Publication Account

Date 1995

Event ID 1016763

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1016763

RCAHMS: Exploring Scotland's Heritage - The Highlands, 1995

Just before the broch is reached, the path crosses a minor burn on a small suspension bridge with iron columns cast at the Ness Iron Works, Inverness. Leave the path and climb a grassy slope to find the broch on a knoll overlooking the Dunbeath Water, set in a grove of trees surrounded by a modern wall. The broch was excavated in 1866 but then decayed until in 1990 it was cleared out and consolidated.

The wall is only a metre or so high at the entrance, but rises to some 4m at the far side. A small chamber opens from the entrance passage between two sets of door checks, and a wooden draw-bar for one door may have been operated from here. On the far side of the broch there is an entrance to a larger chamber opening out either side of the door. The way such chambers were roofed can be well seen, the sides being gradually corbelled in until the remaining space could be bridged with slabs (which often formed the floor of the gallery above). There is also a scarcement ledge to support a wooden floor some 2m up. These are the only features to survive, and the staircase to the wallhead must have been reached by an opening in the wall above ground level, as at Rhiroy (no. 86) and Yarrows (no. 105). Steps would have led up to the opening. Much of the stone from this broch and any outworks has been robbed for later walls and buildings in the strath.

Beyond the broch the path continues up a most attractive wooded strath. A leaflet from Dunbeath Heritage Centre (off the A 9, on the old road southeast of the new bridge; exhibition and audiovisual programme) describes a trail along the strath through hazel, birch, rowan and bird-cherry woodland, passing various archaeological sites. Out and back, this trail is some 13km (8 miles) long and would take most of a day; at the end the trail leaves the path and involves a scramble up a hill. At the far end, there are two round chambered cairns and a long horned cairn at Loedebest, and a standing stone and a stone quarry where such slabs may have been obtained on Cnoc na Maranaich, all of which can be reached more easily by a back road from Dunbeath.

A siege of Dunbeath in AD 680 is recorded in the Annals of Ulster. The broch would then have been a collapsed mound of stones. The most likely place for an important 7th-century settlement is the headland occupied by Dunbeath Castle (which can just be glimpsed from the A 9); its situation may be compared with dark-age sites at Burghead (Moray) and Castle Rock, Dunottar (Kincardine).

Information from ‘Exploring Scotland’s Heritage: The Highlands’, (1995).