"Deer Parks, Traps and Hays: Hunting forests in Medieval Scotland" with Dr. Piers Dixon.

Deer hunting in medieval Scotland has been poorly researched archaeologically until recently. In his book, Hunting and Hunting Reserves in Medieval Scotland, Gilbert identified medieval parks at Stirling and Kincardine in Perthshire that William the Lion created, but it is only in recent years that excavations by Hall and Malloy have begun to explore their archaeology. The Royal Commission recorded another type of hunting feature, a deer trap at Hermitage Castle in 1996 and then re-recorded the earthwork at Dormount Hope in 2000 originally reported as two separate monuments. Although the earthworks of parks, traps and other types of enclosure display similarities in the construction of their earthwork boundaries the individual sites display variations in their topography that beg questions about their function. Fieldwork has established that the earthwork is indeed a single monument which has an open end allowing deer to be driven into the natural canyon of Dormount…