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Reconstructing Battles and Battlefields: Scientific Solutions to Historical

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landscapes, Vol. 15 No. 2, November, 2014, 119–131

Reconstructing Battles and Battlefields:

Scientific Solutions to Historical
Problems at Bannockburn, Scotland
Richard Tipping1
with Gordon Cook2, Dmitri Mauquoy3,
Aden Beresford1, Derek Hamilton2,
John G. Harrison1, Jason Jordan4, Paul Ledger3,
Stuart Morrison1, Danny Paterson1, Nicola Russell2
and David Smith5
1
University of Stirling 2University of Glasgow 3University of Aberdeen
4
Coventry University 5University of Oxford
The need for scientists to add objective data to historical studies is argued using
as a case study the battle of Bannockburn in 1314. The terrain was critical in this
battle, as in so many others, but cannot be understood from the few primary
sources, which are not contemporary and are strongly biased. Scientific
techniques can cut through hyperbole. The methodology and techniques used
to better understand the landscape around the battle are briefly discussed,
particularly new advances in radiocarbon dating which enable analysis to
approach the chronological precision of the archaeologist, if not the historian.
Our data are argued to have clarified muddled interpretations.
keywords battlefield archaeology, environmental reconstruction, environmen-
tal history, Bannockburn 1314

Introduction
Taking the volume theme (and conference title), ‘Landscapes in Conflict’, at its most
prosaic, this paper focuses on landscapes which were the foci of conflicts between
nations. Despite their significance, many battlefields are poorly understood. In
several instances the sites of battles are unknown or disputed (Foard and Morris
2012). This of course creates major problems in interpretation. The terrain is often
fundamental in understanding the decisions of major agents and the action itself.
This paper, drawing on the results of the Leverhulme-funded project ‘Landscape
dynamics and Bannockburn 1314: scientific answers to historical problems’,
focuses on one battle, Bannockburn in 1314. Fought over two days in June 1314,
the battle is today truly iconic and loaded with political significance in 2014, its

ß Oxbow Books Ltd 2014 DOI 10.1179/1466203514Z.00000000030

120 RICHARD TIPPING et al.

700th anniversary. The Scots routed the English. The battle will be celebrated in
Scotland in the year that Scots vote for or against independence. The field of battle
is unknown. Historians debate this issue with some intensity, largely because
primary sources are decidedly subjective, ambiguous, or clearly rich in hyperbole;
they are also not contemporary with the battle.
From the comparative poverty of objective archival sources, interpretations have
been many and bewildering. Explaining Bannockburn has attracted many wild and
unsupportable fictions as well as better grounded-theories from many British
medieval and military historians, including some of the finest. Reese (2000, 148),
one of the better recent interpreters, forlornly concluded that ‘With no clear
scientific proof [of the contemporary landscape] one can only continue, like earlier
historians, to make deductions from the contemporary accounts’. There is in
addition no convincing archaeological evidence for the location of the battle, a
circumstance usually explained as being a product of complete scavenging by
triumphant Scots. With the rout and with no retaliation, scavenging could have
been very thorough.
Against this failure of traditional data-sources, we have sought to establish a
methodology for understanding the terrain at Bannockburn from historical
sciences. We sought to reconstruct all elements of the landscape around Stirling in
c. 1314, with the intention that this methodology might be applied to other
battlefields in future, drawing on techniques most often used to reconstruct past
environmental processes and changes at longer timescales. In this paper we will
discuss our methodology and techniques in some detail because many will be
unfamiliar to medieval, military, and environmental historians.

Bannockburn 1314
Bannockburn is a village some 3.5 km south-east of the centre of Stirling, today a
suburb of the city (Figure 1). West of and through the village flows the Bannock
Burn, unnamed on the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 map (Figure 2) because it is a
small and insignificant stream. It rises 9 km west of the village near the North
Third Reservoir (NS 756 889), at around 440 m above sea level (Ordnance Datum:
OD). It flows through two gorges where meltwater streams scoured the valley
during deglaciation. North-east of Bannockburn, the burn is incised some
3–4 m into a coastal plain called the Carse, three level surfaces of silt-rich clay,
former salt-marshes formed in periods of higher relative sea level (Smith et al.
2010), and from there flows into the tidal River Forth 3.5 km from Bannockburn
(Figures 2, 3).
The conflict was between the English forces of Edward II (reigned1307–37) and
the Scots led by Robert Bruce (reigned 1306–29). The immediate cause of the
battle was the need for Edward to raise a long-standing siege of Stirling Castle by
the Scots, ostensibly before or at mid-summer, though the battle was the
culmination of decades of warfare and skirmishing originally provoked by Edward
I’s disputed claim to the Scottish crown in 1296.
Edward may have known of the siege only on 27 May 1314 (Cornell 2009,
139). His force was perhaps two or three times that of the Scots in wait outside
 RECONSTRUCTING BATTLES AND BATTLEFIELDS 121

figure 1 Stirling Castle and the St. Ninian’s Ridge from just above the floor of the Bannock
Burn west of Chartershall. The road in the foreground is the M9 (see Figure 2) (Photo: Author’s).

figure 2 Extract from Ordnance Survey digital mapping at 1:50000 level (‘District View’) of the area
discussed in this paper, showing the hilly ground west of Stirling, the streams draining this, including
the Bannock Burn south of Cambusbarron, the modern extent of urban Stirling, the meanders of the
River Forth to its east and the Carse between the Forth and the village of Bannockburn. (Image: ß
Crown Copyright/database right 2008. An Ordnance Survey/EDINA supplied service).
122 RICHARD TIPPING et al.

Stirling, weighted relatively far more towards cavalry than infantry. Edward’s
advisors were no strangers to the Stirling landscape. Somewhere south of Stirling,
probably near St. Ninians west of Bannockburn (Figure 2), the armies confronted
each other for the first time. The English were driven back and had to make a
choice, east or west, as to where to camp that night. John Barbour, in his
extraordinary poetic paean to Bruce, The Bruce, written in c. 1375, stated that the
English ‘quartered that night in the Carse’ (Barbour 1997, 489). Most interpreters
accept this, and we do too. If this was so, what the Carse looked like becomes
critical but sources say very little.

Environmental crises prior to 1314

Probably more than in most battles, landscape and environment played a very
significant role in the outcome. That nature undid the English might be a
significant moral for post-Bannockburn times. The ‘long’ fourteenth century, from
the mid-thirteenth century until after the successive outbreaks of plague in the later
fourteenth century, was one of an astonishing number of environmental shocks to
northern Europe. Indeed the first five lines of a bitter near-contemporary (c. 1320s)
anonymous middle English poem – On the Evil Times of Edward II – combine
Edward’s failure at Bannockburn and the harvest failures after 1314,
Whii werre and wrake in londe and manslauht is i-come,
Whii hungger and derthe on eorthe the pore hath undernome,
Whii bestes ben thus storve, whii corn hath ben so dere,
Ye that wolen abide, listneth and ye mowen here
The skile (Dean 1996)

thus refer to the war, vengeance, and manslaughter that Edward is accused of
bringing to England, and in almost the same breath the famine which was also his
fault.
Our thesis in understanding Bannockburn was that rapid and large-scale
climatic deterioration after c. 1280, working on soils, rivers, and the estuary
created a landscape around Stirling that was by 1314 inimical to the favoured
English strategy of cavalry-driven warfare. The last set-piece battle between the
armies had been in 1298, also near Stirling but, we argued, in very different
climatic and environmental contexts. What had changed, we hypothesised, was the
regional response to climate change commencing c. 1280 (Hughes and Diaz 1994;
Mann et al. 2009).

Scientific approaches and methodologies

To test the thesis, we drew on a very diverse array of established palaeo-climatic,
palaeo-ecological, and palaeo-environmental techniques. All are tried and tested
but very few have been used to explore in detail an event with a time-span of less
than 50 years.
Of most significance is radiocarbon (14C) dating and the very recent
breakthroughs that now make the measurement of time by scientists very nearly
 RECONSTRUCTING BATTLES AND BATTLEFIELDS 123

figure 3 Detailed geomorphological map of the lower course of the Bannock Burn across
the Carse, the parallel Pelstream Burn and Cocks Pow, incised below the Carse, altitudes of
sediment-stratigraphic transects used in understanding the geomorphology and sedimentol-
ogy, the three surfaces of the Carse defined from these and localities discussed on the Carse.
OS grid lines at 1 km interval, shown for scale (Source: Jason Jordan, Coventry University).
124 RICHARD TIPPING et al.

approach that of archivists and archaeologists. Most historians are familiar with
the technique but not with new developments that now allow precision almost to
the year. Radiocarbon dating provides an age-estimate for the deaths of different
types of organic matter. Accelerator mass-spectrometry (AMS) enables samples of
very small size to be assayed. Radiocarbon age-estimates have associated errors,
which can be quantified. The size of error varies with the age of the sample and the
laboratory. At the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC)
laboratory, conventional or normal-precision 14C dating yields an uncertainty
range of c. ¡35 years at 1.0 standard deviation (s). High-precision 14C dating
(Cook et al. 2010), however, reduces the range to ¡16–17 years. Radiocarbon
age-estimates are not calendrical age-estimates. They need to be calibrated against
a precise, independently dated chronological data-set, usually tree-rings.
Nevertheless, after calibration a 14C year can be either older, the same as or
younger than the calendar year a sample died, probably because of long-term
fluctuations in solar energy (irradiance). These mismatches through time are called
‘wiggles’. A set of closely-spaced uncalibrated 14C age-estimates can form the
shape of a wiggle or several wiggles, and can be statistically draped over a master-
curve (Mauquoy et al. 2004) so that 14C age-estimates relate more precisely to
calendar ages. Most recently, sets of wiggle-matched 14C age-estimates can be
analysed by Bayesian statistical techniques (Mauquoy et al. 2002; Yeloff et al.
2006; Blaauw and Christen 2011) wherein the range of a set of wiggle-matched
14
C age-estimates can be very significantly reduced by assuming that each relates to
the others in a meaningful chrono-stratigraphic way. In very recent years this
approach has allowed palaeo-ecologists to ask questions of specific historical
events (van Hoof et al. 2006; Yeloff and van Geel 2007). With these new
approaches it is possible to understand environmental changes leading up to 1314.
It is important to understand the local impacts of climatic deterioration in the
years before the battle. Increased precipitation was probably the most significant
climatic variable to impact on the two armies, particularly Edward’s heavy
cavalry. To understand the rate and magnitude of climate-driven hydrological
change from c. 1280 we quantified fluctuations in the water tables of two raised
mosses on the Carse, at Shirgarton Moss and Wester Moss, the wooded area south
of Fallin (Figures 2, 3). The only significant source of water to a raised moss is
thought to be precipitation. Statistical modelling of three well-understood palaeo-
hydrological indicators (testate amoebae, Sphagnum species and humification:
Mauquoy et al. 2002) would define hydrological change on peat bog surfaces. Soil
erosion has been recognised as significant in this period (Dotterweich 2008). We
sought evidence for both. The scale, extent and intensity of farming as well as the
distribution and character of extant woodland, that have influenced many
interpretations, was understood from new archival searches and from spatially
precise and highly-resolved pollen analyses, dated by Bayesian approaches. Only
one pollen diagram close to Bannockburn was available (Birnie in Rideout 1996),
though inadequately 14C dated and too poorly resolved to be of use. New 14C
dated sediment stratigraphies were therefore sought by boreholes on valley-sides
through gravity-driven colluvial deposits and on riverine floodplains subject to
accelerated flood-generated overbank sediment. We hypothesised that fluvial
 RECONSTRUCTING BATTLES AND BATTLEFIELDS 125

figure 4 Photograph of the small, insignificant Bannock Burn near Chartershall (NS 783
904) (see Figure 2) (Photo: Author’s). The battle of Bannockburn is assumed by all
interpreters to have taken place somewhere in this area on the 24 June 1314. The encounter,
however, began the day before with initial confrontation and skirmishes. One reason for
confusion among interpreters as to the location of the battle is its long duration which
allowed the adversaries time to move round each other.

response to increased precipitation might have provoked channel incision, the

creation of a ‘great ditch’. The tidal Bannock Burn may have changed by either
climate-driven relative sea level change or increased storminess (Galloway 2009).
Until our work nothing was known of sea level change in the historic period for
the Forth estuary and its tributaries (Smith et al. 2010).

Discussion
This wide range of different scientific techniques was employed because of the
great numbers of ways in which environmental changes might have impacted on
the battle and the terrain. The programme was the first, we think, to attempt to
reconstruct and connect so many different components of a past landscape in such
high temporal and spatial resolution.
In many ways what we found was disappointing. We were more successful at
broad-brush reconstructions than locale-specific detail. Nowhere could we find
deposits dating precisely to the early fourteenth century: we found sediments from
just before and just after, but frustratingly not in the period. Post-medieval
126 RICHARD TIPPING et al.

agriculture has been destructive such that we could not test our thesis. Instead, we
have identified and dated more enduring landscape elements that are present today
and were present in 1314 but have gone un-remarked.
No historian has succeeded in defining the appearance of the landscape west of
St. Ninians in the early fourteeth century. From 14C dated geomorphological and
sedimentological analyses on the valley floors of streams (burns) draining east
from high ground around the North Third Reservoir (Figure 2) we confirmed that
the Bannock Burn south of Cambusbarron and west of Chartershall was as it
appears today (Figure 4), a small and un-prepossessing stream. It had a small
sandy floodplain in parts, constructed from the seventh century, when its valley
floor was as wide as today: hardly an obstacle. Incision of streams cannot be
related to fourteenth century climate change: it had occurred much earlier.
However, other streams south of the Bannock Burn, draining from the North
Third Reservoir, had no alluvial floodplains. Deep peats formed the wide valley
floors, 3–5 m deep and much older than the early fourteenth century, surviving
because streams lacked the power to erode them. These would have constrained
movement because they cut across the natural route to the castle. Interpreters have
focused on whether peat bogs at Chartershall, Milton (NS795 904) and Halbert’s
Bog (NS 792 906) would have constrained troop movement. These did protect
Bruces’ right flank on day one as the Scots stood near St. Ninians (Figure 2). The
bogs were in 1314 much larger than they are depicted on mid-eighteenth century
maps, the traditional source of topographic analyses for historians. Several more
peat bogs between Cambusbarron and St. Ninians have been shown to have
existed than are known; they have largely been removed. They lay in hollows
between drumlins, dome-shaped ridges formed during de-glaciation: a scientific
‘reading’ of the landscape provides new insights. But these separate hollows would
not have coalesced to form continuous marsh. Routes to the west of St. Ninians to
Stirling Castle might have been found but troops would have needed to wind their
way along drumlin crests almost in single file, horribly exposed.
If the image of this part of Stirling in the early fourteenth century is of the boggy
wastes and wilderness imagined by most modern historians, then the counter-point
to this is that west and south of Chartershall the drumlin slopes above the bogs
were probably fully agricultural. This emerges from new archival and pollen
analyses at Cauldbarns (NS 794 884). This was an easily-traversed patchwork of
arable, pasture, and woodland (Figure 5). There is no palaeo-ecological or archival
evidence that woodland was ‘wild’, creating a deterrent to the advancing English
as imagined, for example, by Nusbacher (2000, 150: ‘The combination of woods
and uneven terrain made it difficult to see more than a few yards in any direction’
or by Cornell (2009, 167) that ‘the trees of the Torwood loomed menacingly
before them … Daylight disappeared … [the army] blinded by the darkness … [in]
an uncomfortable coldness’. These imaginings are highly unlikely for woodland
close to such a major town. Woods would have been light and airy. Military
historians may simply have misinterpreted the medieval usage of the term ‘foresta’.
East of Bannockburn we obtained much new data that clarify what the Carse
looked like in 1314. To Barrow (1988, 212) the Carse was ‘boggy and intersected
by countless streams of uncertain depth, to Reese (2000, 122–4) it was ‘flat wet
 RECONSTRUCTING BATTLES AND BATTLEFIELDS 127

figure 5 Photograph of the managed woodland and surrounding pasture at Cauldbarns.

Pollen analyses here suggest that the appearance of this hillside in the middle ages was as it
is today, minus the tarmac and fences (Photo: Author’s).

meadows … the pows’ [small sluggish streams] running through ‘deep peaty pools
with crumbling, overhanging banks … as treacherous as quicksand’. Nusbacher
(2000, 171) imagined a ‘tidal bog’, and to Cornell (2009, 183–4) it was ‘threaded
with treacherous streams and marshes … Underfoot … composed of soft, peaty
earth’, ‘a perilous morass of soft, swampy earth’ and the Bannock Burn was ‘a
formidable obstruction’ cutting ‘high-banked channels and gorges through the
carseland’.
The Carse is not uniform as most historians have assumed. There is a staircase of
three surfaces, formed at separate times during relative sea level fall over the last c.
6,000 years. They had different histories. The highest and oldest surface supports
much-degraded raised mosses, as at Wester Moss. They began to grow in
prehistory. We have demonstrated from 14C dating peat at Craig Moss and South
Cockspow (Figure 3) that they spread rapidly and were formerly very extensive,
possibly across all the highest Carse surface. From cartographic regression we can
show that they did not shrink significantly in size until the eighteenth century
(Figure 6). Our reconstruction is thus close to that of modern historians (above)
but it is based on pedological data. Nevertheless archival data show that the
highest and oldest Carse surface, at least near Skeoch (3) was farmed before and in
the fourteenth century. People were removing peat at least at the fringes of the
Carse. At Braehead (NS 798 927), on the highest Carse surface very near to the
128 RICHARD TIPPING et al.

figure 6 Extract from the ‘protracted’ lowland copy of the Roy Military Survey (1752–1755)
showing the meandering River Forth, the extent of cultivated land on the Carse, settlements
and as the black squiggles, the extents of Wester Moss in the north-west corner and other
conjoined mosses to the south-east on the highest Carse surface (Image: ß British Museum
Library).

figure 7 Photograph of the incised Bannock Burn near Skeoch (Figure 3) on the Stirling
Carse, here some 3 m deep (Photo: Author’s).
 RECONSTRUCTING BATTLES AND BATTLEFIELDS 129

figure 8 Nineteen-forty-four aerial photograph (accessible on Google Earth) of the

meanders of the River Forth and the clear outline of a former course of the River Forth and
marine embayment at Bolfornought (NS 823 937) (Source: NASA Image ß 2014 The
Geoinformation Group).

centre of Stirling, 14C dated pollen analyses show that soils were farmed from the
sixth century.
On the two younger but still prehistoric Carse surfaces, peat has not been
recorded anywhere by either soil survey or systematic coring programmes (Smith
et al. 2010), though the Roy Military Survey depicts such at Bandeath in the north-
east of Figure 6. These surfaces were settled and farmed before the early fourteenth
century (Reid 2013). They may have offered firm substrates from which to
approach Stirling and, ultimately, to fight on, if a way between or across the raised
mosses could be found.
Analyses of relative sea level change may seem irrelevant to the battle, but the
Bannock Burn is connected to the tidal River Forth and the estuary was very
different to today. Before this study nothing was known of this for periods younger
than c. 2000 BC (Smith et al. 2010) but from 14C dated sedimentological and
diatom analyses we can show that relative sea level in the early fourteenth century
was probably at the altitude it is today, with mean sea level around 1.4 m OD. The
full depth of the incised Bannock Burn, 3–4 m in parts (Figure 7) was reached in
the last centuries BC.
Tides, even exceptional ones, would not have reached even the lowest and
youngest Carse surface at around 7 m OD. In addition, 14C dating of an estuarine
sediment stratigraphy at Bolfornought (Figure 8) suggests that the confluence of
the Bannock Burn with the River Forth was in 1314 around a kilometre south-west
of its present position. This would have led to tides penetrating deeper into the
Bannock Burn, upstream of the present tidal limit (MWMOST: Figure 3), lining its
130 RICHARD TIPPING et al.

incised sides with estuarine mud rather than fluvial sand: ‘Bannockburn … was so
difficult to pass because of [its] mud and depth so that none could ride over it’
(Duncan 1997, 498–9); Barbour reported that the ‘full gret party … Fled to the
water of Forth, and thar … The mast part of them drounit war’ (Barbour 1997,
499). In the end it was nature, the streams of the Carse, that destroyed the English.

Conclusion
Following new research and interpretation, we can add to an understanding of the
terrain around Bannockburn in the early fourteenth century, and use scientific data
to revise and correct misinterpretations of the few historical sources. Our data
have been incorporated in new computer models of the landscape in the new
National Trust for Scotland Visitor Centre in Stirling, ready for the 700th
anniversary. Fine-grained analyses of the landscapes around Bannockburn and
how they changed over the decades before the battle were not, however, obtained.
The thesis that rapid climatic deterioration changed the landscape in a few short
years to one unsuited to English military strengths could not be tested. This was
not because the specific techniques were flawed. It is because sediment sequences
spanning this turbulent period are very few, perhaps reflecting the effects of an
accelerating rural economy in central Scotland within the Middle Ages. Wheeler
et al. (2010) had the same problem in trying to define the location of the battlefield
of Bosworth 1485. But the approach is not flawed, and the need for objective
science-led reconstructions has not lessened. Ultimately these types of reconstruc-
tions are the only ones not capable of hyperbole. This is important.

Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for supporting this project (Grant RPG-
2012-717), to the research and other offices of Stirling, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and
Coventry Universities, and to Derek Alexander and Tom Ingrey-Counter (National
Trust for Scotland), Tony Pollard and Iain Banks (Centre for Battlefield
Archaeology, Glasgow University), John Atkinson (Northlight Heritage), Folko
Boermans and Richard Downes (BBC Scotland), John McArthur (Stirling
University), Donald Balsillie, Guy Harewood, and Murray Cook (Stirling
Council), Michael Prestwich (Durham University), and the many land-owners
who gave us access in the bitter cold of early 2013.

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Notes on contributor
Richard Tipping is a Senior Lecturer in the Division of Biological and
Environmental Sciences at Stirling University. He works on palaeoecology,
environmental archaeology, and environmental reconstruction, with major
interests in vegetation history, climate change, human impact, and geomorphic
activity, and the complex links between these components. He has published
widely on many aspects of landscape evolution in one book, four research
monographs, and over 150 research papers and contributions to edited books.
Contact: rt1@stir.ac.uk

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