The Swartigill Burn, the Black Hole Burn in old Norse has a story to tell. Like all good stories the burn has a beginning, a middle and an end. Let's start at the middle, a wide flat floodplain contained between two high banks. On the north side the burn runs along the edge of the floodplain, below a medieval farmstead. It was not always so, and probably took a route on the opposite side, which also has along abandoned farmstead. Members of the Yarrows T rust had sptted some stonework eroding out of the burn, and decided to investigate, as the burn in spate had dislodged some stone. 

On cleaning back a small area, we unexpectedly recovered a large assemblage of pottery from Early to Late Iron Age in date. 

Some of the rim shards were everted using the thumb impressions of the potter, A human  touch across two millennia.  

In 2015, a geophysical survey of part of the floodplain revealed an extensive area of