A Storm Uncovered Scotland’s Iron Age Footprints, Then Erased Them

Winter storms at Lunan Bay in Angus exposed 2,000-year-old human and deer prints, then wiped the clay clean within 48 hours. Dog walkers Ivor Campbell and Jenny Snedden spotted the marks after dunes blew out, and a University of Aberdeen team saved casts and drone maps before the North Sea took the rest.

Scotland had no previous record of a similar ancient trackway. The prints now exist as plaster, photographs and a millimetre-accurate 3D model, on a coast whose soft ground is already moving faster than it did before the 1970s.

A Monday Night Email Started the Clock

Campbell and Snedden were walking Ziggy and Juno when storm damage to the dunes laid open a fresh clay layer. Campbell saw distinct markings and called Bruce Mann, regional archaeologist for Aberdeenshire, Angus, Moray and Aberdeen City. Mann saw the first photograph and judged it special enough to pull in the university the same night.

The call went in on 26 January 2026, a Monday. Professor Kate Britton later said the email arrived late and that the group spent the night lining up kit, because the same unseasonable storms that had stripped the sand were still working on the clay. Faculty staff and PhD students were on the beach the next day, 27 January.

THE WEEK THE CLAY WAS OPEN

1. 26 January 2026: Campbell contacts Mann; Britton gets a late email and treats it as an archaeological emergency.
2. 27 January 2026: The Aberdeen team reaches Lunan Bay, buys plaster of Paris on the way, and starts cleaning, mapping and casting in winds of more than 55 mph.
3. Within 48 hours: Britton says the entire exposed site is destroyed by tide and wind-blown sand.
4. 19 February 2026: The university publishes the find, with lab dates on plant remains from just below the prints.

Mann stood on the beach and watched waves finish the job. He said the storms had both revealed and then destroyed the site in just over a week, a longer clock than Britton’s 48 hours for the exposed clay itself, and that nothing was left on the shore.

Plaster From the Craft Shop, Then the Tide

The group that raced to Lunan Bay with plaster of Paris included Britton, Professor Gordon Noble, post-doctoral researchers Dr Will Mills and Dr Elinor Graham, and PhD students Sarah Barakat, Thomas Warrington and Tayla Sanders. They stopped at a craft store because there was no time to wait on a lab order. Campbell and Snedden carried buckets and put the kettle on between tides.

We had to work fast in the worst conditions I’ve ever encountered for archaeological fieldwork – the sea was coming in fast, with every high tide ripping away parts of the site, while wind-blown sand was simultaneously damaging it. We were effectively being sand-blasted and the site was too, all while we were trying to delicately clean, study and document it, so it became a race against the elements. And, within 48 hours the entire site was destroyed.

Kate Britton, Professor of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen

Britton called it a genuine emergency. A single print takes minutes to make and can be lost in hours once the clay is open; the whole scatter lasted two working days.

WHAT LEFT THE BEACH ALIVE

• Physical casts: Selected prints were moulded in plaster before the next high tide.
• Drone maps: In short calms, Noble, Mills and Graham flew a drone and built 3D coverage with millimetre accuracy.
• Lab dates: Plant remains from deposits just below the prints went for radiocarbon dating and came back around 2,000 years old.
• Species list: Ongoing work on the casts and models identified red deer, roe deer and other animals, plus humans who walked barefoot on the semi-fossilised clays.

Graham said the photos are now a permanent record even though the site is lost, and that the same flights will serve as a baseline for how fast this stretch of coast is failing. The weather did the excavation and the demolition in one pass, which is why the kit looked like a craft drawer rather than a season’s trench.

People and Deer Shared the Same Wet Ground

The sandy holiday beach is the late surface. Mills said the clay records a muddy estuary, and that people used it perhaps to hunt deer or to gather wild plants such as samphire. Bare human soles and deer slots overlap on the same wet ground, a few minutes of traffic that then sat sealed under dunes until the 2026 storms.

Noble placed the dates against what his team already knows of the Lunan Valley. He called the prints a tangible link to the region’s past, made around the time of the Roman invasions of Scotland and in the centuries leading up to the emergence of the Picts. The university’s own phrasing set that moment beside Boudicca, Jesus, and the height of the Roman Empire. The walkers on this foreshore were late Iron Age people of the Angus coast. They were not yet the named Picts of later Roman writing.

Angus later fills with Pictish symbol stones at Aberlemno, St Vigeans and Montrose, but those carvings sit centuries after these soles. The Lunan clay does not show a battle or a fort. It shows someone unshod, and deer, crossing mud that is now a tourist strand beside the Montrose Basin.

Mills added that the site was short-lived and still points to more of the same. Any of the clays around the wider basin could hold another scatter, if someone sees it while it is still there.

What Other UK Beaches Have Given Up Prints?

Britton’s team listed only a handful of British comparisons: the Severn Estuary, Formby in Merseyside, and Happisburgh in Norfolk. None of those earlier finds had a Scottish twin until Lunan Bay. The English sites also tend to arrive in a storm and leave in one.

UK TRACKWAYS THE SEA HAS OPENED

At Happisburgh in May 2013, Nick Ashton of the British Museum and colleagues cleaned elongated hollows in estuary silt at low tide and shot them from every angle before the sea took the surface. A Happisburgh hominin footprints in estuary muds paper followed, with photogrammetry standing in for a site that did not survive. Those prints are more than 800,000 years old. They still lasted about two weeks. Lunan Bay’s clay, two millennia old rather than almost a million, lasted 48 hours.

Formby Point is the awkward cousin. Tracks there have been peeling out of eroding foreshore mud since about 1950, a long leak rather than a two-day emergency. Lunan was a single window. Once Mann said there was nothing left, the Scottish site could not reopen on the next spring tide.

442 km of Soft Coast Has Already Retreated

Graham tied the rescue to a wider shift: sea levels rising and coastal erosion speeding up around Scotland, so locals have to watch their own bays and report what the tide dumps. Scotland’s National Coastal Change Assessment, published as Dynamic Coast, mapped that change with 2,300 maps along 21,000 km of shoreline.

NCCA SOFT-COAST FIGURES

• Soft coast share: 19% of Scotland’s shore, or 3,802 km, can erode.
• Since the 1970s: 12% (442 km) of that soft coast has retreated; 11% (423 km) has advanced; 77% (2,936 km) has stayed about stable.
• Speed: National erosion rates have doubled to 1.0 m a year, and accretion is about 1.5 m a year.
• By 2050: If recent rates hold, at least 50 buildings, 1.6 km of railway, 5.2 km of road and 2.4 km of clean water pipe sit in the way, with cultural and natural heritage sites among the rest.

The share of retreating coast is up 39% on the 1890 to 1970 period, and the advancing share is down 22%, with larger swings on the east coast and the Solway Firth. About 30,000 buildings, 1,300 km of roads and 100 km of railway already sit close to erodible ground. Those are planning numbers, not a count of lost brochs, but they are why a craft-store plaster run now looks like method rather than panic.

Historic Environment Scotland issued a guide to climate change impacts on historic sites on 8 October 2019, warning that exposed coasts face erosion while rainfall chews stone. Skara Brae, opened by a storm in 1850 and now behind a sea wall, is the famous version of the same bind. Lunan Bay is the cheap, fast version: no wall, no season in the diary, a Monday email and a site that did not see out the week.

The drone mosaic is now the place. Anyone walking Ziggy and Juno at Lunan will find sand again, not the estuary those bare feet crossed. The next clay layer, if the Montrose Basin still holds one, will also arrive on a storm and leave on the tide that follows.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can You Still See the Iron Age Footprints at Lunan Bay?

No. Mann said there is nothing left on the beach, and Britton said the exposed clay was gone within 48 hours. The surviving objects are the plaster casts, the 3D model and the drone photographs held by the University of Aberdeen, which Graham said will also be used to measure how fast that stretch of dune is retreating.

Were the People Who Left the Prints Picts?

Noble dated them to the late Iron Age, around the Roman invasions of Scotland and in the centuries before the Picts appear in the written record. Roman writers use Picti much later, from the late third century. The Lunan walkers belong to the Angus coast of about 2,000 years ago, not to the symbol-stone culture that visitors now follow at Aberlemno and St Vigeans.

Could More Prints Still Be Hidden Near Montrose?

Mills said any of the clays of the wider Montrose Basin could preserve similar information. The 2026 site was a single exposed patch, not a survey of the whole estuary, and the next scatter would need the same luck: a storm that opens the clay, a walker who notices, and a team close enough to cast it before the following tides.

How Is Formby Different From Lunan Bay?

At Formby Point in Merseyside, prehistoric people and animals left tracks in intertidal mud from about 7,500 years ago for roughly 3,000 years, and erosion has been uncovering those beds since about 1950. Lunan Bay produced one short window in January 2026 and then closed. Formby is a repeating foreshore; Lunan was a 48-hour salvage.