The Ancients - Shetland: Edge of the Prehistoric World

Episode Date: March 19, 2023

Over 100 miles further than the northern reaches of Britain, beyond Orkney, are a remote group of islands that make up Shetland. It’s one of the best kept secrets of prehistoric Scotland, containing evidence of the lives that were lived there some 5,000 years ago. With Viking archeology as well as prehistoric remains, it's a one of a kind insight into the past.In today’s episode, Tristan talks to Dr Val Turner, one of Shetland's regional archaeologists. Together they take us to this edge of the prehistoric world, to find out about what life on these distant islands would have been like. From the axe factories that were discovered there, to the incredible Iron Age skyscrapers that are the brochs, what can we learn about this remote part of the world?Senior Producer was Elena Guthrie. The Assistant Producer was Annie Coloe. Edited by Stuart Beckwith.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient 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. It's the Edgants on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's episode, well, we're venturing to a distant edge of the prehistoric world. We're going far beyond the northern reaches of mainland Britain. We're going past Orkney.

We are talking all about the remote group of islands that make up Shetland today. Shetland, it has a lot of Viking archaeology, but it also has some extraordinary prehistoric remains too, because yes, that's right, has some extraordinary prehistoric remains too, because yes, that's right, people ventured here as far back as the Stone Age, as the Neolithic period, some 5,000 years ago. It's astonishing, a huge water crossing across the tumultuous, the turbulent North Sea to reach Shetland. Now, in this episode, we're going to be going from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, looking at the archaeology of Shetland that varies from Neolithic settlements and axe

factories to the massive Iron Age megastructures that were the Brochs. And our guest today is the perfect guest because she is none other than Dr Val Turner, Shetland's regional archaeologist. So without further ado, to talk all about Shetland in prehistory, life on this distant edge of the prehistoric world, here's Val. Val, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. Well, thank you. It's good to be able to do this. I'm very excited for this one. We've done prehistoric Orkney on the podcast before, Stone Age Orkney, and maybe when people want to talk about prehistory off the northern coast of Britain, their minds might immediately go to Orkney and its incredible prehistory.

But Shetland, a bit further away from the mainland, but it still also has some absolutely amazing prehistoric remains too. It does. I think it's a wonderfully well-kept secret. But archaeology, I think, is second to none. It really isn't. But of course, we're further away than Orkney, more difficult to get to, more expensive to get to. to get to. And also, historically, back in the 1920s, some forward-thinking landowners in Orkney donated lots of land to the equivalent of, I suppose it was the Department of Works or whatever was the predecessor of Historic Scotland or Historic Environment Scotland as it is now. And that obviously meant that they developed those and a lot of effort and time was put in there a long time before anybody ever thought about the archaeology holistically or in Shetland.

So there are accidents that mean that Shetland is a bit overlooked. Is a bit overlooked. Well, let's try and rectify that a bit now. And of course, your whole career, you've been bringing to light more of this incredible archaeology from the islands of Shetland. But first of all, no such thing as a silly question. Whereabouts are we talking with Shetland? Shetland is about 300 miles from the northern tip of Scotland. So you just keep going. And it's also a similar distance from the east coast of Norway. So we like to joke that our nearest train station is Bergen. But it's a group of about 100 islands, and they vary in size, of course, and about 15 of them are inhabited. And the length of Shetland, the size of Shetland, from the tip of Sumbra in the

south to Muckleflugger, which is the most northerly point in the UK. It's about 84 miles. But then another 30 miles to the south is Fair Isle, and Fair Isle counts as part of Shetland as well. So it's quite an extensive spread out, lots of groups of islands. Collective spread out group of islands, as you say, and lots of islands too. So it's fascinating to have that in mind when we're talking about its prehistory too. So let's therefore go right back to the start of our earliest evidence for human activity here. What is, at the moment, the archaeology revealing about the earliest evidence for human activity on Shetland? Well, until recently, or relatively recently, I would have said that the earliest activity that we knew about was a kist at Sumbra, which had a date of about 3,200 BC.

But now we can push it back a bit further than that. There was a midden found at West Bow with a date of about 4,000 BC. And then there are also two domestic sites which have been found. One has a date of about 360 to 3400 BC. And the other one, Firth's Foe, is about 3400 to 3100 BC. So we're pushing the dates back a wee bit. And interestingly, that was because of development. So there was a big gas plant being built there. And that's what revealed those two particular sites. That's what led to them being excavated.

And it ended up being really important because it has pushed our understanding of early settlement in Shetland back that wee bit further. I love that. And I find it absolutely fascinating. This is a recent find. And do we have any idea why these people decide to come to Shetland? It seems a really far and distant place to reach to. Why they decide to come to Shetland at that time, I don't know much about their boats and how they got there. But I guess it must be an interesting question too, as to what are the motivations for people going this far through the North Sea to reach these islands? We don't know that there was any specific drivers. I mean, in the way that, for example, in the Viking period, there are drivers that we know about and understand. I don't think there's anything equivalent in the Neolithic period. If you are in the north of Scotland, you can see Orkney. And

then from the northern tip of Orkney, you can see Fair Isle. And then from the northern tip of Fair Isle, on a good day, the south of Shetland. And so you could see what you were aiming at. And it might have just been adventure, the desire to see what was there. Interestingly, you can't go back again. Because although from the southern tip of Shetland you can see Fair Isle and get to Fair Isle, nowhere you're going. Once you get to Fair Isle, the north of Orkney is too flat. You can't see it. So you kind of get to Fair Isle and then you're stuck. How interesting.

One-way ticket then. One-way ticket indeed. I mean, okay, so the people have ventured to Shetland. They've arrived and they've settled on Shetland. You mentioned the Neolithic period. Whenabouts are we talking about the Neolithic period? Were those dates that you were hinting at earlier? Is that the fourth millennium BC, around that time? Yes. We do only have things from the Neolithic so far. We have just maybe hints of earlier settlement, but it's really just in a pollen analysis. People have suggested that there have been grazing animals here earlier than the dates that we've got. However, I think one of the reasons that even if there was Mesolithic

settlement here, we don't find it, is because people lived around the coasts. Life was much more transitory anyway, so they were only living in kind of tents and lighter buildings and then moving on. But if they were around the coast, coastal erosion and sea level rise has been such in Shetland that the evidence has long gone into the sea. Because in Shetland, Shetland's different to most of the UK in as much as during the Ice Age, there was ice pressing down on Scotland,

there was another ice sheet pressing down on Scandinavia. And it meant that Shetland in between the two at the edge of the both of them rose up. And so as the ice melted, so Shetland began to sink. And so Shetland began to sink. And so Shetland has always been sinking. So you don't get raised beaches as you do in the West Niles. Shetland has constantly been sinking. And that obviously has a knock-on effect with the archaeology. How interesting.

So absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence. And I guess on Orkney too, where you have those little hints of the Mesolithic, the hunter-gatherer people's communities being there, that lots more work to be done by researchers who actually, I suppose, Mesolithic researchers recognise that they might not find anything here. So it's not a great attraction. Someone's got to take a risk sometime soon, Val. We'll see what happens. OK, well, therefore, let's go to the Neolithic period, the time of the first farmers in Shetland and that time period of 4th millennium BC, you know, the next thousand years odd or so, correct me if I'm wrong. So this seems to be a time where we see more visible prehistoric remains on Shetland. And if we focus first on

homely life on settlements, do we know much about the houses of these Shetland farmers at that time? Yes, because people were building in stone. And so they start doing that very early on. Any timber buildings, it's really difficult to find in Shetland because there's peak cover. So the usual resources that people use further south, like aerial photography, it just doesn't bring up remains of wooden buildings in Shetland. So it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. But once people are building in stone, those remains are much more visible. And they're actually visible in the landscape today in a lot of cases, because where the peat isn't too deep or where it has been cut, then you can actually see that there is archaeology there. So that's one of the

glories of working in Shetland. And also not only the houses, but also the field boundaries that went with them. So you've got the whole farms there in the landscape. And there's an area on the west side of Shetland where the Royal Commission a few years ago mapped some of these landscapes. And they mapped an area of about 10 kilometres square. And it's packed with Neolithic or early Bronze Age archaeology. And it ran off in all directions. I mean, that 10 kilometres square didn't contain it all, but it was perhaps some of the densest areas. So that just shows you the extent to which the archaeology is surviving and is there and the evidence is there. So you can see in the archaeology still surviving the outlines of 5,000 year old farm

boundaries? Yes, absolutely. And also the divisions between the farms as well. The landscape seems to be carved up and very organised on the west side of Shetland, even as early as the certainly late Neolithic or early Bronze Age. And those boundary lines, they still exist. You can still see them. So in Orkney, they like to say that if you scratch the surface in Orkney, it bleeds archaeology. if you scratch the surface in Orkney, it bleeds archaeology. Well, I would reply that in Shetland, you don't even have to scratch the surface. You just go for a walk and you fall over it. Oh, brilliant. That's absolutely brilliant. As you say, this is really a secret of Shetland's prehistory. It's absolutely incredible what it's sounding like. I mean, with these settlements, with these farmsteads, the whole nature of these Stone Age settlements,

are these farmsteads, are they closely packed together? Are we thinking something perhaps like a settlement like Skara Brae? Or are they more isolated and spread out across parts of Shetland? They're much more dispersed. They're not living in collective groups in the way that they are in Skara Brae at all. They are often a single house in some areas. There's a single house within perhaps a field boundary that you can see. And there may well have been more boundaries that you can't see if they're made of organic materials and things that

just don't survive and we don't see. But on the west side, you get what seems to have started as single houses with one field attached and then over time new areas have been added so they have created more fields around it which survive and over time they do build additional houses but it doesn't seem well certainly from the excavation at the school de bluster which has been done, these three houses there that are stone are different in style, in form, and they haven't been lived in at the same time. So it represents maybe as much as a thousand years in that settlement, which when you just look at it on the ground, you think, oh, well, that's all contemporary, but it's not.

Now, you mentioned the name of Skådebruster there. I haven't got it in my notes, but I remember when we've chatted before, you did mention that site. Is this a's not. Now you mentioned the name the Scord of Brutidae I haven't got in my notes but I remember when we've chatted before you did mention that site is this a very significant important site in the story of Stone Age Shetland? I think what's important about it is that it was excavated at the end of the 70s and it was excavated well and using the best techniques that were then available with some dating, with soil analysis, which was really very much in its infancy at the time, pollen analysis. It was really a good multi-faceted project that happened in Shetland. And it's really the most recent kind of large scale exploration of any of these settlements. settlements well intrusive excavation anyway

there has been small amount of work done on different sites since but what we really need is some more big projects on some of these field systems and houses to find out more now about what's going on because obviously archaeology develops all the time and it's a magpie discipline it steals ideas from different disciplines as well so there's more that we could apply to an excavation now than you could at the end of the 70s yeah so the school de brista is important because of the information we derive from it well i love talking about particular cases so that's a really good one to highlight right there i mean and i and I've mentioned names like Skara Brae. Skara Brae, of course,

the best preserved Neolithic settlement in Western Europe. But that is, of course, on the island of Orkney. But it's always quite nice having a comparing and contrasting with Orkney in regards to the same time period.

And especially as we move on to communal activities in the Neolithic, because you mentioned how these houses are more spread out than we do find in places on Orkney. And of course, Orkney is almost so famous for its stone circles for places of communal activity.

Do we see something similar with the Neolithic in Shetland? Do we have evidence of buildings which seem to suggest that these Shetland farmers, they did convene, they did do stuff together? Well, the only building that we've got, which is kind of bigger than one domestic house, is Stainydale. And when Charles Calder excavated it in the 1950s, he named it Stainydale Temple. The reason he did that was because he had just been in Malta and looked at some of the temple sites there. And he noticed that there was a similarity in design, I suppose, with those. Now, I myself have just come back from Malta and one of the reasons I wanted to go was to check this out. And really, it's very different. Stainy Dale is much smaller. The

sites there, not only have they got enormous stone, but that's because that's what they had, but they also have altars, they have figurines, they have all sorts of things there that would lead you to suggest it was a temple. Whereas at Stainy Dale, there's nothing like that. However, the shape is similar to some of the chambered tombs, but it's also similar to some of the houses. It's about twice the size in both directions of your average house. So it's twice as wide and twice as long. And the kind of niches or side rooms around which you would normally find in a prehistoric Shetland house around a central hearth, the niches exist at Staneydale. But what they found when they excavated was that there were fires in front of each of these niches. And there was evidence of people within the niches.

But the interior, the kind of central area, was kept fairly clean. And so it didn't have domestic debris in the middle of it. So it does suggest that something different is going on there. But what? Your guess is as good as mine. different is going on there but what your guess is as good as mine wow so that's kind of an enigma whether it was well probably not a temple but whether it was a burial place where it was a center of community whether it's a place associated with the living or with the dead the jury's still out on there until more excavations until more discoveries are made it definitely wasn't burial okay well there we go you say that and it isn't your standard domestic house either,

although it's set in an area which it has fields and it has other domestic houses around it. And then there's a very nice settlement grouting. You just go up over the ridge and down the other side. And one interesting thing about it is also that it's set in an area which when you're there, you cannot see the sea. Now, for Shetland, that's really unusual. And it may be coincidence, but it may not be. Nevertheless, they've used driftwood in creating two great big poles in the centre of it, which would have held

the roof up, presumably. And that's definitely not indigenous wood either. It was spruce that was brought in so yeah something different is going on there but as i say we don't know what they're bringing in spruce as well and it's really interesting especially as you mentioned that one-way trip almost that idea for these neolithic venturers who went to shetland at that time too i mean i must also ask therefore about stone circles neolithic period renowned in orkney and elsewhere in britain for stone circles, Neolithic period renowned in Orkney and elsewhere in Britain for stone circles. Do we also have any potential evidence for Stone Age stone circles in Shetland? Well, I have to say no. When I first moved to Shetland and I was single and 28 and all of that,

and I found that a frequent chat up line was, come and see my stone circle. And I went and saw numerous stone circles and they weren't. What we do get is circles of low lying stone, which are much more likely to be enclosures, whether they are domestic, whether they're agricultural, or whether they might even be bronzed cremation cemeteries, but they're not stone circles in the way that you would think of stone circles. There are some amazing legends with some of them. For example, well, a lot of it is to do with the trowels. The trowels are Shetland's trolls, and certainly one in particular at Yalta Dance in Fetla, there is a group of stones and two in the middle.

And it said that the two in the middle are the Trowy Fiddler and his wife who were playing fiddle tunes. And the other trows were dancing around the edge, but they didn't notice the sun coming up. And so they all got turned to stone. There you go. Right. Well, the legend is still very much alive and kicking then with the stone circles. But that's so interesting to hear, therefore, how like when a stone circle isn't a stone circle. And Shetland's a great example of that with the Stone Age vow. And I mean, OK, therefore, if we keep moving on there, a few other parts of the Neolithic I'd love to talk about in Shetland before going down into the Bronze and Iron Age. First off, you hinted at it earlier, Stainy Dale Temple, definitely not a tomb.

And we do have evidence of tombs from Stone Age Shetland. We do, yes. We have a lot of tombs which are generally this heel shape. They have a concave front with an entrance passage through the middle. And then the back is rounded and is carefully outlined with a curb of stone and then there's stone inside but the passageway in and the chamber is really quite small it would have only held one complete body at the most and it's possible that it was just a representative bit of somebody's body that went in there or it may have been that one person was buried in there and then subsequently the bones were kind of moved aside and then somebody else was put in there.

We just don't really know how that worked because we don't have the abundance of bones surviving. We have a little bit from one or two of the sites, but most of these tombs are in peaty land and so bone doesn't survive particularly well but they're not necessarily on top of the hills some of them are but they are all on rises or on slopes where they've got a good view of at least 180 degrees and they are above settlements as if either the ancestors want to keep an eye on the people below or the people below want to keep an eye on the people below, or the people below want to keep an eye on the ancestors. There's something kind of going on there. Visual houses of the dead. Absolutely. It's so interesting. And do we not therefore have enough

evidence yet to suggest whether these tombs were reused again and again and again by generations of people at those settlements? You mentioned that we don't have much bone surviving. Do we know about that at the moment? We don't know. Although we imagine that given the amount of effort that went into them, that yes, they probably were reused, but they couldn't have been reused for the majority of the population. Where the majority of the population went is an entirely different question. Yeah, absolutely fascinating. It's always one of those really interesting ones. Okay, it is an interesting question. Do we have any idea where the majority were buried? Or is that one thing that's just lost to Shetland's prehistory? Yes, we have no idea at the moment.

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It's all in the area of Northrow, down to the fringe of Coliforth and Ronas Hill, which is our highest hill. It's all in that area. It's all volcanic area. And that has what geologists describe as dikes, intrusions of ribokite felsite, which is really hard and is often bluish in colour. But that's been quarried in the Neolithic period and blocks removed. And they have been working the stone actually in the area. And there's work going on there at the moment. And what they're creating is not only very beautiful axes out of the fell site, but also what they call Shetland knives. And Shetland knives are like flat discs and they have relatively sharp and thin edges they're really highly polished and they're often using what they call spherolytic ribcai felsite

which basically means that they've got beautiful circular patterns on the stone and when they're polished up they just look astounding and these beautiful knives never found outside of Shetland. Whatever they're doing with them, they're only keeping them in Shetland. And it does look, I hate to use this phrase, ritual, because I think people overuse it for things that they can't think of an explanation for, or it's a lazy shorthandand but there are caches of these that have been found in Shetland two in particular one on Stourbrook Hill there were 19 of the Shetland knives they were all standing up on end as if they were in a bookcase within the heat and they were just left there and these were knives which hadn't been used they were in pristine condition and all the effort that went into doing that and this was not a chance loss this was a very deliberate deposition

and of course we have no idea as to why but clearly these were very significant objects and the amount of effort that would have gone into creating just one Shetland knife also I mean I don't know how many person hours that would have taken, but it would have taken a very long time to do that. How fascinating this item that is unique to Shetlands. I mean, it does kind of beg the next question is, in your opinion, having looked at all the archaeology

and all the archaeology that has so far been unearthed, how connected do you think Shetland was during the Neolithic to the wider Neolithic world, to places like Northern Britain, to Orkney and potentially Scandinavia or beyond? Shetland was connected to some extent, but not to Scandinavia. I don't think there's no evidence for that at all. There is limited evidence for contact with Orkney. Shetland's Neolithic and Orkney's Neolithic go in totally different directions. But our tombs, again, they're totally different in the main, but they're part of the Scottish tradition of chambered tombs,

which is throughout Scotland at that time. And there are lots of regional variations, Scotland at that time. And there are lots of regional variations of which Shetland has its very different regional variation. But there are two possible tombs in Shetland, which I think look very reminiscent of stalled cairns in Orkney. And also on the edge of Scarabray, there is a house site, which in Orkney is rather disparaged and is called a workshop. It's slightly at a distance. Well, I say at a distance, you know, it's a couple of meters from the main settlement and it looks very different. But if you picked it up and put it in the Shetland landscape, you'd say that's a prehistoric house for sure. And so I think there clearly is contact, but their ideas are very different.

So things are developing very, very differently. So while there's contact, they're largely independent of one another at that stage. How interesting. How interesting indeed. I love the idea of how these two incredible sets of islands off the north and coast of Britain 5,000 years ago, they both have extraordinary Stone Age remains, but those remains are very different from each other and trying to see what's similar, but how much is different. I could ask so many more questions about the Neolithic in Shetland, but let's move on. And let's move on, therefore, to the next period, the Bronze Age. This seems to be a great time of

change, almost of transformation in Orkney. But what really happens in the Bronze Age in Shetland? Do we see massive transformations? What do we know about the Bronze Age in Shetlands, certainly house types and, well, to some extent, certainly initially, burial continues as it did. And we don't find much bronze either. So you could start arguing that it isn't a bronze age. However, things do gradually change. We do have a little bit of beaker pottery, though again, that's not very great. And it looks more as if people have gone away and got the idea and come back with it because it's only loosely looks like beaker pottery elsewhere. But gradually, styles burial do change. They stop burying people in kists and cremation becomes a thing, which there isn't any evidence about in earlier times.

As I say, the fields and the field systems continue much as before. And we do get some evidence of bronze working. For example, at Jarlshof, there is a bronze smith's workshop, which may have been used only temporally by an itinerant bronze smith, is some of the thinking there. temporally by an itinerant bronze smith is some of the thinking there. And the styles of bronze that are being worked at Jarlshof very much relate to that that's found in Ireland. So that seems to be where the connection is there. And there is connection between Orkney and Shetland at that time as well, because Shetland has soapstone, steatite, which is something that is not very common in Britain, but it's something that the Vikings were very familiar with. And it's one of the reasons they felt at home when

they came to Shetland. But we have some enormous great funerary urns from the Bronze Age in Orkney, which have to have come from Shetland. There's nowhere else that Orkney at that stage is likely to have got steertight from. So there seems to be these snippets, these insights we can get into the Bronze Age in Shetland. I'm really glad you mentioned Soapstone there because I went to Gernesbroch. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals.

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I think that's right. And I think during the Bronze Age, bronze is made out of tin and copper. We don't have tin, but we do have copper supplies. And subsequently, we have bog iron and various other mineral resources in Shetland. There's even supposed to be a bit of gold in Unst. And so I think that's one of the reasons why Shetland was attractive. It was attractive for its minerals as that becomes increasingly interesting and important. We mentioned bog iron there. So is that a type of iron ore that is organic is the wrong word, that is native is the wrong word as well. But you know what I mean, that you have on Shetland,

so that when you do get to the iron age, the resources are there for the creation of iron tools straight away. There's no need to import materials from elsewhere. Yes. I mean, bog iron isn't the best quality iron ore, but nevertheless, it's formed by the iron minerals leaching through the peat and then it hits the surface or something that it can't penetrate through and then it builds up and you get this iron pan and that can be smelted and used as iron. Well, there you go. Just before we go more into that,

actually, there's one other couple of words I must mention, which is Beaker people with the Bronze Age. We have evidence of them coming to other parts of Britain and there's more recent genetic evidence of them in Orkney too. Is there any potential evidence

that Beaker people reached Shetland during the Bronze Age? Well, as I mentioned before, there's not very much evidence. There's just very fragmentary bits of evidence, which is really pottery, as I mentioned before, there's not very much evidence. There's just very fragmentary bits of evidence, which is really pottery, which kind of is almost beaker inspired rather than mainstream beaker pots. And there isn't very much in Orkney in terms of their pottery either.

There's a little bit in the West Niles. There's some further south in Scotland. It does look as if somebody's seen it. People have got the idea. but in Shetland, they're very much doing their own thing. It's going off in their own direction. And that's really before burial is really changing. And so it's almost something that is an extra layer as part of the late Neolithic, early Bronze Age, rather than being a whole scale difference. So whether or not you can argue for there being a Beaker period or a Copper Age in Shetland, I think that's very hard to do. How interesting. Well, fair enough. Mysteries still abound. Thank you for that slight tangent. We will now go on to the Iron Age because for the last 10 minutes, let's focus so much on

the Iron Age. What new kinds of monumental structures or structures in general, I think you know where I'm going with this, do we start seeing appearing on the islands of Shetland when we reach the Iron Age? I'm presuming this is around the start of the first millennium BC. Yes. Well, again, at the beginning of the Iron Age, it's a slow development of the types of houses that were here before. There aren't dramatic changes until it comes to building brochs. And when the brochs are built, that's

a very different thing. Now, our excavations at Skatnes demonstrated that the dates for the brochs in the north are between 400 and 200 BC, or at least that's when Scantness was built. And then there are arguments that you can make for why they were presumably all roughly contemporary. And that makes Broch building earlier than people thought. It also means that because people have done work in the Western Isles and dated what they are convinced are primary surfaces and building phases, it means that Brough building started here in the north in Orkney and Shetland rather than further south. And that makes perfect sense because Shetland and Orkney have this long tradition of building in stone.

We're building in stone right from the Neolithic, where further south people have got wood and they're not building in stone. But our primary resource is stone, and we're building in stone right from very early on. And therefore, that expertise is here. That expertise to build in stone, to take things to the next stage is in Orkney and Shetland in a way that isn't third south so why wouldn't it have started here how interesting the origins of Broch's right there and just to clarify Val just so we all know a Broch

this is a massive monumental dry stone tower sometimes they're called like the prehistoric skyscrapers of ancient Scotland. They're absolutely incredible ancient structures to look upon, aren't they? Yes. Moosebroch stands 13 metres high. So that gives you some idea of how tall they are. The internal diameter can be somewhere between 10 and 15 metres. There's quite a big variation of the few that we have the ground floor plan of. And then the walls around them are roughly five metres thick and some are thinner, some are slightly bigger, and they're not consistent all the way around. But nevertheless,

they're about five metres. At the ground floor level, they are absolutely solid with just some cells built into them, which you could access from the interior of the broch. But as you get higher up, they develop into being two wall faces, which are then tied across with stone that keeps the whole thing together. And there's a staircase up so you can get to the top. And it makes for a very solid robust structure as the fact that moose still stands to its full 13 meters so most of them were taken down in the iron age and the stone was reused once the need for a tower passed which is why most of them don't survive to

the same extent so we don't know whether moose was an exception or whether they were all that kind of height. I think Moose is a fascinating example, isn't it? And anyone who hasn't heard of Moose O'Brock, just Google it now, because it is such a striking structure and how well it has survived, you know, the best preserved Brock in the whole of Scotland. And it is just incredible to lay your eyes upon. But isn't it also quite a unique case as well, as you've hinted at there, because of the fact that it has survived.

Most brock remains, Shetland, correct me if I'm wrong, so many brock remains sites, whether it's Scatness, whether it's Moosa or so on and so forth. The fact that Moosa has survived and looks so incredible today, this is very unusual for most brocks. They don't look like the great towers they were of the Iron Age today. That's true, yes. Most brocks have been remodelled. Many were remodelled in the Iron Age,

and there were villages that were created around many of them. Not all of them. Some of them were not in places that were conducive for that. Some are in much more isolated, rocky places, and possibly the houses that were associated with them were built elsewhere within their kind of territory. But the ones, certainly Ascanis, the village is contained within the Broch ditch, and it's not the only one where that's happened. Of course, there's Gurness in Orkney.

There are others in Shetland. Also in Shetland, you've got a couple of offshore brochs where the village is actually on the mainland shore opposite it. But these villages did build up around them and they are using some of the wonderful dressed stone that they've used for the brochs. The need for a tower, whatever it was, that has passed. And so they've started dismantling it and reusing that stone for the buildings around it. And then that kind of reuse of stone comes forward in time and there's documented evidence of, for example, Sinbister House and Sinbister School in Walser were recorded as having been built out of stones that came from the fort at

Huckster, which is nearby. The fort was also Iron Age and was kind of roughly contemporary with Brough. So yes, they've been used as quarries until relatively recently when people began to appreciate them more and value them and regret the things that have happened to them in the past. Goodness, sounds a bit like Hadrian's Wall in the not-too-past preceding centuries indeed. Wow, that's absolutely fascinating. Before we go a bit more into that reuse of these brocks and the word Vikings, I mean, last but not least on the brocks, do we have any idea of their potential function in Shetland? Were these potential defensive structures? You mentioned the village next to most of these settlements, were these centres of communities or great houses. I mean, what do we have any idea about what they were used for

in their prime? Well, I think there are as many ideas about what broths were used for as there are archaeologists. Or as a colleague of mine says, get two archaeologists in a room and you have at least three opinions. But at one end of the spectrum, you've got people who believe that they are the houses of chieftains. They're important places. They're the focus for perhaps tribute and that kind of a system. At the other end of the scale, you've got people who believe that they are defensive or even, I've heard it said aggressive, but I don't know how it can be aggressive. It doesn't move. But anyway, you have these enormous ditches around them and enormous defences in some surviving.

At Skatnas, we know that the ditch was at least seven metres wide and four metres deep and it's riveted in stone so it doesn't slump. And that's a serious attempt, I would have thought thought at keeping someone or something out or in and there are also banks associated with them but also a lot of brachs are intervisible and that applies in Orkney and in Shetland and you've often got two across a piece of seaway or in the south mainland of Shetland you've got a whole network of about half a dozen broths and you can see between each one. And that suggests that maybe they wanted to either send a basic message to each other or they are collectively providing some kind of lookout system or whatever. I mean, we don't know any of the details of any of that, but it does suggest that this is deliberate, that they wanted to be indivisible and that they were working together in some way because of that.

And so that makes the construction of being within a fairly short timeframe if they're all working together. But I think it also has implications for what they're being used for. Wow, there you go. Last but certainly not least, well, as we wrap up now, I want to talk a bit about the legacy of these buildings, whether they are older than the Iron Age or Iron Age relics, such as the Brochs. When the Vikings do venture to Shetland several centuries later, do we know how they view these much older structures on Shetland, whether they might be the remains of a broch village or, I don't know, Stanydale Temple, or places that have visible remains from a much older period? Do we know how the Vikings view these remains when they venture to Shetland? In the main, that's very difficult to establish.

There are one or two little glimpses. I think when the Vikings come in and the Brochs are obviously visible and they're probably operative, or at least not as Brochs, but as villages and as estates which are being worked by the Picts. That's the name just for the late Iron Age people. When the Vikings come into Shetland, they have some kind of relationship with people in the Broch villages. There's evidence that there's trade, but the villages around the Brochs are still being operated as Pictish. However, there does come a point at which the Vikings do take over some of these areas. And there are longhouses on the fringes of some of the Broch villages.

longhouses on the fringes of some of the Broch villages. And certainly, as we've got evidence, not only of Viking longhouses on top of the Iron Age remains, but also the Vikings reused one of the buildings which had been occupied in Pictish times. It had been abandoned. It had begun to fill up and the Vikings put down a, and they used it as a weaving shed. And we know they used it as a weaving shed because they used looms where the warp was weighted by stones, and these stones with holes in them that held the warp threads in place. When you finished a piece of cloth, you'd cut it off, and the stones would be left in place, not least because they had to be equally weighted. So once you'd worked that out once, you didn't necessarily want to keep working that out every time from

scratch. So the stones were left in place and we found the stones in the Viking levels of this Pictish building. So you have got that. And then of course, the sagas tell us two stories of eloping couples, one from Scandinavia and one from Orkney, both of whom at different times are recorded as having stayed in the brock at Musa, which again does suggest that it is exceptional then. It's the one that's still standing then. And they made use of it. They made it comfortable. They holed up there for a while. And eventually the marriages happened one version

of the orkney ingus saga describes musa as being an unhandy place to attack i absolutely love that musa brock exceptional in the viking age exceptional down to the present day well this has been an incredible chat you've really highlighted how shetland and its prehistory it really is one of prehistoric scot Scotland's greatest secrets and so incredible too. So I'm very grateful for your time and it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. You're very welcome. Well there you go, there was Shetland's regional archaeologist, Dr. Val LaTourneur, telling you the story of prehistoric Shetland from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I really loved recording that one.

But then again, I love all things prehistoric Scotland, so it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Now, last things from me. You know what I was going to say. If you're enjoying the episodes, you want to help us out where you know you can do, you can leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. It greatly helps us as we continue to share these amazing stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible. But that's enough from me and I'll see you in the next episode.