A LARGE sign by the A1, just south of Dunbar, points the way to Doon Hill.

It has been described as “one of the country’s most important archaeological sites”.

I had long wanted to visit this place so we set off last Sunday when the weather seemed to settle.

The first challenge is getting to the car park. While signs point you in the right direction, the road was, shall we say, a bit of a wild experience for an old car like ours.

Overgrown grass and turf in the centre of the road scraped the underbelly of our long suffering vehicle, and we had to find a place to park and complete the final section on foot. But this just made the whole experience feel more of an adventure.

As you approach the site, parts of the view vanish behind another ridge to the west. It’s not, as we might expect, on the highest summit. On arrival you are met by an information board, which tells you the background to the discovery of the site, and the recent interpretation of its significance.

It’s at this point you need to switch on your imagination and sense of wonder as there is actually nothing to see of the archaeological remains themselves. But as you wander from the information board you will notice the cement pathways on the ground.

These mark the location and lines of the site’s archaeological finds; a palisade wall, a cemetery with twelve graves, and the two halls. The site was first discovered by aerial photographs.

This led to an investigation by Brian Hope-Taylor, an archaeologist who led an excavation of the site in 1964-6. He discovered that two halls were built here, one slightly larger than the other, but the later smaller one had been built almost exactly over the earlier.

He concluded that the earlier hall was from the sixth century and likely built by a local chief, and that the later hall, built after the destruction of the first, was constructed by invading Angles sometime after AD638.

Here, it seemed, was evidence of the changes that took place in the seventh century, as the forces of King Edwin incorporated the lands of what is now East Lothian into the expanding kingdom of Northumbria.

But later, carbon dating of pottery and flints found on the site revealed a different story. It showed that the earlier hall is in fact Neolithic! That means it is 4,500 years older than originally thought, dating to around 4,000 BC! This is what makes it such a significant site. It’s a place where human settlement in our county had its beginnings. The Neolithic period (meaning New Stone Age) was when humans were settling down as farmers in Scotland, abandoning their hunter gatherer life. Were these farmers new arrivals from elsewhere, or already indigenous people learning new ways and skills, or maybe a bit of both?

Who knows, but what seems clear now is that a magnificent hall was built on Doon Hill 6,000 years ago by our Neolithic land ancestors. Other, similarly built halls have been found elsewhere in Scotland, and so the hall is part of an important development in human society in our part of the world.

We often think of Neolithic settlements as being in stone because of the survival of places like Skara Brae in Orkney. But what the Doon Hill site shows is that our Neolithic ancestors were able to build intricate architecture in timber, and this was almost a thousand years before Skara Brae was built!

It’s never going to be a popular place to visit of course, because unlike Skara Brae, there’s nothing ancient to take a photo of or see. But the significance of the place is in the atmosphere and in your imagination when you know what was once here.

I stood in the centre of the Neolithic hall, or rather where the hall used to be. It had been divided into three parts, the larger in the middle. My senses tingled with the thought that on the very spot I was standing, 6,000 years ago, our land ancestors had gathered within the timber walls and thatched roof of the hall.

Was it a home, a communal gathering place, both? It was the dawn of a new era, the beginnings of humans dominating and changing the landscape forever for their own use. And this place was clearly important to the people who built it.

As my children ran along the cement pathways they had no idea they were tracing the lines of an ancient settlement. I reflected that for sure this had been a place of storytelling 6,000 years ago.

Here stories now lost would have been told; tales of hunting, legends of the landscape and memories of ancestors, travels and dreams.

I think for me, as a storyteller, this was why the location felt so powerful. The site represented a location of communal gathering and living; a place where the tradition of storytelling will have taken root, in a time so different to ours, yet with the same human needs for companionship, entertainment and meaning.

I wondered about the choice of location before we left. A line of trees gave a sense of the forest that once dominated here. The tip of the Lammermuirs could be seen, and the sea to the east where the rising sun would have painted the roof with its early rays. It was a partly sheltered site, despite being on a hill.

And then there was the mystery of the second hall. Archaeologists remain convinced this was indeed from the time of Northumbrian expansion. But that raises questions. Why build a hall on almost exactly location as once built 4,500 before? It surely wasn’t a coincidence, so was this site for some reason still meaningful then?

Dark clouds rumbled in a threatening manner and broke my thoughts. A downpour was on its way. We quickly headed back down to the car, past fields of oats, wheat and clover which gave evidence to the landscape changes begun by those early Neolithic settlers.

One wonders what they would make of the changes that have happened since they first cut the trees and sewed the fields. In those 6,000 years we have made a different world. I have to admit I felt a shiver when I thought about what changes humans may bring in the next 6,000 years, or even just the next 50.

By Tim Porteus