographs. When they were excavated in the 1960s they were thought to be a native lord's hall of the 500s replaced by an Anglian one after an invasion in 638, but new radiocarbon dates in 2009 and 2017 turned the story round: both halls and their palisade are Early Neolithic, about 6,000 years old, like the hall at Balbridie in Aberdeenshire. The earlier hall, marked in grey, is 23 metres long with a large central room and two smaller ones; the second, in red, overlies it, and the palisade with its two entrances is marked in yellow. The approach is a narrow single-track road without passing places, then a field gate, which must be closed behind you as animals graze, and a grass track to a tiny car park.