SERF

What's New at SERF?

  • The BIG Dig in Dunning

    The SERF BIG Dig in Dunning offers a hands-on opportunity for the local community to discover the archaeology of their village. Click here for more information.

  • Castle Craig Broch Excavation

    The 2012 excavations of the Castle Craig broch is set to start. Find out here more information about what was found in 2011.

  • Forteviot Bronze Age Cist Update

    The discovery of a dagger and well-preserved organics in a Bronze Age cist amazed the SERF team in 2009. Since then more work has been done on these materials. See here for more information


Strathearn Environs and Royal Forteviot (SERF)


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Forteviot occupies a special place in the history of Scotland. The death of King Kenneth mac Alpin, one of the first kings of a united Scotland, was recorded at the ‘palace’ of Forteviot in AD 858 and at this time this site was an major royal centre in a fledgling Scottish nation. Forteviot is also the location of one of the most extensive concentrations of early prehistoric ritual monuments in mainland Scotland.

It is these two chronologically separated but physically linked episodes of landscape use at Forteviot, which provides a focus of the SERF project. What it is about Forteviot and Strathearn that drew people here at different time periods to establish such important centres?  The Strathearn Environs and Royal Forteviot (SERF) project is a long-term study set out to explore this question and to situate Forteviot in a wider political, social and geographical perspective. Since 2006 archaeologists from the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen, with the help of local volunteers, have been exploring Forteviot and the neighbouring parishes of Dunning and Forgandenny.

Project Directors:  Prof. Stephen Driscoll, Dr. Kenneth Brophy, Dr. Gordon Noble, Dr. Ewan Campbell

Project Manager:  Dr. Tessa Poller