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White Castle, East Lothian


Nunraw is an estate in East Lothian, Scotland. It includes the White Castle, a hillfort, situated on the edge of the Lammermuir Hills, two miles south of the village of Garvald, (55°54′32″N 2°37′14″W / 55.909°N 2.6206°W / 55.909; -2.6206, grid reference NT613686, OS Landranger No.67.) Nunraw House is now a Cistercian abbey. Sir James Balfour Paul, Lord Lyon King of Arms, writing in 1905 stated that Whitecastle and Nunraw are the same place and that the lairds there were often referred to by one or the other of these territorial designations.

It is likely that the White Castle was first settled by the ancestors of the Votadini tribe, whose main eastern capital was Dunpender, due north. The fort is ideally placed to strategically control the northern end of one of the main passes through the Lammermuirs, along the Whiteadder Water. With the further fortifications three miles further east at Blackcastle and Greencastle it would have been ideally placed for a beacon to alert the tribe in case of an invasion from the south.

The hillfort was excavated over four years between 2010 and 2013 by Murray Cook and David Connolly of Rampart Scotland http://www.rampartscotland.co.uk/, and dates to the second half of the 1st millennium BC, though there was also evidence of limited Neolithic and Early Bronze Age activity.


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