Publication Account

Date 1996

Event ID 1016332

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1016332

RCAHMS: Exploring Scotland's Heritage - Orkney, 1996

Midhowe is an excellent example of a broch built on a promontory with outer defences on the landward side, here consisting of a truly massive stone-built rampart with a ditch on either side. The area thus enclosed was originally larger than it survives now, for there has been considerable erosion and loss of external buildings on the west side of the broch. The sea wall built to protect the site in the 1930s is itself a superb building achievement, utilising to the full the qualities of the local flagstone. Nevertheless, the design of the broch and its defences is so compact, with the wall of the broch only a couple of metres from the inner ditch, that there can be no doubt that this was built as a prestigious, fortfied family house - the iron-age equivalent of the Norse castle on Wyre (no, 36). The external buildings round the broch were added later, when defence was no longer as vital, for they are built over the filled-in ditch and directly agains the rampart itself.

Instead of having a solid wall-base, the broch has a gallery within the wall at ground-level, a design that seems not to have been entirely successful because at some stage the gallery had partially to be filled with rubble and external buttressing to be built against the outer wall-face on the north side in order to prevent serious collapse (the buttressing was achieved by stacking vertical slabs just as in the 20th-century sea-wall, the same solution to similar problems almost 2000 years apart), The broch wall survives to a height of 4.3m, with an internal ledge for a first-floor gallery at a height of just over 3m, and the layout of the ground-floor is particularly interesting and well-preserved, bearing in mind that its present appearance reflects the final phase of its occupation and may not be entirely representative of earlier phases. Tall slabs were used to divide the somewhat crowded interior into two semi-circular rooms, each then subdivided further into cells and cupboards, and each with its hearth and stone-built water-tank. The main hearth in the southern room even retains the stonelined post-hole on either side which held the uprights for a spit over the fire, from which pots might be hung or joints of meat roasted. The underground cellar in the northern room may have been used for storing food supplies or it may once have been fed by a spring to be a freshwater supply. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the broch interior is the alcove built to the immediate north of the entrance, a superb emonstration of some ancient stone-mason's skill and mastery of his resources. Balanced on a tall thin flagstone, itself almost 2.3m high, is a pier of drystone masonry which soars upwards to become a corbelled ceiling to the alcove.

Sufficient remains of the first floor of the broch to give a graphic impression of its arrangements. The stone ledge projecting from the broch-wall round the eastern half of the broch helped to support a wooden gallery (further support being provided by timber posts), to which there must have been access by means of a wooden ladder in the northern room, which also gave entry via a doorway in the brochwall to a stairway and upper gallery within the thickness of the wall. At a later stage, a stone stair was built in the southern room leading to a cell in the wall at first-floor level, which also had the effect of blocking the upper gallery in the wall. The timber-built first-floor was presumably used as sleeping accommodation, the ground-floor being taken up with cooking and storage facilities, while the stairs and gallery within the broch wall provided a means of access to the top of the broch tower.

Among the stones chosen by the broch-builders are two cup-marked boulders which were probably carved sometime in the second or early first

millennium BC. One is built into the south face of a fragmentary structure to the south of the broch, and the other, which is decorated with both cups and rings, is built into the outer face of the broch itself, low down on its north-north-east side. These two stones may well have been associated originally with the nearby chambered tomb (no. 81).

In common with most excavated brochs in Orkney, many artefacts were found in and around the broch, including some of Roman origin: sherds of distinctive pottery and fragments of a typical bronze ladle. The Northern Isles were well beyond the limits of Roman control in Scotland, and the presence of Roman objects such as these must be seen in the context of gifts, trade or raiding, probably not directly with the Romans but through intermediate native contacts. Other finds included a variety of bone and stone tools and bronze jewellery (now in NMS), and there was evidence to show that both bronze and iron had been manufactured on the site, including an ironsmelting hearth in one of the external buildings. Without the help of radiocarbon analysis, dating of this particular broch is likely to err on the conservative side, for several aspects of its design and later development suggest that it may well have been one of the earliest Orcadian brochs to be built as a true tower.

Information from ‘Exploring Scotland’s Heritage: Orkney’, (1996).