ABSTRACT
Aberdeen appears in history (Dennison 2002, Thom 1811, Boece 1821) at the turn of the 1st millennium when it is laid waste by seaborne foes. How long it had existed we cannot know at present, but its vulnerability to attack from the sea suggests it was in some sense already a trading town established near the North Sea, and that makes it a different kind of settlement from the other sites within the present boundaries of the city such as Dyce for example where the present Kirk dates from the 1100s or at the south-west corner at Peterculter (which answers to Ptolemy’s reference to a major town of the Caledonians) where there was not only a ford of the Dee but a suitably defensive and wellprovisioned site for a successful settlement, or what is now called Old Aberdeen which did develop its own urban character as an ecclesiastical settlement. But it is the confluence of the Denburn and the Dee roughly a mile inland from the sea which on present evidence is the origin of the City. This is south and west facing, at the foot of the slope of Schoolhill northwards. It is here that the church was established but when is unknown (Doig 2009, Bede 731, Boece 1821). St Katharine’s Hill is to the east (and the natural place for a ‘castle’), and, beyond the Denburn to the west a large plateau. There was a loch to the north, and various streams flowing from that to provide power for mills. The Dee was navigable for the suitably skilled, but perilous, and shifting, which makes it ideal for defence. There was plenty of water and a series of other settlements close by in a region of settled civilization.
