NY 907887: An enclosed round house of ring bank type, and an embanked plot containing the remains of four cairns were identified during field walking in February 1981 at Hallshill. On a knoll to the south of the house are a further 60-70 clearance cairns. Remains to the east of the house are obscured by rigg and furrow. A rescue excavation in October/November 1981 confirmed that the roundhouse was a round timber built house, 9m in diameter, encircled by a ringbank. Surveyed at 1:1250. (1)

NY 907887. Hallshill unenclosed settlement. (Plan). (2)

Prehistoric settlement at Hallshill Farm, East Woodburn, excavated by T Gates (NY 906886). Earthworks discovered in 1980 - 15m diameter embanked circle (unenclosed round house site), with other low banks and remains of small cairns.
Post-holes of a ring-groove timber round house found within the circular bank. Finds included flint flakes, fragments of a saddle quern, and a barbed and tanged arrowhead possibly from a grave disturbed by building the timber round house. Date: 1st/2nd millennia BC. (3)

Fieldwalking in 1980 identified prehistoric earthworks on land acquired for afforestation. A plane table survey confirmed the presence of a solitary ring-bank which may represent the site of an unenclosed round house. West of the ring-bank, and aimmediately adjacent to it, lay a small embanked field or paddock (about 0.6ha) enclosing four small cairns (probably stone clerance). In addition, there were two larger groups of cairns, between them containing more than 80 individual cairns scattered within a radius of 300m to the west and south. The southern cairnfield contained around 70 cairns and covered an area of about 3ha; the smaller cairnfield to the west comprised about 15 cairns and linear banks spread over an area of about 1ha.
Excavations took place in 1981 and 1986 to examine the round house, section of field boundary and field, and a clearance cairn. Before excavation the round house appeared as a turf-covered mound, 12m in diameter from crest to crest, with banks up to 0.25m wide and 0.25m high, and a break in the south-east side probably indicating an entrance. The round house revealed a ring-bank of stone and 14 postholes: nine formed an inner ring 7.2m in diameter, and four additional postholes formed a porch around the entrance gap. A sub-rectangular pit just inside the ring-bank was probably an Early Bronze Age grave about 1.50m by 0.55m; the grave had been dug into and almost completely emptied by the builders of the later round house.
The field revealed that the majority of larger stones had been moved to the edge of the field or added to clearance cairns, leaving the majority of those in the field measuring only 0.05m to 0.10m across. The excavated cairn comprised a loose dump of stones about 4m in diameter and standing up to 0.6m high.
Crop samples from the site are the first to be recovered from a domestic late Bronze Age or early Iron Age site in the north of England, and have produced the earliest record of spelt in the region. (4)

In 1987 carbonised seed from 20 samples were analysed from the hut circle excavated in 1981-86. The samples were from pits, post holes and one hearth. Emmer wheat was the dominant crop plant in the samples, but small samples of spelt wheat, six-row barley and flax were also found. The assemblage consisted largely of cereal chaff fragments, with only small quantities of cereal grain and arable weed seeds present. The grains of spelt and seeds of flax form the earliest records for these species in northern England recovered so far. (5)

Lidar imagery shows the excavated roundhouse and a length of associated field wall within a clearing left in the plantation. To the south, the plantation covers a Bronze Age landscape surveyed at the same time as the excavated settlement, no sign of which can be seen on DTM lidar imagery due to the density of the trees. (6)