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The key archaeological
features in the area are:
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1 Chambered Cairns and Later
Burial Cairns
Considered to be Neolithic (4,000 BC – 2,000 BC), these have
identifiable burial chambers rather than just cists (stone coffins).
These are often found in association with simple cairns, some of which
contain cists, dating form the Bronze Age. The chambered cairns are
often round, heel shaped or long narrow mounds. Later burial cairns are
those not fully excavated but presumed to be burial places. These tend
to look just like a pile of stones.
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2 Cairns and Burial Cists
These appeared during the transition from Neolithic to Bronze Age at
around 2,000 BC. This is when the ‘Beaker’ people arrived from the
continent bringing new technology (bronze working) and religious
practises – burial in individual cists or graves with grave goods
(beakers for instance), sometimes within or below a cairn. Small burial
cists without cairns do not survive well. Two were found during
roadworks – one in a gravel pit at Loch More, Eddrachilles in 1967 of
which only a few stones remains and one in Strathnaver. Beakers were
found in both as well as another at Woody Knowe, Strathnaver,
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3
Standing Stones, Stone Circles and Stone Rows
These date from the Bronze Age and are believed to have been for
religious or ritual purposes, including keeping track of the seasons
through astronomy. They are modest in scale compared to those at famous
sites like Callanish, Lewis.
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4 Cup Marked Boulders and
Outcrops
This is believed to be decorative art and consists of a range of
circular patterns – cup shaped marks, smaller circles surrounding some
of them, and on occasion lines joining the cup marks. These are found
on bedrock and outcrops in the vicinity of Bronze Age settlements.
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5 Hut Circles and Field
Systems
There are a great many of these, sometimes amounting to one or two
buildings and in other places to the remains of several. Field systems
can be identified through clearance cairns and old terraces and dykes.
Often burnt mounds and souterrain are found in the same vicinity.
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6 Defensive Monuments –
Brochs, Duns and Crannogs
Brochs are dramatic, round towers, often with several rooms or chambers
within. They date from the Iron Age (500 BC to 500 AD) and tend to be
located in promontories or other inaccessible and defensive locations in
the north and west. Duns are found on the west coast, again in
defensive locations. They have thick walls like brochs and some have
rooms within those walls. Some examples are vitrified. Crannogs were
build on artificial islands which were built in lochs and sea lochs,
with a causeway juts below the waterline, where one exists at all.
Their use is debated but they were again strong defensive positions,
safe from attack by people of wild animals. Brochs were followed by
wheelhouses of which there is one high up on the slopes above Loch
Eriboll. The wheelhouse has supporting pillars and was a galleried
dwelling like the wags of Caithness.
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7 Souterrains
They consist of tunnels and chambers built below
ground level and the roofed in and their use is debated. Cool, dry
storage for food and grain seems to be a sensible possibility. They are
found close to hut circles and tend have chambers which are either oval
or cruciform.
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8 Burnt Mounds
These are broken stone, charcoal and ash heaped
around a central hollow. There are two competing explanations for their
use. One is that they were clay lined and used for cooking; the other
that they were saunas. In fact it might have been both and they are
always found close to water and a hut circle settlement.
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9 Marine Archaeology
For Mackay Country this is quite a new area, but as
the account below shows, also a very important area for research of
international significance.
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10 More ‘Modern Sites’
Of
course nowadays the old buildings left behind after two World Wars are
considered archaeology. Older buildings of great significance are
Castle Varriach and Balnakeil House but the clearances settlements are
of equal interest and much more numerous. The Strathnaver Trail
highlights some important clearance sites which have been excavated.
Back to Top
The Kinlochbervie
Shipwreck - By Isobel Patience
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When Roy Hemming
and his fellow members of the RAF Lossiemouth Sub-Aqua Club
discovered a piece of sixteenth-century Mediterranean pottery on the
seabed off Kinlochbervie in 1997, the find sparked excited
speculation that it had arrived there on a ship forming part of the
Spanish Armada, the magnificent fleet mustered by Philip II of Spain
in 1588 to invade and subdue England and its reigning monarch
Elizabeth I. The Armada was made up of over seventy armed galleons
accompanied by fifty-seven support ships, and epitomised the power,
ambition and international influence of Spain, hampered only by the
activities of England under Elizabeth’s rule. Spanish galleons were
glorious ships, built both as warships and merchant vessels. During
the latter half of the sixteenth century, galleons sailed all over
the globe with cargoes of luxury goods. With piracy commonplace on
the high seas, galleons armed themselves with heavy-duty brass
muzzle-loading cannon to such an extent that merchant ships could be
almost indistinguishable from warships. Although the galleon was
descended from the oar-driven galley and the bulkier, Spanish ‘nao’,
it was propelled by sails and cut through the water with greater
ease of handling than its predecessors, and became the benchmark for
shipbuilding all over the world. Its characteristics included
colourful paintwork featuring heraldic devices, an elegant, high
stern and, on the bow, an extension of the forward deck and bulwarks
known as a beak-head, providing an advantageous position for
handling the spritsail. |
…the find sparked
excited speculation that it had arrived there on a ship forming part
of the Spanish Armada |
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For all its size
and style, the galleon was no match for the stormy weather that
drove the Armada northwards up the east coast of Britain after
engaging only briefly with the English navy at Gravelines. The
fleet sailed with the wind, following the Scandinavian trade route
around the north and west coasts of Scotland into the Atlantic
Ocean, with the intention of then returning to Spain. Once again the
weather proved to be a mightier foe than Elizabeth’s navy, and many
Armada ships never reached home, instead coming to grief off Irish
and Scottish coasts. Indeed, it seems that every village on the
north-west coast and in the Hebrides has a tale of shipwrecked
Spanish sailors settling in the area to marry and raise families of
dark-eyed, olive-skinned children.Documentation charting the fate of
the Armada suggests that though up to 67 ships failed to return to
Spain, only six remain unaccounted for, and it has been postulated
that one of these, a supply ship named the San Gabriel, may
be the luckless Kinlochbervie wreck.
Top: The piece of
sixteenth-century Mediterranean pottery found on the seabed off
Kinlochbervie in 1997.
Above: A Spanish galleon in full sail – but does the romance of the
Spanish Armada match up with the reality of the Kinlochbervie
shipwreck? |
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The challenge of
finding out more was taken up by Channel 4, St Andrew’s University
and RAF Lossiemouth, culminating in the underwater dig which was
filmed in July 2001 and broadcast as part of the popular ‘Time Team’
television series in January 2002. A reasonable day greeted the
arrival of the Channel 4 broadcast unit, divers from the
Archaeological Diving Unit (ADU) of St Andrews University and from
RAF Lossiemouth’s Sub-Aqua Club, nautical archaeologists, assorted
academics and support personnel at Kinlochbervie in July 2001 but,
like the sailors of the Spanish Armada, the underwater dig
participants were soon to witness the capriciousness of the
north-west weather. The wreck site, which lies in unstable
conditions at depths of between five and thirty metres on a series
of rocky outcrops around four miles south-west of Kinlochbervie, is
a protected site in terms of the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973,
requiring divers to apply for a permit before accessing it. It is a
dynamic environment and presented what Martin Dean, director of St
Andrews University’s Archaeological Diving Unit (ADU), referred to
during the Time Team broadcast as a “classic case of rescue
archaeology” – a race to find and recover artefacts before they fell
prey to the destructive power of the sea.To access, work on and
excavate from the wreck site, the team had arrived laden with
sophisticated dive technology and equipment, including: |
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a specially-equipped diving vessel, the Scimitar,
owned and operated by the Archaeological Diving Unit (ADU) of St
Andrew’s University
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a
remotely-operated vehicle, affectionately named Eric, equipped with a
video camera, lights and propellers, for scanning the seabed and
relaying pictures back up to the Scimitar
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diving kit featuring a surface supply system of
nitrogen-based gas fed from tanks on board, underwater video cameras
and umbilical communications links with the Scimitar
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a sonar acoustics system for pinpointing the
location of finds
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an underwater metal detector and
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a magnetometer to chart the surface of the seabed.
Coupled with the
collective expertise of the team, the outlook for recovering a
fascinating variety of finds was an optimistic one, despite the
ever-present threat of bad weather closing in and, for the television
crew, the knowledge that the marine environment and the paramount need
for safety would effectively double the time required to complete and
film the business of the dig. All in all, a very different ‘Time Team’
from the norm.
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Above:
High-tech meets low-tech – note the humble wooden clothes-pegs
used to secure the finds bags. And the less said about the horns
the better. Photograph courtesy of Philip Robertson.
Left: A boatload of divers arrive at
Kinlochbervie, ready to explore the wreck site.
Photograph courtesy of Colin Martin. |
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Settling in, the
team based itself at the Harbour Office in Kinlochbervie, and made
careful preparations for the strictly controlled programme of diving
ahead.With all preparations, surveys, measurements, checks and the
morning’s team briefing complete, the dive programme could begin in
earnest.Two distinct diving styles were employed during the
exercise. The professional divers of the ADU operated using
sophisticated suits and apparatus including a helmet with a video
camera attached and a surface supply system for breathing, whereas
the RAF Lossiemouth recreational divers used traditional scuba
techniques. Each diving method offered advantages - the enhanced
safety and the benefits of communication enjoyed by the ADU divers
were complemented by the military-style speed and flexibility of the
RAF team.Both sets of divers worked according to exacting safety
standards, precise schedules (each dive was restricted to a maximum
of 28 minutes) and within a structured plan to locate and bring the
maximum number of artefacts back for examination. In fact, around
100 finds were recovered during the exercise.Divers were firstly
tasked with locating and recording the exact position of objects of
interest and attaching numbered tags to them, with Eric the ROV
keeping an eye on them as a safety measure. In terms of the surface
recovery licence obtained under the Recovery of Wrecks Act 1973, the
team divers were only permitted to take small finds which would be
lost or damaged if left on the seabed. Next, at the collection
stage, materials were placed in finds trays which were then sealed
and raised by rope to the surface. At this stage it was endearing
to see among all the impressive gadgetry that finds bags were held
together with humble wooden clothes-pegs. Even in the makeshift
headquarters set up in the Kinlochbervie Harbour Office, ice-cream
cartons and cotton buds sat alongside powerful microscopes,
monitors, analytical GIS software and other serious pieces of kit as
finds were subjected to the first stage of examination on the road
to determining their provenance. |
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To speed this
process, ‘diagnostic pieces’ – those considered most likely be
indicative of a particular time, place or culture and so likely to
provide the most valuable information – were raised and examined
first.By the end of the first day of operations, even the non-divers
had had a good wetting as the rain fell steadily, and the team
retired to bed with hopes of better weather in the morning. On the
morning of the second day, forecasters warned that weather
conditions may take a turn for the worse within the next twenty-four
hours, thus racking up the pressure to bring in a good haul of finds
in the limited time available. |
Above top: A diver
brings a tray of finds to the surface at the end of his dive.
Photograph courtesy of Colin Martin.
Above: Rummaging around the sea-bed – this diver is labelling the
fascinating finds located by the team.
Photograph courtesy of the Archaeological Diving Unit, University of St
Andrews.
At the end of the
second day, although visibility on the seabed was still very good the
weather was worsening, casting doubt on the third day’s dive schedule.
When the third day of the dig dawned, a fierce westerly gale was rapidly
closing in and as a consequence only a limited number of dives were
carried out. These were hampered by poor visibility and the swell of the
water, even at depths of twenty metres. This proved enormously
frustrating for the team, fired by the significance of the materials
already recovered. So, what were the end products of all the activity –
and how did they help to solve the mystery of the unidentified shipwreck?
The catalogue of finds (not all of which were removed from the seabed)
included:
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cannon and cannon balls
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anchors of generic sixteenth and seventeenth century
design
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four cast-iron guns and shot
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a depth-sounding lead weight for measuring the depth
of water
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Iberian red micaceous ware including a tripod cooking
pot with some residue still present
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high-quality Italian majolica ware including a
near-intact wine ewer and a large fragment of a boat-shaped salt cellar
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north Italian red earthenware shards and stoneware
shards
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Seville coarseware including an intact olive jar with
a stamped rim
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galley bricks used for building a fire on board and
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lead sheeting possibly used to patch up the ship’s
hull.
Despite the quantity
and quality of the finds, some aspects of the wreck were still a puzzle –
such as the absence of significant metal finds. This may be explained in
part by the theory that the ship may have broken into at least two pieces,
and the wreck site comprises only one of these, most likely the bow
section.Initial opinion on the age of the finds seemed to favour the
possibility of an Armada wreck. However, subsequent dating of the guns
and the ‘star’ finds of the underwater dig appear to indicate that the
unfortunate vessel was of a slightly later period than the Spanish Armada
- possibly a lost Mediterranean trading ship - but the evidence is not
conclusive. The lack of bronze cannon further tips the balance against
the Armada theory. Although further investigations took place at
Kinlochbervie in 2002 and 2003, there may still be materials from this
turbulent period in European history lying on the seabed waiting to be
found. Permits under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 and associated
regulations are readily obtainable and diving enthusiasts will be sure to
find a welcome considerably warmer than the weather from the people of
Kinlochbervie.In all, approximately 100 finds were located and recovered
in July 2001, each one helping to provide answers to the questions the dig
team had set itself. Arguably an almost-intact wine ewer was the ‘star’
find of the excavation, a luxury item exquisitely made and lavishly
decorated, part of “the best collection of Italian renaissance pottery
excavated from an archaeological context in this country,” according
to pottery expert Duncan Brown in his Time Team interview. The wine ewer,
made of high-grade Italian majolica (tin-glazed pottery) of a type created
to order for the great and the good of Mediterranean society, features ten
fluted panels bizarrely decorated with a depiction of female satyrs,
flowers, snails, insects and cameos, painted in orange, blue, black and
yellow against a background of white. Its remarkable state of
preservation may be due to its having been transported in a wooden packing
case which slowly broke up on the seabed but nevertheless protected its
precious cargo for many years.Initially, it was suggested that the piece
originated in the workshops of the Patanazzi family of Urbino, Italy, but
further research identified Tuscan workshops at Pisa or Montelupo as the
more likely source. Disappointingly for adherents of the Armada
hypothesis, it has also been suggested that the ewer dates from no earlier
than 1590. The intact olive jar recovered from the wreck site provides a
sharp contrast to the self-indulgence of the majolica ewer. The jar was a
basic workaday item, an example of Seville coarseware with a stamped mark
on the rim - a ‘star’ find principally by virtue of the excellent
condition in which it was found. The stamped rim hammers another nail into
the coffin of Armada romantics, as it is noted that stamped rims were not
present among the jars from the 1596 San Pedro wreck, but did
feature in those from the 1622 wreck of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha.
In the ‘Time Team’ programme, the jar is shown being picked up from its
position on the seabed and packed in a specially-constructed container by
a nervous Phil Harding, supervised by perhaps an even more nervous Martin
Dean as the pair nursed their precious find to the surface. The wine ewer
and olive jar, together with the entire collection of finds, are now in
the care of the National Museums of Scotland.
Back to Top
Some
Relevant Archive Materials
Again Kevin O’Reilly’s guide books are of great interest, particularly for
those wishing to visit specific archaeological sites and seeking to
recognise archaeological features in the landscape around them. There is
a map of all known archaeological sites and monuments in Mackay Country
and a copy of Robert Gourlay’s useful guide book, ‘Sutherland: An
Archaeological Guide’. The detailed journal article about the
Kinlochbervie shipwreck archaeology is available from The International
Journal of Nautical Archaeology, as is the Channel 4 TV programme -
and there is a wonderful set of pictures about that excavation.
Further Archaeology
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In many parts of the Mackay Country there have
been archaeological digs uncovering remains from different periods
of time. As an example the archaeological dig at Sangobeg has
discovered a significant find. A pre Christian burial site, amongst
a midden layer, has been revealed. On a bed of white pebbles lying
in a north south direction the skeletal remains of what is suspected
to be an ancient Pictish inhabitant has been uncovered. The fragile
bones were easily seen but in an advanced state of decomposition.
The team of archaeologists, 2 dig directors, 3 supervisors and 7
students carefully revealed the delicate structure lying in a foetal
position under a cairn. The discovery was made at the beginning of
the second week of a four-week dig after clearing several areas of
the midden. |
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The vicinity has obviously been inhabited by
diverse peoples over the centuries unaware that this grave was
present from about the 6 or 7 century as early signs indicate. There
have also been a lot of artefacts found including pottery from the
late medieval period. The site at Sangobeg was identified in 1997
during a survey and was believed to accommodate possible Viking
remnants. As the area is in a dynamic state of flux with the high
tide water mark having moved considerably more inland over the years
there is every possibility the area could reveal further sites
worthy of investigation. This is true and can be applied to many
sites in the area.
At Balnakeil on the sand
dunes at Faraid Head in 1991 a richly equipped Viking boy’s grave
was uncovered. The grave was discovered by chance. A sand dune had
eroded, exposing a shallow pit in which the boy’s body was
discovered. He was buried on a bedding of feathers and straw, with
the boy was buried with various adult iron weapons including a sword
in its scabbard and a shield boss. Also found was a range of other
grave goods including a brooch pin, comb, beads and gaming pieces
dated sometime between 850 and 900. Fortunately this was noticed in
the sandy coastal area at Balnakeil Durness, in time for Highland
Regional Council to mount a rescue-excavation, which recovered most
of the remains. The skull and torso uncovered were accompanied by
grave-goods that included a possible spear, a sword, various objects
of bronze and iron, an antler comb, and 14 bone gaming-pieces.
Viking burials of the pagan kind,
with weapons and other grave-goods, are few in number, and most were
discovered a long time ago when standards of recording were
poor.From the skeleton, scientists were able to tell that the boy
buried at Balnakeil was probably between 12 and 13 years old. He was
around 150.4 cm tall. A modern discovery like this one therefore is
important. |
Back to Top
Strathnaver
Province Archaeological Research
Project being carried out by Glasgow University Archaeology Research Division
Started June 2004
The Medieval province of Strathnaver, comprising present-day
northern Sutherland, was a focus for settlement from the early Medieval
period through the centuries of Viking activity and Norse colonisation,
into the Medieval period. Our understanding of the changing nature of
that settlement from A.D. 500-1500 is poor over much of
Scotland, and this area is
particularly understudied. Documentary and placename evidence for
Medieval settlement is strong throughout the province. Exploratory work
in the
valley of
Strathnaver and around
Durness has also shown the potential for good archaeological evidence.
The
phases of fieldwork, to be undertaken over four years, will address
particular themes, including the relationship of Medieval settlements to
chapel sites, the nature of higher-status settlement and its role in the
political landscapes of Strathnaver, and longevity and degrees of
continuity in Medieval and later settlement sites. A one-week survey
season will be undertaken each spring, followed by a four-week excavation
season each summer, with the aim of surveying four tracts of landscape and
excavating four to six sites over the life of the project. This will be a
partnership project directed by staff from the
University of
Glasgow and Assumption College, Massachusetts. It will involve university
students and local community members and will provide high-quality,
well-supervised training in excavation and survey techniques, although
this objective will be secondary, subject to the research objectives. The
fifth year will be spent writing up the results for publication.
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The project will be designed and carried out
within a research framework explicitly concerned with understanding
sites in their landscape context and in overall relationship to each
other. The regional approach will allow comparisons to evidence for
Medieval settlement in other parts of the Highlands and
Islands. The results will fill significant
gaps in our knowledge of settlement in northern Scotland in the Medieval period.
(Reference: Olivia Lelong, GUARD) |
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