Tealing Earth House

Tealing Earth House lies a few metres from a dovecot of 1595 in the farmland of Tealing, near Dundee. It is an Iron Age souterrain of the first few centuries AD, found during ploughing in 1871: a banana-shaped passage about 25 metres long, 2.5 metres wide and 2 metres tall, now open to the sky inside a fenced grassy enclosure. When the Angus antiquarian Andrew Jervise excavated it in 1874 it was divided into compartments and roofed with massive flat slabs. Two Bronze Age cup-and-ring marked stones were reused in its walls, and one fine example can still be spotted. Finds included animal bones, native pottery, ten broken querns and high-quality Roman glass and pottery, supporting the idea that souterrains stored food during the Roman occupation; most were deliberately filled in about AD 200. It is open from April to September only. Visitors park beside the dovecot and walk a short, sometimes muddy path through the trees; it is working farmland, so follow the Access Code.