Archaeological blog (just for you Elina!)

A few days ago I Kelly and my dad went to see some old stuff. To be honest there is plenty of it around here culminating in the facinating Scara Brae on Orkney. Which if you don't know (shame on you if you don't) is a nigh on perfectly preserved neolithic village. It is wonderful to be able to look back over 5000 years ago and literally see how people lived then. It is terrifically interesting to see how all the houses have a similar layout and impressive that they had an effective waste water handling system. Well back to our wee trippy. We took a walk along the Yarrow archaeological trail which neatly combines an iron age site and three neolithic sites on a easy 2 mile hike. Please note this is not an area I can boast much knowledge about in the slightest so please don't quote me on anything, I am mostly working from a pamphlet and small guide to ancient Caithness.

Here we are at the first and Iron age site. This is a Broch, something unique to Scotland. These are stone, circular towers built in the late Iron age (200BC to 200AD). Up to 12 meters in height with 4.5 meter thick walls (at ground level). Brochs have a single low doorway which can be closed with a single slab of stone and is guarded by a guard cell. Further up the walls became hollow and there was access to the top via a stair case. Ruins of Brochs are found all over the north of Scotland and the Northern and Western Isles. It is obviously a defensive structure Brochs do show evidence of regular domestic habitation. The other ruins surrounding the Broch at Yarrows however were built by the Picts a few hundred years after the Broch was first made. Brochs are made without motor or anything except rock, drystone as we call it here. It is also the method which many garden and farm field walls are made of in Scotland and is by no means a dead art. It is still actively practiced, we had a drystone waller come and fix the drystone wall in front of our house. If you want to say it in something more of a Scots accent it would be 'dry staene-dyke'.
You can see it was quite a small tower, perhaps the inner courtyard is 5 or 6 meters in diameter.
The low doorway, one would have to crouch low to get through making it easy to defend.
Some dramatic light looking south to the hills there.
Me crouching in the entrance way to a Cairn, I will get to them in a moment.
I and Kelly on the Yarrows trail at Cairn of warehouse (a round Cairn).
This is Kelly standing in front of the Long Cairn of South Yarrow South. Cairns are chambered tombs from the neolithic times, the book on ancient Caithness dates them from 4400 to 2000 years ago. The pamphlet for the Yarrows trail dates the building of the Cairn of Warehouse to 5800 years ago and says it was still in use until 4000 years ago! Anyway they are old.
Here is the entrance to the the south yarrow south Cairn. It is also low and small. Cairns are mostly found in the West of the UK and in some Eastern places such as here in Caithness. The older Cairns are circular and the later design is the long Cairn with two 'horns' at one or both ends, a sort of stage for rituals? It is seemingly not clear if these were tombs for burial or a storage place for bones which were used in ancestor worshiping rituals.
Dad standing beside the Cairn of warehouse.
Me standing in front of a windmill (last used 60 or 70 years ago) about 6km from where I live. It is next to a town called Castletown which used to be a major site of the flagstone industry. It might be a little boring but briefly: the North of Scotland has lots of a particular type of sandstone which breaks in even, smooth, flat slabs. Before concrete slabs were made they were an ideal building material especially for paving. Slab stones from Caithness were used as far away as Argentina! It is this useful buildings material which allows dry stone walls to be made and allowed our ancestors to construct Brochs and things like that.
Now we are at the Camster Cairns. This is the Long Cairn at Camster. These are two large and largely intact Cairns that have been reconstructed. This Long Cairn is in fact two circular Cairns which have been modified to make one long Cairn. The great thing is that you can crawl down the narrow, dark and claustrophobic tunnel to the burial chamber in the center. That explains the picture you have already seen.
Here is the Camster round Cairn which was the most intact, the tunnel and chamber had most of there original roofing intact! It lasted thousands of years!
A profile view of the Long Cairn.
Kelly and Dad walking to the round Cairn at Camster
Ah, now here we are at Avebury! Which is not in Scotland, it is in Wiltshire (England). We had a excellent guided tour of it and the other near-by sites from my Aunt. Thank you! The stone circle at Avebury is the UKs largest stone circle (bigger and older than Stone Henge) dating to about 5000 years ago. Just thinking of the logistics of getting something of this scale built 5000 years ago is mind boggling. It is a truly fascinating to wonder about the purpose of it all and the meaning behind it (fascinating and futile?), especially the stone which are quite obviously asymmetrically which my Aunt pointed out. Why make a perfect circle and then stick several stones in very asymetrical positions within it?
This is a Long Barrow of which there are a number in the area around the stone circle. It seems to be similar to the Cairns of Caithness but with a larger space inside. The fact which blew my mind about this was that is had been continuously used to about one thousand years! That sort of continuity is incredible. Really, we are luckily if something is constantly used for a few centuries now. Sign of a very stable society or merely of stagnation and a lack of progress?
The stones, which are huge by the way.
This is the other site in the area. An oddly symmetrical hill you say...it is artificial! Yes it is entirely man made, made around the same time at the stone circle and long barrow. This is Silbury hill, 40m high and made of almost half a million tons of chalk making it Europe's (perhaps the worlds) largest neolithic artificial mound. It is now covered in grass but being made of chalk when it was constructed it was brilliant white. Quite striking I think you will agree this 40m high cone of dazzling white in a landscape that contained few man made structures and very few of this scale. And consider it was made with no other tools than antlers from deer and elk to use as picks and shovels!
And finally here is a white horse, this one is not old but the neolithic types made similar things. Much of the ground here is chalk so if you cut away the turf you are presented with the white chalk.

Well I hope you like my old stuff blog,

Take care all!

ps. There is a blog I wrote yesterday below if you haven't read it yet.