Tonight I attended an Orkney Tourist Guides Association talk about the Broch of Gurness, researched and presented by archaeologist Kevin Kerr. What a fascinating story! Kevin has delved deeply into the archives of the 1930s excavation and discovered a lot about the people involved, how they were thinking at the time, and what they found.
It has been a belief in Orkney, and a story circulating among us guides, that the site was first discovered by the poet Robert Rendallin his younger days, one day when he happened to sit on top of the grassy mound painting a picture of Rousay. According to legend, the foot of his stool, or the foot of his easel (nobody knows which!) fell through a hole in the mound and when he started to dig he found a staircase. However, when digging into the actual archive, Kevin found that this was more likely an excuse given to furious members of the Orkney Antiquarian Society who ran out to stop the digging, and that the truth is more likely that Robert Rendall and the landowner planned together that they would dig in the broch, and that they knew from the outset that it was an archaeological site.
Proper excavations took place in the 1930s, interrupted by the war, and more work continued in the 1950s and 60. One of the early excavation leaders was James Richardson, and he was surely some character. Through his extensive network, a class of architect students came on site as a summer school, and they did what archaeologists now routinely do, but which was way ahead of its time in the 1930s: They laid out a grid of squares over the site and drew plans of it all in meticulous detail! This excavation is therefore much better documented than most others of the time (there were apparently around 18 excavations going on in Orkney in the 30s, as tourism was just taking off and the authorities wanted sites prepared as attractions). It was fascinating to hear Kevin’s take on how recent events and politics of the time influenced the interpretation of what they found. Between the wars, defense was on people’s minds, so the broch was thought to be primarily a defensive castle and the underground structure was a well for withstanding a siege.
Kevin also showed a map of just how many brochs there are along the Eynhallow Sound: There’s a string of them both in Evie/Rendall and in Rousay; I counted 16 known and suspected brochs along the two coasts. The total number for Orkney is about 183, and about 600 in Scotland.
It was also quite mind-blowing just how long people had been using the site. The broch period itself is c. 200 BC to 200 AD, but people were on the site long before this, back to the Neolithic and Bronze Age. The broch itself was put to bed about 200 AD, and Kevin painted a beautiful picture of how this was done: They took all the lamps away and let it go dark, and pulled down the roof. However, this was not the end of the life of the site. In the later Iron Age, someone built a house right up against the broch entrance. A later Pictish ‘shamrock house’ was built up against the broch wall, too. The Picts repurposed the site for metalworking, and one speculation that Kevin offered was that the mysterious stone tanks next to the hearths in the broch village might be something to do with the metalworking process. Next, the Norse people (Vikings) moved in. Right at the top of the broch mound, the excavators found a Viking burial with part of a human jaw and a shield boss. Also, there’s a woman’s grave on the site, and this woman apparently grew up in Ireland or England. She was dressed in the Viking fashion with oval brooches and an iron necklace (which, although Kevin didn’t say this, has been interpreted by some as a Thor’s Hammer).
Broch of Gurness, Evie, Orkney.
