The Ancients - Scotland's Enigmatic Ancient Structures

Episode Date: December 10, 2020

Brochs. Early archaeologists believed that they must have been built by the Danish, that the indigenous population could never have managed it. More recent suggestions have been that architects travelled Scotland, spreading the plans for these Iron Age ‘round houses on steroids’. Iain Maclean came on The Ancients to shed a little light on the truth of the stone buildings found across Scotland, particularly on the coastline. Whilst mentions of Romans, Egyptians and Greeks are familiar to our ears, the Scottish Celts have fallen under the radar. By studying brochs, archaeologists have not only uncovered the amazing architecture which has kept many of them standing, but have also learned more about the societies that built them. By examining the spread of the structures over time, they have been able to track changing climates; and by excavating the contents of the buildings, they have been able to track the communities’ ways of living off the land. Iain dreamt up the concept of the Broch Project for Caithness and, when he isn’t building brochs from various different materials, is spreading knowledge of this little understood part of Scottish history through events and community outreach.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, we are talking about one of the most remarkable set of ancient structures from Iron Age Britain.

We are talking about the Brocks, these massive, these huge stone round structures, the remains of which we see scattered across Scotland today, particularly in the Highlands and in the islands of Orkney and Shetland. Now to tell me more about these brocks, what we know about these ancient towers in the north, I was delighted to be joined by Ian McLean. Ian is a founding member of the Caithness Brock Project, a brilliant charity dedicated to preserving and ensuring the legacy of the archaeology of Caithness, that region in the north-eastern tip of the Scottish mainland. And brocks, of course, play a key part in that archaeology. So it was great to get Ian on the show to tell me more about the brocks of antiquity. Here is Ian McLean. Ian, thanks so much for joining me today. Excellent. Thanks very much for having me on the show.

Now, the Brocks, these are iconic buildings that seem to cover the far north of the British Isles. Yeah, that's right. The Brochs are Iron Age towers, basically. Seen by some to be the pinnacle of prehistoric architecture in the European sphere, or so we like to think ourselves at the Broch Project. And you find them mostly across the Atlantic fringe of Scotland. So they're normally on the coastline? For the most part, because Scotland has a lot of coastline, specifically in Orkney and Shetland,

they are always found quite close to the coast. But Caithness, where I'm from, we have brochs along the coast and in the interior as well. And in Sutherland, they follow the river valleys as well. So although they're viewed that way because the majority of them are near the coast, a lot of them are actually inland as well. And how many of these stunning structures survive to this day?

There's about 700 brochs roughly, but not all of them survive in a particularly good state of repair. And to call them all brochs, they're actually separated into three different categories. That's Atlantic Roundhouse, Complex Atlantic Roundhouse, and the tall broch towers that have kind of become the iconic view of what a broch is. And you mentioned roundhouse and the tall broch towers that have kind of become the iconic view of what a broch is. And you mentioned roundhouse just there can we broadly define a broch as a

stone roundhouse? Yeah I would say that's quite a good rundown of what they actually are a lot of people have thought they were defensive kind of military structures in the past because they're huge thick walled structures up to 13 meters tall and for that reason people have seen them as possibly purely defensive buildings but through excavation we can see that they look to be quite walled structures up to 13 meters tall and for that reason people have seen them as possibly purely defensive buildings but through excavation we can see that they look to be quite domestic structures quite a lot of domestic evidence going on in there so they would just be like a roundhouse on steroids if you like that's remarkable because if you go to one of these sites in person and you stand there and you just see how tall they are even just the remains of the ones that survive it really gives an impression how tall they must have been in their full structure yeah well there's

one broch left that's still its full height and that is musa broch in shetland and that stands at 13 meters high unfortunately most of the other 600 to 700 broch that exist barely exist as mounds much more than two or three meters high. There are a few other examples still standing to 11 and seven meters high but not all of these 700 broch mounds would have been as tall as Musa as many of them would have been much more stout structures possibly five to six meters high. There's no regulation to the type of structure that they are you know. Indeed and in regards to these brocks what do we know about the earliest brocks? The earliest brocks well again it's back to this idea of them being separated archaeologically

separated into three different categories. Sometime at the early Iron Age you have the Atlantic Roundhouse being built and that's a single story structure and then moving further into the Iron Age you've got the complex Atlantic roundhouse where the walls become thicker and they have cells built within the walls and then towards about 100 BC they start to get particularly tall structures as I said up to 13 meters tall you know so one of the oldest excavations was from Caithness at Crosskirk and they found evidence there for about 600 BC for occupation but instead of Bina Bro broch we actually classify that as a complex Atlantic roundhouse because it was doubtful that it was ever 10 meters or taller you know so a single story structure. So what you're saying there it sounds like there's a clear

sense of evolution as the ages progress. Yeah definitely at one point in the antiquarian times when archaeology was really in its infancy many of the antiquarians came in and they said that these were Danish towers because they didn't believe that the savage locals could possibly ever have the skills to build structures of such height. But now, more modern interpretations, we know that these are indigenous structures. They were built by the natives. And we can see by looking at the different excavation of the different types of broths,

you can see an evolution of these structures throughout the ages in Scotland. So they're fully indigenous development. Indeed and do we have any idea why they decided to build these structures primarily out of stone? Kind of there's been a lot of talk about the lack of trees in the north of Scotland I don't know if you've ever been to Orkney or Shetland or the north but when I say Scotland I think people think of the Caledonian woodlands but as you come further north there's less and less of these large forests, and it's a very barren landscape. So it could be that because there's a perceived lack of timber as a ready resource. What we do have here is the famous caithness stone, which is the type of stone that splits into flat, regular shapes. So it's like

stone Lego, if you like. It's quite easy to put together. It would seem that the Brock builders have stolen to build a roundhouse that you might see commonly across the whole of Britain at the time. But because they don't have an availability of wood, they've chosen stone to make the walls from it. But they must have still had wood because they've made a roof and a floor and many other structures in there. It's just it's not in the same abundance as what we find in the rest of the country. Ah, so they did use it, but not as much wood as further south and it sounds like of course on Orkney you have the famous well the heart of Orkney those Neolithic sites and does it therefore seem like a continuation from that that focus on monumental stone structures?

Yeah I would say so I mean it harks back to this cathedra stone again that may as how many of these great structures we see being built in Orkney could have possibly developed there originally because we have the abundance of easily constructible stone like but I don't know how much we could argue that there's a continuation of that Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures that existed in Orkney at the time it's a very poorly understood era but in the Bronze Age you have a bit of climate change going on and the uplands what you have is an abundance of simple roundhouses and the uplands that appears to be the climate is correct to farm that type of landscape at the time but during the end of the Bronze Age the climate begins to change and these upland areas of farmland become too difficult to farm in that current climate

therefore you've got groups of people leaving the uplands possibly en masse and the areas of lowland arable ground become more valuable in a way so then it may be that the brocks begin to be developed in that sense as solid communities and farmland that's becoming more sought after or thought over even like so there's a bit of climactic change there between those two eras and that may be responsible for why the brocks are beginning to develop in themselves. So you're saying that the Brocks might have evolved from this idea of communities having to move, having to migrate and then having to contest with each other for control of certain pieces of land? Yeah, these lowland bits of ground, the arable parts of ground, possibly have the same hot circle communities on them but as the land becomes contested they need to stake

their claim claim make a statement in stone if you like and say this is our ground and we will not give it up to anyone and that could be the reason that you begin to see the brocks taking on a far more permanent establishment than the rudimentary hut circles we see dotted all over scotland at the time you know oh yes right so you mentioned communities we mentioned the brocks can we see regional variance in the design of the brocks would we see regional variance in the design of the brocks would a brock created in caithness where you are be very different to a brock created in let's say assent in northwest scotland yeah that's right yeah when brocks first began to be studied

or when people first began to look at brocks i think the first thing that strikes them is the similarity in the structures that you can look at brocks and the western isles or in shetland and see striking similarities in the structure itself and that look at Brochs in the Western Isles or in Shetland and see striking similarities in the structure itself. And that led people to believe that there was possibly roving architects that carried plans around. And that's how you ended up with so much structural similarity spread over what seems to be a wide and disconnected area. But the more that you look at Brochs, I often give people an example that if I asked everyone in a room to draw a picture of a cat, they would all draw a picture of a cat, but everybody's picture would be different. So there

is some striking differences in the way that Brochs are built. And it's not so much in the Broch structure itself, but it's the way that the community is formed and how it's placed in the landscape. So for example, in Nortna, you see the beginning of Broch villages. It's not just a Broch, but it's an entire village going all the way around the broch within a rampart wall but in the western isles this doesn't seem to occur at all in the western isles brochs can be typically found on islets in the middle of a loch so it's just a broch and an island in the middle of a loch if you like quite like a crannog and at Caithness we see brochs built on promert, where they have steep rock faces all around them dropping into the ocean,

but one side of it is connected to the landscape. So you can see that there's definitely regional variation as to how the broch is placed in the landscape. That's very interesting. Sorry, just to clarify before we go into that a bit deeper, a crannog, that's a house built on water. Yeah, it's like a roundhouse built on stilts within a loch. Loch Tay is famous for its crannogs.

And there's obviously the Crannog Centre, which is an archaeological project where they rebuilt a crannog in Loch Tay. So it's quite an interesting one for visitors to go along and have a look at if they want to see how people lived in the Iron Age in crannogs. That's remarkable. So we have evidence of a stone brock basically representing a crannog as a type of regional block in the West. basically representing a crannog as a type of regional block in the west yeah sort of they've certainly been inspired by that or either the two groups have seeked to be defended in some kind of way by water you know so you only have one entrance to get out to this crannog along a pier if you like the same thing's going on with the western brooks they appear to have either picked a knoll or created artificial islands by just dropping stones into the water until they've created an artificial island connected by a causeway lake. So this idea of travelling architects going around the north

of Scotland in the Iron Age doesn't hold much credibility? It's a theory that's been pushed along by people and it may hold water to some aspects of the design of Brochs itself but it certainly doesn't hold any water when we look at the broch communities and how they're placed in the landscape but it might be a case of just keeping up with the joneses and monkey see monkey do one guy's got a broch and an eyelet and the next guy wants the same thing you know so what are the basic similarities we can see between the brochs in shetland and one in the west apart from of course that they're made of stone and they're circular shaped the similarities i suppose are in the structure alone and then the proportions and dimensions of the structure.

They are roughly 20 metres across at the bottom and can be built up to 13 metres high. They have multiple floors in this structure, so it's a multi-storey roundhouse, if you like. And possibly some of the... It's harder to say this because not many brocks have been excavated in modern times, but some of the ways that the brocks are set out, the internal furnishings only really become clear when they've been excavated. The ground floor sometimes has been separated into two halves with two hearths going on down there and we find that same pattern across different regions. Indeed, and I'm guessing archaeology must be absolutely key, absolutely central to increasing our knowledge of the Brock.

more to find out more. Every excavation that goes on fills in another part of the mystery of these structures. So we follow Cairn's excavation in Orkney very closely. It's been going on for 10 years and spearheaded by UHI. And some of the information that they come out with really feeds into the stuff that the Caithness Broke Project's been trying to do. And that's looking at, say, bone deposits on the ground floor, what that can tell us about brock societies and how they live in the landscape. So they've found a lot of whale bones, not that they're hunting whales, but when a whale beaches they must see that as a great boon and use every part of that whale that they can. So in the brock they found a whale bowl, so a bone has been made out of a whale backbone if you like and it's been hollowed out and then they found part of a human skull inside that whale bone that was

deposited in the brock when it was deconstructed if you like so these excavations of the brocks they can actually reveal quite a lot about the societies that built them definitely yeah definitely but what i think has been lacking in the study of brocks is a grander picture of what a broch actually is so there has been many excavations over the last 100 years but a grand picture of this still seems to evade people's imaginations. That's kind of what the Brough project would hope to do is to take all these different parts of evidence that we can find from excavations all over the country and put them all together to create a grand vision of what a Brough actually is. That's exciting just saying that as

you say as if it's piecing together this great archaeology puzzle to get an even bigger idea of what it would have been like for these societies. When I say Romans straight away something Roman comes into your lorica segmenta and you've got a good image in your mind of what a Roman is and the same way Egyptians or Greeks but when I say Brochs and Scottish Celts the same vision doesn't seem to be quite as clear in people's minds and the hope is even though there's been a lot of excavation we don't know really if any more excavation can help pull that picture together for people so it really needs to happen is obviously what the broch project plans to do is rebuild a broch and to paint that picture for people let's go on to building a broch then from all this archaeological excavations all this

archaeological discovery do we have any idea of how a community would go about building a broch any idea of that is real speculation at best about how the community forms go about building a brock? Any idea of that is speculation at best about how the community forms together to build a brock. John Barber coined the term farming republic to describe these communities. So you've got a kind of hierarchy within the community. You must have some sort of big boss that has enough surplus food to buy people's time,

to invest the time and energy doing this. You know, this could take up to two years for a community of 25 people to build one of these structures so it's not just about finding the materials for that it's about finding the time and sustaining these people's livelihoods while they're busy building your brock for you so it does show some sort of hierarchy in the society at that time to be able to muster the manpower to actually build a structure of that size. And you mentioned it earlier although it's just the stone which really survives today when we have a look at it from the outside, these brocks, they weren't just made of stone.

There's certain elements from the archaeology that we can tell that lend themselves to the wooden fabric of the structure that no longer exists. Obviously, these structures are over 2,000 years old, so very little wood remains after that time. But there's certain aspects like the skersmith ledge, that's basically a ledge in our wall face, and that shows where a wooden beam would have sat to make the first floor. Some of these buildings have two skersmiths, and that's how we know that they had multiple floors, if you like.

And because of the scarcity of wood, some people have said that maybe they didn't have roofs. But I don't know if you've ever spent much time in Scotland in the winter, you would certainly prefer to have a roof over your head but the wood question has been a bit of a problem for us but we do have a few answers from the small parts of archaeology that have come up one piece of wood was found that had pidic holes in it and pidics are little wee seeing enemies that drill holes into wood when they're in the water so we know that some of the wood that was used for construction came as a result of driftwood. And obviously if you're using driftwood,

wood must already be at a premium. By the time you're taking wood from the sea, you must have a significant lack of usable timber in your community. So humankind has destroyed about 50% of the world's forests in the last 100 years. But 2000 years ago, the North American forests would have reached all the way to the shoreline of the atlantic and there probably would have been quite a ready supply of driftwood timber that had fallen into the atlantic and washed up in the shores of places like orkney and shetland to use as construction timber that's interesting so these communities could have been using wood that had come from the americas and been washed up in britain or the surrounding isles or elsewhere in britain that time, Caledonian forests would have covered the majority of Scotland

all the way up to the coastline. So much of that wood as well could quite easily be falling into the water and washing up. If we're still getting timber washing up now in the day and age that we're in, then there must have been a significant more abundance of that in the Iron Age. That's remarkable. I love that fact. Really love that fact. That's certainly our way of explaining it to ensure that we can have a look inside the roof then, let's have a look at the interior of the brock. What do we know about a brock's interior? They're all very different and like I said before, we've been following the excavations

at Cairns and Orkney at UHI very closely but what we do find is a multitude of activities going on within the Brochley so we find a lot of bone deposits we find human remains but we don't find whole body burials this whole body burial is a modern concept in the Iron Age what appears to be occurring is excarnation where bodies are left exposed outside for a lot of time and then parts of that body are collected sometimes modified so we have parts of human cranium that have perforations in the cranium so someone has been working this human bone and possibly displaying it within the broch we have human remains that are buried in the threshold so it's almost like you have to step

over the remains of possibly your ancestors as you come into the broch, and some human remains are found around the hearth. So it seems that death is very much part of life in the Iron Age, and the ancestors are brought into this structure to possibly imbue it with some sense of continuity throughout the family's age, and their place in the structure. We also find evidence of metalworking. That's in the form of mould molds that would have been filled up to make brooch pins if you like that's one of some of the molds that we found we find quite a large assemblage of bones of different animals and that tends to change depending on what region the brock

is in so some of the brocks at west have found a lot of antler and a lot of deer showing that that's the staple they're existing on and i think in shetland they found a lot of bones of seabirds so depending on where the brock is and the excavation lends a little bit of credence to how that community actually survives and what their staple is of their diet you know so does the archaeological excavations of the interior of these brocks does it once again really hammer home the regional variants in their design and what they were used for? Yeah, I think it does. I definitely think it does show that they are different structures in different areas. If the structure looks the same, but the community that lives in them exists in a different way of the landscape. But I would say that farming, in particular,

grain and cattle seem to be the staple that these communities existed from. So we find a lot of kernstones, if you like, for grinding grain like there's been arguments that the upper regions of the broch are actually used for storing grains possibly like a kiln and that they have a hearth on the first floor and the smoke that comes up from that can be used as a corn drying kiln to dry grain higher up you did mention a clachtal broch or on and the excavation of that seems to show that it collapsed during its existence and use in the Iron Age and that it possibly collapsed from firing. I'm sure they found evidence of burnt and charred grain in that. So it was an interesting excavation in that many of these brochs have a reuse after their Iron Age use is finished but the one at

Clachtal appears to have collapsed while it was in iron age use and that can help gives us a snapshot then of what iron age life was like rather than if it has been reused and a lot of that information has been lost in subsequent periods of reuse okay let's have a look at clactol then for a moment clactol by the way is in northwest scotland in modern day ascent and you mentioned how it seems to have come to an end from the roof falling in on itself. Do you have any other examples of other brocks which seem to have come to an end this way? I think there may be, but I would say the majority of brocks have got a longer life than just the Iron Age, or they come to deliberate closure. So at some point, say about 100 AD, many of these structures begin to be abandoned.

But they're not just left, they seem to be ritually abandoned, for the community decides then that this structure is now over and quite often something is deposited there, like Cairns, the human head that was placed in the whalebone. I don't know if that's the last person that lived in the house and the rest of the community decided, right, we'll bury him with the brock and close the brock off and deliberately collapse it in at the time.

So that's certainly one way that they've come to an end, is deliberately pushed in if you like and just going back to the difference in use as it were this regional variance you're saying that the purpose of these brocks it could vary significantly so it could be a castle in orkney but a kiln in clactol yeah i would say so like even though the one in orkney that's a castle may still be used as a kiln but but because it's surrounded by a community, it's that community that's making it more like a castle. It'll have a number of houses outwith the broch,

and that could be extended family or the retinite of the chieftain at the time. And then it's surrounded by a rampart wall, and sometimes they have another strange and obscure structure in front of them called a blockhouse, which is like a defensive structure that sits within or behind the rampart wall. It becomes to look more like a castle or a defended community at that point. But it may still have had some of the original elements of being a grain store or factory as well, because that's the real wealth of the community at the time is their surplus and what they have taken from the land. So instead of seeing wealth as gold coins and things like that at the time, the wealth of the community is very much what it's

invested its time in over that season of farming, I would say. So a stronghold in one sense or other, a farming stronghold or a military stronghold? I would say more likely to be a farming stronghold, whether because there's all these brocks across the north of Scotland. There's certainly cultural similarity and that's led some people to say, well, look, there's a difference between the people in the north of Scotland. There's certainly cultural similarity and that's led some people to say, well, look, there's a difference between the people in the north and the people, say, south of Inverness because they're all living in similar structures.

But I don't think that means you have some sort of nationhood, if you like, where there's a king that rules over all Brochs. I think the community is still very much, I wouldn't say at war with itself, but there's cattle raiding and that's why they have defendable elements. They have walls and ramparts going around them

because the communities are still having, as what still happens now, local disputes and going by and trying to suppress or whatever their neighbours. But it hasn't got then to the point of a national identity. So I don't think that anybody in Orkney lords it over people in the Western Isles, even though they all have a similar look to this society, they all live in Brox, I don't think they've made it to the nationhood, if you like. Possibly in the Orcadian communities

where you have these Brox villages, you might know from your history days that when Claudius invades England, and the Emperor Claudius arrives in 43 AD, I think 11 kings submit to him at Colchester. But one of those kings is named as Rex Orcadia, so that's King of Orkney. And he submits to Claudius. Apparently that could just be a Roman boast at the same time because they were known for that. But I think the Romans saying Rex Orcadia,

King of Orkney, I think that's just their way of saying the chieftain of Orkney at the time, you know, rather than actual king or kingdom, know yeah absolutely and just sticking that for a moment I can imagine in the Iron Age times going back to a community which has this monumental impressive brock at its heart it feels like that brock would be the nucleus of the community yeah and then Orkney's case it would be Gurnessbroch although they have a number of these Broch communities at Lingrow and Minehow. Gurness appears to be the biggest community of all with the most associated outbuildings with it.

So there could have been up to 150 people living in that Broch village. Wow, 150? It's possible then that you could be looking at some sort of chieftain of a greater area of the Isles, but I don't think that extends to other regions like Orkney and Caithness. The regional chieftain of a greater area of the isles but i don't think that extends to other regions like orkney and caithness the the regional chieftain of orkney would probably just rule over orkney and caithness and shelton would have their own regional leaders you mentioned

the romans just then of course the romans have a few forays into scotland maybe not as far as the highlands and past in venice but obviously they are up there for quite a bit and of course they do circumnavigate the iron de britain so do we have any evidence in the roman sources at all of explorers or whoever making a note of these monumental structures on the coastline unfortunately we don't like so obviously you'll be familiar with tacitus claiming that after he defeats the caledonians at mons grubius that he sends his fleet north to subjugate the Orkneys and to seek out Thule, which is possibly Shetland at the time. Apparently, this fleet then moves to circumnavigate the whole of the British Isles, which may again be a bit of a boasty.

But if we go back to the claims of the King of Orkneys submitted to Claudius in 43 AD, when Tacitus defeats the Caledonians later on in 87 or 89 AD, it could be that this submission really did happen in 43 AD, that Tacitus is going forward to renew these claims of submission, and that's why he claims to have subjugated the Orkneys. Really, Tacitus doesn't delve into any description at all of what goes on or what the landscape looks like north of Inverness but we can definitely see that there's an ongoing obsession with the extremity of

Britain and the classical literature it seems to be that Britain cannot be fully conquered until Orkney is one of the first places to be mentioned in the classics with regards to Britain so it seems that they've got a bit of an obsession about this place that exists on the fringes of the known world. The Roman obsession with Orkney. There's got to be a book in there somewhere. That's remarkable, but also to think that the Romans may have had contacts, may have had trade with these Brock communities to the far north. Yeah, well, we do actually find a fair bit of Roman items, but that might not be direct contact. of Roman items but that might not be direct contact there's no real way of proving that but we find same in wear and Roman glass that there has been a specific piece of pottery found in Orkney of the variety of Haltern 70 which is a specific type of pottery that was produced in

the era of Domitian I think to show that there's some sort of trade and that pottery is not of the plain kind it's the type of thing that you'd expect to be given to bribe a tribe and to submission if you like so little bits of that can show that there's definitely some sort of contact going on there and it doesn't necessarily mean that the base objects of the time there's certainly some of the higher status things are being bandied about that could be the result of raiding or it could be the result of higher status diplomacy going on at the time. Wow. Regardless, whichever way it is, it is still remarkable that contact is either indirect contact or direct contact. It shows that the Brock communities have an important place.

They're not just this forgotten about people at the remote ends of the world. They are actually active in that society at the time and trading throughout or certainly in contact throughout the rest of Britain. Absolutely, absolutely. And you kind of mentioned it earlier about the end of the Brochs, as it were. What follows the Brochs as the centre of the community for these northern communities in Britain and surrounding islands? It's a bit of an archaeological black spot, really. Whatever

actually happens to the Broch communities, they seem to have went into a rapid period of decline where Broch building seems to end and there's no more of these monumental constructions going on. I don't know if that points to some sort of societal collapse at the time in the structures of society that the chieftains no longer have the surplus to muster the manpower to create these monumental constructions. But in the Western Isles, what tends to happen is a structure called a wheelhouse begins to be built within the inside of a broch. And it's very much a much more rudimentary structure, a single story structure.

So they're using the remains of the broch to create a lesser home. It's a bit like in the early Middle Ages when Rome leaves Britain, some of the indigenous groups settle into the villas and things like that. They're using the remains remains of structures but certainly not in the same way as they were used that's in the western isles and the caithness they just appear to have been abandoned and it's very difficult to find the evidence of how people start to live after that period so there's a real black spot in the archaeology at that point of what comes after the broch it seems to be not an awful lot until the the norse turn up and begin to build the longhouses you know well there you go and once again it seems to really

shout out at the regional variants as some might continue to be using in the western hours but of course we don't know but in caithness it seems to be a completely different case yeah that seems to have been a rapid decline and that could be for a number of factors disease it could be because they have been recruited into the legions if you like we have native british groups that are then recruited into the roman legions and given a name as that atakote legionnaires and seniornaires but we don't really know what occurs then but certainly monumental construction comes to a rapid halt and there must be some sort of reason for that rapid end to this society and this way of living.

Well there we go and hopefully more archaeological research will reveal more about that black spot in the archaeological record and Ian I must finish by asking about what you and the guys are currently doing with the Caithness Brock project. Well the Caithness Brock project seeks to rebuild a brock and we feel this is probably the best way to show what Abroch society was all about. It's a bit of a three-pronged attack really. We hope to rebuild Abroch as an experimental archaeological project to show how these fascinating structures were built. A comparable project is Gildion, France, where for the last 10 years they've been reconstructed in a 13th century castle used in traditional techniques and we hope to gain some insight into how these structures actually worked, where the fire goes, how the smoke functions inside the structure. The second part of this is Drystone, Dyking and Traditional Skills workshop

where people like yourself will be able to come along and shift a few tons of stone up and get a shot at the Drystone Dyking skills and the last and most important part of this is to create an iconic visitor attraction for the north of scotland something that will really help put caithness on the map this is the home of the broch there's 200 brochs in caithness so that's kind of what the caithness broch project's final aim has been but over the last seven years we've been buzzing ourselves with various outreach events like we've built a lego broch we didn't actually build that ourselves we employed a professional lego builder to do that.

That is a job if you are a young guy and you build Lego and you really hope that you can make a career out of it. So we built Lego brochs. We've done excavations on various broch sites across the county. We've consolidated brochs. We've had chocolate brochs. We've made broch rose gin. There's very little we haven't made out of brochs at this point, but that's what the Caithness Broch Project's been doing doing to raise the profile of brocks and the story of british

architecture if you like fantastic well it definitely seems like you're going places and wishing you every success it sounds like you guys have only just scratched the surface with all the archaeology with the history of the brocks so it sounds like a really really exciting project thanks very much for having us on the show and if any of your listeners want to keep up to date with what the brock project does you can follow us on facebook twitter or instagram brilliant the caithness brock project caithness brock project yeah thanks so much for coming on the show ian not a problem thanks very much tristan Thank you.