Dr Richard Tipping (University of Stirling)
Richard Tipping has spent over 40 years exploring Scotland’s environmental history, from the last glaciation to the 19th century. He has frequently worked in Dumfries & Galloway since the late 1980s. He retired from the University of Stirling in 2016 but is still research active. He is particularly interested in the relation between people, climate and landscape in Scotland, and has published more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles and more than 150 chapters in books, and is the author or co-author of research monographs on northern Scotland (1998), the Borders (2010, 2016, 2018), Argyll (2011), Perthshire (2019) and Deeside (2009, 2019, 2021).
Richard says -
"During Martin Brann’s (2004) excavation of the first, or old castle of Caerlaverock, sedimentological and biological evidence from the moat system suggested that the castle was impacted by floods of sea water. In 2007, limited evidence for very large storm surges in the Middle Ages was found in Castle Wood. With Historic Environment Scotland (HES) wanting to up-date what we know about Caerlaverock, the opportunity to re-examine this evidence materialised, with funding in 2021 from the Castle Studies Trust and HES. This talk reports on the new findings.
LiDAR imagery of Castle Wood has revealed that there are 13 huge barrier beaches, hundreds of metres long and tens of metres wide, formed by storm surges. These partly enclose eight large lagoons which formed shoreward of these. Their formation added some 200 metres of coast along a distance of at least 2.5 kilometres, south of a pre-existing cliff. The harbour, linked to the old castle, originally lay on this cliff-line. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) and radiocarbon dating of sediments in the lagoons shows that they are Medieval in age. Probably very quickly, the harbour became isolated from the sea.
As well as constructing storm beaches, there were two larger storm surge events that eroded parts of them. In the first of these, around half the width of six recently constructed storm beaches were eroded, with around 200m of coastal retreat. In this event, shingle beaches began to include stones of Criffel Granodiorite carried 3.5 kilometres from New Abbey. Storm waves smashed into the old cliff, eroding archaeological features in front of it and building a shingle beach on its top extending 15-20m inland. The area affected by flooding was more extensive. Coastal retreat re-connected the harbour to the sea, but storm surges scoured out sediment in the harbour and penetrated into the moat system and other ditches, pushing marine mud and pebbles before them. We cannot identify damage done to the old castle, and we cannot estimate the heights of coastal floods, but the storm surges may have persuaded people to rebuild further inland and at a higher altitude.
This was not the end, though. Following this event, more storm surges built seven more barrier beaches in front of the harbour before a second large event probably eroded part of these, creating a bay that in the mid-18th century began to fill with salt marsh (the ‘merse’).
The talk will explore how these quite staggering storm surges form an exceptional, particularly well-dated part of a larger pattern of coastal inundations and sand dune construction around the British Isles and western Europe that are related to major changes in northern hemisphere atmospheric circulation at the boundary between the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the ‘Little Ice Age’."