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Ingshowe
Broch (Iron Age)
Site Name Ingshowe
Classification Broch (Iron Age)
Alternative Name(s) Ingashowe
Canmore ID 2089
Site Number HY31SE 5
NGR HY 3903 1277
Datum OSGB36 - NGR
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/site/2089
- Council Orkney Islands
- Parish Firth
- Former Region Orkney Islands Area
- Former District Orkney
- Former County Orkney
HY31SE 5 3903 1277.
(HY 3903 1277) Brough (NR).
This broch has been so mutilated by excavation and by the encroachment of the sea that precise measurements are now unobtainable but, when excavated (J Anderson 1888) its external diameter was 60 ft, its internal diameter 33 ft, and the wall-thickness 13 1/2 ft. The doorway with guard-chamber was on the SW and, in a part of the wall that stood 12 ft high, a section of the gallery survived. Human remains and red deer bones were found.(G Petrie 1927; J Fraser 1927).
In the bank adjoining the beach are traces of a scattered kitchen-midden.
RCAHMS 1946.
The turf-covered remains of a broch, as described above. There is no trace of the midden noted by the Commission.
Resurveyed at 1/2500.
Visited by OS(NKB) 22 April 1966.
'The Orcadian' newspaper describes the excavations carried out at this site in the late 1850s.
Orkney Smr Note (1980)
Excavated 1857 by Farrer. Petrie writing two years later
describes in detail the broch entrance-passage, which had an
aperture in the side paralleled only at Hoxa, S Ronaldsay. [R1]
Anderson gives dimensions as external diameter 60ft,
internal 33ft, wall thickness 13.5ft. [R2]
Much damaged by excavations and sea erosion. In the bank
adjoining the broch are traces of a scattered kitchen-midden
deposit. [R3]
Outline sketch-plan, ink. Petrie sketchbook no 3 SAS 487,
in RMS.
Turfed remains of broch as described. No trace of midden
noted by RCAMS. OS visit April 66.
No trace of midden. Dense-packed stonework including walls,
exposed on a 40m front around end of headland; erosion quite
rapid. Stonework appears to be founded directly on the glacial
clay.
Information from Orkney SMR (RGL) Jul 80.
In October 1980 a group of Kirkwall Grammar School boys
reported further erosion and picked up a spindle-whorl, an
unfinished stone sinker, a large lump of iron dross from the
bottom of a bloomery, and a piece of bloomery slag. These were
deposited in Tankerness House Museum.
Information from Orkney SMR 1980
Publication Account (2002)
HY31 9 INGSHOWE
HY/39031277
Broch in Firth, close to the shore at the point of a low peninsula. The site was explored by Farrer before 1866 [3] and this and the encroaching sea have so much destroyed the structure that no proper measurements are obtainable now.
The main entrance was found in the south-west with a guard cell on the east (right) side of the passage. In a part of the wall which stood about 3.7 m (12 ft.) high traces of a mural gallery survived: this must have been an upper tier. There was also supposed to have been an aperture or slit opening from the guard cell to the entrance passage but from Petrie’s sketch (below) this is probably the low doorway. In a bank next to the beach are traces of a scattered midden deposit [5] and human bones were found in the rubbish inside the broch [3].
Petrie made a sketch of the exposed remains, which were then about 3 m high, including the entrance passage (with door-checks formed of slabs set on edge, a guard cell opening off it (with a low door, shown with dotted lines) and the presumably Level 2 intra-mural gallery [6, 66, fig. 3.12].
Recorded dimensions [2], diameter 18.3 m (60 ft.), internal diameter 10.1 m (33 ft.) and wall thickness 4.1 m (13.5 ft.); the wall proportion is therefore c. 45%.
Finds [6, 67]: a stone whorl and iron slag.
Sources: 1. OS card no. HY 31 SE 5: 2. Anderson 1878, 318 (list of sites only); 3. Petrie 1927, 25: 4. Fraser 1927, 52: 5. RCAHMS 1946, 2, no. 322, 92: 6. Hedges et al. 1987, 66-8.
E W MacKie 2002
