Note

Date 24 February 2015 - 31 May 2016

Event ID 1044119

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Note

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1044119

Atlas of Hillforts of Britain and Ireland

The well-known broch at Midhowe, which was taken into Guardianship following the excavations of 1930-33 (Callander and Grant 1934), stands on a heavily eroded coastal promontory which is also defended on the landward side by a massive stone wall accompanied by both an internal and an external ditch. The broch itself measures about 9m in diameter within a wall 4.5m in thickness and displays numerous architectural features, including its entrance facing out to sea on the W. The outer wall is some 7.5m thick at the very base, where the inner and outer faces rise from the bottom of the flanking ditches. The entrance is adjacent to the S margin of the promontory, where the wall thickens to 9.5m, creating a long and relatively broad passage running back from a narrow opening through the outer face. Curiously, this opening does not conform symmetrically to the broad causeway that has been left undug in the outer ditch, and nor has the wall been carried to the edge of the adjacent geo, leaving ready access around its S end along the cliff-edge, where a flight of rock-cut steps gives access to the inner end of the entrance passage. The wall was not sectioned at the time of the excavations, but it is likely that the various observations made at the time, including a vertical joint in the outer face of the wall at the NW end, where the face is also founded on secondary paving in the bottom of the outer ditch, indicate a long and complicated history of construction, in one phase of which the wall probably returned along the S margin of the promontory and the only access to the interior may have been via the flight of steps leading from the terrace along the cliff-edge; in this light, there is no reason why the earliest phase of this wall may not have predated the construction of the broch, enclosing an area measuring about 40m from NW to SE immediately to the rear of the wall by at least 27m transversely (0.08ha), and perhaps as much as 40m given due allowance for the heavy erosion of the deposits on the seaward side (c. 0.15ha). Confined between the foot of the broch and the outer wall on the NE is a complex of later buildings, which also overlies the infilled inner ditch.

Information from An Atlas of Hillforts of Great Britain and Ireland – 31 May 2016. Atlas of Hillforts SC2846