Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 37 on 20/03/2008.

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Iron Age mysteries

The Scottish landscape is dotted with ruined stone towers known as brochs, Christopher McCooey looks how and why they were built.

In shape, and from a distance, it would have looked something like a small cooling tower. But up close, this was no smooth concrete concave structure. It was a dry-stone hollow-walled tower, entered at ground level and which had steps to take you between the two outer and inner walls up to the top. This one on Mousa, just off the mainland of Shetland, is considered to be the finest surviving example of an Iron Age broch and is some 2,000 years old.

I had come over to the island on the Solan IV from Sandwick. The captain was Tom Jamieson, known as the ‘Peerie Man’, which means the small man. He takes visitors to the island in the summer in his 60-seater boat “not the bonniest, but she’s functional.” So much so that he transports 100 sheep to and from the uninhabited 500 acre island at other times by taking out the seats.

Storm petrels find the nooks and crannies of the broch ideal for nesting and Tom will make special night time trips for visitors to see them returning in their hundreds from a day’s fishing for sand eels out at sea. Some of the birds ringed on Mousa have been picked up in their winter quarters near Cape Town.

But what are brochs and why are they unique to the north and west of Scotland?

In total, at least 700 brochs are known to exist, constructed and developed in the period between 600BC and 100AD. The actual number is likely to be much higher as there are numerous unexcavated mounds throughout Orkney, Shetland and on mainland Scotland.

A typical broch s.....

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By Christopher McCooley

Section : Scotland Archaeology

Page number : 24