 Thank you. So, I'm Ellie from Scape. We are an organisation to work on the archaeology of Scotland's coast, so I'm presenting a case study today about maritime coastal eastern landscape on the east coast of Scotland in the Firth of Thorth. So this is the view from our site. It's a landscape of mobility. Now these are two key bridges that connect the central belt, the lowlands of Scotland, with the north. And this landscape really sort of represents a microscopic of the wider Firth of Thorth SUV. So our site, outside of the exemplifies the coastline as a resource in itself in that it provides access to water and to the sea, which provides opportunities for transport, for trade, for communication, but also for a range of other purposes as well. So, for military purposes, for industrial use, for agriculture, as well as for other economic uses such as fishing, and, of course, the coastline also presents opportunities for reclamation as well to gain more land for agriculture. So, just to say this is very much a collaborative project. These are some of the key collaborators who've worked with us on this site, and because the nature of the project volunteers have been involved in all aspects of our fieldwork and investigation, without them none of this project could have been done. So, this is the Firth of Thorth and the East Coast of Scotland. It's a large tidal SUV. Our site sits on the south coast, about two-thirds of the way between Edinburgh and Stirling, two of Scotland's historic power bases, and it really sits within a landscape that's been very heavily modified both in itself and within an SUV that's been very heavily modified. It's called Higgins Nuke. Nuke is a historic Scottish word that actually means a small promontory land that juts out into water, which I want you to remember. So, there we are. That's the river Firth there in the middle, and that's their site. So, it's defined by this Neandru watercourse here at the Plygburn, and the length of the Plygburn has been the focal point for a range of activities for many centuries from the medieval period onwards. So, this is a very artificial and engineered landscape. It's been subject to the natural inputs of the towns coming up the river Firth, the input of the Firth coming downstream, as well as the input of the Plygburn itself, but it's also a landscape that's been very modified by a human agency as well, which has both intended and unintended consequences for the landscape. So, it's been consciously formed and altered, and it's a landscape that we're going to look at at a range of scales as well. There's been a range of levels of agencies that have operated on this landscape, both in this specific site and in the wider estuary as well. So, one of the first things we did to investigate this particular site was to do a drone survey, which allowed us to create a detailed three-dimensional model of the landscape. That raised the basis of our start for actually understanding this site. So, I just want to discuss the four different aspects of the use of this site through its history, starting with the coastal dimension. It's a coastal landscape. It's a landscape of mobility. Because of its location, it's got access along the river out to the sea to sort of international connections, but it's also connected across the river through that to the north of Scotland. There's been a harbour and ferry here from the 14th century onwards, and certainly it's the 15th century there were complaints about sedimentation and salutation here, but it really has been from that period onwards all about access, transport, communication and trade with a lot of construction of artificial structures to facilitate that. But it's also a military landscape within the very defined period of the early 16th century, thanks to King James IV of Scotland, who has been described as being obsessed with the development of his navy throughout the wars against Henry VIII of England. So, he constructed a maintenance and fitting out yard for the ships of his navy, and he selected our site at Higginsnuke. We think probably because the main dockyard is where he sticks out any draught of leaf. That's very vulnerable to being raised by the English, so he selected our sites here because it's in land so it's more defensive whilst still offering access to the coast and to a deep water port as well. So, during that time it was our maintenance and fitting yard. It was really a focal point for all of Scotland's resources reported into this area as well as expertise and materials from our allies across Europe. So, from France, from Flanders, Scandinavia, Portugal and Spain sent all sorts of help and assistance to Scotland to this particular site. It was probably selected because it was already introduced as an existing harbour. It was already in town ownership, and there's also access to resources in the hinterlands such as Ruddland as well. There was certainly vast oil investment in the site in the 16th century and in the development of the Navy. This is the great microflagship of James's Navy. It was the leader in the naval arms race in which the monarchs of Europe were engaged in the early 16th century. She was the largest ship in Europe and she was launched in 1512. Our site at Higginsnuke was built particularly for this massive ship. So, although this map which dates to just about 50 years after the end of our dockyard period shows three ships on just outside our site. It's the only place in Europe where this map shows any ships at all. But with the defeat of Scotland and the Battle of Flaws in 1513, everything came to a abrupt end and the site of our dockyard was effectively lost completely. So, the search for that has been a large part of this project. There's also an industrial landscape following the end of the dockyard period. There's a lot of manipulation of the landscape for water mill, for grinding corn. This really was all about water management features. So, there's significant alteration of the channel of the power burn. This entire former unit of it was cut off artificially and turned into a mill pond. The earliest map for that is 1784. So, that northbound reason for the power burn. Our site's up there. You can actually see in that top corner the artificial cutting straight in the line of the channel has created that meander really just to act as a mill pond. It was then converted to the site of our mill, put a power bus wheel, flowed out into the river forth, but that channel was probably also used to allow the tidal waters of the fourth inland, allowing the mill to operate as a tidal mill as well. A second mill was added a few years later and a harness was created. Both mills harness that water from the constructively mill down in the smooths, but that also caused conflicts of interest with landowners upstream as well who had fishing rights and harbours that were impacted by that. Finally, the source of agricultural landscape obviously threatened most of its history with particular manipulation in the 17th and 18th centuries. So, first off with the impact of any large scale landscape alterations upstream. This is Concardin Moss just north of Stirling. So, Stirling is down here. Our site is downstream of that. Concardin Moss is just the north left of Stirling, so upstream of our site. This vast area is just a huge peat ball that was drained from the late 17th century through the 19th century to provide land for reclamation. So, they cut all the peat, but they didn't treat that as a resource. They just allowed it to float down the river, which contributed a huge amount of mud and sediment into the system. It was a complete disaster for the first and fourth. It's been described as the first ecological disaster in Scotland and it's completely destroyed the fishing industry as well. Of course, even in the 19th century, if our site is there, the Admiralty charts are still showing drifted peats as a significant aspect that really altered the navigability of the river forth. Being a coastal estuarine landscape, it also provides opportunities to claim further land from the sea for agriculture. It's been estimated that between 45% and 50% of the fourth intertidal area has been lost to land reclamation in the past 400 years. So, just to look at an example, just north of our site, our site Higgins Nukes down here, and just to the north of that, you can see the successive lines of sea bags going out to the river forth. So, all of that area, nearly a kilometre of land, has been claimed from the river over the past few hundred years. And again, if we just go back to this map here, just south of our site, that's a proposed sea bag again for further reclamation. So, all of that activity basically stopped our site of Higgins Nukes being a kilometre jutting out into the water. So, there's now land on both sides of our site. It's also existed in an agricultural landscape in the sense of droving. So, there's a vast network of drove roads from a cattle I've taken from all across the islands in the north of Scotland down to the large cattle fairs in Falkirk, just south of our site. So, Higgins Nukes was at the crux of that. It was the main crossing point about all of the cattle from basically all of the north of Scotland crossed at this ferry here. There are two main crossing points there on Alwag. They are completely inspired by the two expenses that are one of the most important ones. But of course, what that meant, there's a huge amount of construction of infrastructure, piers and sea walls in order to facilitate that. From that point onwards, from the construction of some of these piers, increases complaints about the problems of siltation and sedimentation, and there are complaints from the 18th to 19th centuries of people having to wait for hundreds of yards through the intertidal mud to get to the boat. And multiple piers having to be constructed within a very short period of time. So, looking at our site then, some of the physical evidence of those different aspects of landscape manipulation, this channel has been completely artificially modified. This loop has been particularly cut off. There's been significant construction of a sea wall formalising the postage for access at some point. This environment, which is a former channel, has been enclosed by the construction of an earthwork bank. And there's been all sorts of intertidal infrastructure constructed to manage access there as well. But for us, archaeologically, there's been this massive build-up of salt marsh which has really altered the way that we can actually start to understand this landscape. So, in terms of our investigation, we peppered the site initially with boreholes, with a program of coring, and we also did a small excavation there as well, targeting the known features. So, in terms of the coring, that did was confirm that most of this landscape had been formed by the early Iron Age, but that the salt marsh outside the sea wall went down badly. It confirmed that this was some sort of a erosion feature on a former channel. This dense patch here really was targeting the old stone pier that we knew from the historic maps. So, by simple dint of working out your line and coring down until we hit the top of a stone structure, we mapped a stone feature nearly 40 metres long, 5 metres wide and sloping down gradually. We got peat, which yielded surprisingly late Iron Age dates, which was surprising given we were expecting it to be a post-medieval stone pier. So, we targeted that in one half of our excavation, and that confirmed that we were in fact looking at a post-medieval stone pier with an axe extract on the road. We were only able to actually look at the top of the landward end of it because the logistics were actually digging in that deep salt marsh. So, it's putting up against the sea wall. It appears to have been realigned and refaced at one point, possibly as an attempt to manage the problem of sedimentation. It's constructed in a pound plank that gave us an 18th century date. Again, that's confirming that those Iron Age dates from the peat are probably redeposited from the material that's floated down from the drainage of the peat bog. There's also a huge amount of chaff in the system, right at the bottom of this, it's 2.5 metres down, butting up against the bottom of the sea wall, which shows how rapidly that salt marsh has formed. Again, that indicates that at that time is a very low energy, depositional environment where lots of materials being deposited very, very rapidly. Of course, it also indicates the other aspect of this side of the mill. So, again, this is the old channel that was cut off by the modification of the main garden, the main channel came down under the side of the road to the side of the mill. And there we are. That's the side of the mill and the lead relative to the pier. So, this mill needs to appear to be a natural channel. The upper fill was absolutely full of 20th century material, so it was still open and acting really as a landfill site in the 20th century. It's a coronation mug in Edward VII, which is extremely datable, fortunately. We've got sloping clay banks, the natural banks of the natural channel, modified by the insertion of a stone wall on one side, probably the same on the other side, though that's been robbed out. And there's a timber and iron structure in that, which appears to form some sort of slewskate. Control the flow of the water out, and also, probably, let them tidal water in to allow the mill to operate according to the tides as well. So, we know this mill was out of use from the 19th century, at which point they lost the action of the mill slewsing the landscape, and we know from the amount of chaff in the system that you found in the salt marsh that this was a depositional environment. And that seems to have had a dramatic impact on the formation of the salt marsh. In fact, you could really argue that the salt marsh is an artificial man-made landscape feature caused by the drainage of the moll of the peat bog, the drifted peat that was incorporated, exacerbated by landscape management practices, and the end of the mill period as well. And from an archaeological point of view, that's caused serious problems for bedding our evidence of earlier features as well. So, if we go back to our drone survey, we were able to map the various stages of the tide against that. So, we can look at the site low tide, as opposed to the site as high tide as it would have been without the formation of the salt marsh and without the artificially engineered features that got in the way. And you can see how dramatically it's fallen through the landscape just in the past couple of hundred years since these features were constructed since the salt marsh was formed. And the end result of that is that the site of the docks which was represented here with this channel and this agreement probably provided the access, that site has now been completely cut off from the sea altogether. It's very difficult to imagine now when you see the site at low tide that there could have been large ships the size of the Great Michael that came up to this site. Although, when we were doing our excavation, there was one particularly high stream tide, but only at certain exceptional events can we actually see that this is still, in some senses, an intertidal coastal landscape. So, this is a landscape that's been altered by human agency at a range of power levels from the powerful monarchs of Scotland's medieval period all the way down through local landowners to the local 19th century miller. And that's a dramatic environmental consequences both intended and unintended on the landscape with a range of conflicting interests. It's caused a huge problems of sedimentation when you see the text to manage that and re-facing the alignment of the stone pier. But the end result effectively was that these modifications and their impacts really destroyed the very attributes of the tractor in the first place in terms of providing access to the coast and then to the wider sea, which resulted ultimately in the abandonment of this area and the shifting of the focal point of all those maritime activities further east. So, it's a landscape that's worked, existed within a wide network of communication, connections and influences from the very local with the influence of the mill, the construction of the sea wall, the solution action of the mill lead up to the local. And also the impacts of reclamation both to the south and north of the site, which have stopped it being that commentary jutting out into the river forth, as well as the input of the large scale landscape modifications such as the drainage of the peat ball upstream. But it also existed originally within our national network of those drill boats. It's a key point for Scotland's agricultural economy throughout the 18th and 19th centuries by facilitating that access. But if we go right back to medieval periods, it was a key player actually within the network of European international politics for all those allies working together in the wars against Scotland and England. So it really was originally once passed at this part of this vast European landscape of network and politics. So I'd just like to say thank you very much to everyone who supported the project and especially to the volunteers without being none of this.