The hill at Broxy Kennels was of the commonplace kind ploughed and worn out till it had no more definition. Then engineers prepared a new road roadbed around Perth, and archeology followed the survey lines. What was brought out was not something resembling a single relic but an entire settlement plan: ditches, ramparts, remnants of roundhouses, and a confusing chamber in the semi-underground, constructed with boulders carried by the river.
A paper trail was no better a spade to the rediscovery of the fort. Aerial shots of the route of a proposed trunk road were taken in the 1960s and on the surface, there was nothing showing, at ground level, Kenny Green, the project officer of GUARD Archaeology explained, there was “no trace of it.” The ploughing by centuries had left no trace on the surface. The Cross Tay Link Road project eventually made possible a complete excavation in 2022 that transformed a transportation project into an infrequent excavation into an erased landscape.
Broxy Kennels was part of a known Scottish Iron Age style the “hillfort” as a fort instead of a fortress. At least three major periods of use Starting between 550 and 400 B.C.E., archaeologists found at least three major stages of use where the inhabitants excavated two large ditches and raised earth ramparts with the excavated spoil. In the interior, the burnt ruins of wattle and daub, remains of buildings in the form of rows of roundhouses and sign of industry which would indicate the settlement to have been also a labouring place, rather than a lookout. Bog ore, slag are evidence of iron manufacture, and vitrified clay is evidence of high heat in furnaces, which is congruent with Broxy Kennels in the broader frame of Iron Age craft activities in Scotland in which evidence of smelting and smithing has been found in diverse domestic settings.
Then the settlement was no longer mindful of its own defenses. In 400 B.C.E. one of the ditches was filled up and reused as the location of the most interesting aspect of the site, a souterrain. It was at Broxy Kennels almost 30 feet long, 13 feet wide, and 3 feet deep, paved with stone and reinforced at the wall with rounded stones probably taken up the River Tay, a short distance away. The building was not included in the original plan of the fort, it looks like some sort of an intervention, a manmade space that is placed into older earthworks, and then newer ramparts were built on its borders that reorganized the design of the hilltop.
Souterrains are also widespread and perversely misconstrued in Scotland: there are some 200 known, all between the past centuries B.C.E. and the first two centuries C.E. Broxy Kennels made cereal grains on the floor, yet not in sufficient numbers to resolve the long-lasting debate on purpose. More and more, certain scholars suggest that not a small number of souterrains should have been mere dry granaries, even where there are plant remains, and that varying examples may have been used in different ways in household life, storage facilities, refuges or in activities with a religious orientation.
At Broxy Kennels the evidence bears to ambiguity. There was no clear signature even through chemical examination of deposits, and the chamber appears to have had a fairly short working life before becoming silty and infilled. But the larger settlement survived: radiocarbon datings on subsequent pits and postholes indicate new settlement into the late first century C.E. around the time when Roman armies were fighting well into what is now Scotland. Before Roman army reached that side of Perthshire the fort was evacuated, but the excavation is not connected with one thing only. Social reorganization, changing settlement preferences, as well as external pressure, are all plausible but not provable based on existing traces.
Finally, the most up-to-date aspect of the narration perhaps is its technique: a lost community found again through city planning, ancient aerial photography, and lab analysis combined and harmonized. Those who go over the new road are conducted over ground upon which ditches, furnaces and a meticulously arranged stone floor used to pass, an artificial underground chamber, the purpose of which still declines to declare itself.
