|
Broch
|
|
|
| It has been asserted that there are further levels of the broch unexcavated but six foot is all that was found. This is not a greenfield site. Beneath the floor they found clay, vitrified sand and Neolithic potsherds (Grooved Ware and rough Rinyo-Clacton), and the Royal Commision found similar pottery in the kitchen midden [Grooved Ware has been found at Evie Sands by the Broch of Gurness]. Somewhere back on a hill south of the Toab road the descriptio of a tumulus, HY50NW 9, excavated by George Petrie in March 1850 (a 2m cutting from the east edge to the centre) gives us an idea of what likely preceded the broch. This conical barrow stood five feet high and thirty feet across inside a three foot wide shallow ditch. A ring of large burnt stones ran about the periphery of this clay mound. Halfway in the clay darkened and hardened. In the centre Petrie found a "considerable heap" of burnt bones and charcoal bits embedded in the clay in a three inch thick layer. He found no stones there and no tools in the barrow. Perhaps the five vanished Howies of Bossack (at the quarry that is now a tip) were similar. Petrie also dug one of the low flat-topped mounds a few feet away and found a NNE/SSW short cist containing earth and clay with some burnt bone at the bottom, with a celt deposited outside the NNE end. Could this be the nature of the presumed dwellings between Dingishow and the Deerness shore - they have been dismissed as the results of sand quarrying but the 1798 Statistical Account specifically refers to them as "hillocks of stones".
|
Posted by wideford
22nd June 2011ce
Edited 22nd June 2011ce
|
|
Log in |
Register
Top of page