Archaeology Notes

Event ID 673621

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Archaeology Notes

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/673621

NM44SW 2 4331 4313.

(NM 4331 4313) Dun nan Gall (NAT) Broch (NR)

OS 1:10,000 map, (1976)

Broch, Dun nan Gall: Occupying the summit of a low knoll at the NW end of a rocky coastal promontory about 700m WNW of Kilbrenan farmhouse, and only 3m above sea-level, there are the conspicuous remains of a broch. The position is not one of great natural strength.

The broch measures 10.4m in diameter within a well-built dry-stone wall which varies from 3.0m to 4.1m in thickness. Almost the entire circuit of both the outer and inner faces can still be traced. The best preserved sector of the former is on the N, where it rises to a height of 1.2m in eight courses. The latter, however, which has been exposed by comparatively recent excavation, is in a much better state of preservation and stands as much as 1.8m high in ten courses; at an average height of 0.6m above the interior it exhibits a scarement, 0.2m wide, formed by a series of projecting slabs supported on slight corbelling. It is noteworthy that the entire SE quadrant of the scarcement is set one course, or 0.3m, higher than the rest.

The entrance, which has been checked for a door, is situated on the E; it measures about 1.2m wide at both the inner and outer ends but increases to 1.5m immediately inside the checks. On the S side a passage, about 1.0m wide, opens from the interior at ground level and gives access to a stair which leads upwards in the thickness of the wall. Of the other five openings in the inner face, all but that on the NNE apear to have been merely voids or relieving slits in the upper portion of the wall, but the last, 0.9m wide, may have served as the entrance to an intramural gallery, traces of which can be seen at scarcement level round almost the entire circuit.

The interior is obscured by piles of tumbled core-material, and a considerable quantity of wall debris also covers the flanks of the knoll on all sides. A modern dyke has been built on top of the ruins of the broch wall on the NE.

R W Feachem 1963; J Duns 1883; V G Childe and A Graham 1943; RCAHMS 1980, visited 1974.

Dun nan Gall, a broch. Name confirmed.

Revised at 1:2500.

Visited by OS (RD) 12 May 1972.