2006 Fieldwork Season
In 2006, our attention shifted to the project’s other geographical focus, the valley of Strathnaver. We chose the township of Klibreck on the south side of Loch Naver. It has a Norse place name (meaning ‘cliff slope’), it’s mentioned in charters as early as 1269, and it also has an early Christian chapel site – all clues that this place was occupied from perhaps as early as the late first millennium AD.
The township of Klibreck.
In April, Amy and Olivia spent a week doing walkover survey of the township – literally walking systematically across it, carefully recording the visible remains through written descriptions, sketches and photos, and getting National Grid References for each feature using a hand-held GPS. We identified almost 100 features, including longhouses, barns and other outbuildings, the chapel site, a horizontal mill, kailyards and other enclosures – and a boulder bearing about 114 cup marks, a form of prehistoric rock art! At the end of the week, we had a good sense of the variety of buildings that made up the township and which ones we thought were likely to be older. We selected four of these for trial excavation and received Scheduled Monument Consent from Historic Scotland for the work, as the site is protected by law.
Survey plan of the township.
We returned with a larger team in June to spend three weeks opening trial trenches and carrying out topographic survey of the township. Two of the buildings we chose (structures 63 and 65) showed as very faint traces on the ground before digging commenced, with low, turf banks defining the walls. One of these was built over the end of the other, and the earlier of the two had been scoured out by some later use, perhaps by cattle. The later of the two had a well-laid floor of pale grey silt. Neither one produced any finds that could help to date their use. This was disappointing, but at least neither produced the industrial ceramics or glass usually found in 18th-century buildings, which suggests that they are earlier. There may be enough charcoal in the soil samples we took to get radiocarbon dates for their use.
The third building was a longhouse (51) like those typically making up the township: very long and broad, with an upper living end and a lower byre end where animals were kept in winter. Its walls had been robbed of stone after it fell out of use. This building too had been scoured out inside by later use, and one wall had been disturbed by an adjacent kailyard. This was an interesting result, because it showed that during the life of the township, some buildings went out of use while others continued to be occupied; people would have carried on living with the ruins of old buildings, probably re-using them as enclosures.
Marlyn excavates next to the multi-phased hearth in longhouse 46.
The fourth building (46) produced the most surprising results. This was another longhouse, and we expected it to be fairly late in date because it was so well preserved. In fact, it probably was occupied till the 18th century, (because we found industrial ceramics and glass), but it also went back a long way. Inside it, it proved to have a magnificent central hearth – large and well-built, with a big spalled and reddened slab where the fire had burned. There were sherds of glass and glazed pottery around it in the ash that had been swept out of its open northern end. Underneath this was another hearth, a rectangular area of paving with pink, scorched soil between the stones. Underneath this was yet another hearth, again formed of slabs and scorched soil.
Tucked in among the stones of the second hearth was a sherd of black, hand made, grass-tempered pottery, just like the sherds we’ve found in 15th- to 16th-century contexts at Borralie.
This was the best result we could have hoped for. Most of the longhouses in Highland townships excavated so far have turned out to be fairly late (usually 18th century), and it seemed that over the centuries people had rebuilt their houses in different places, so it would be difficult to find the earlier houses. Here we seem to have one house that had its hearth rebuilt on the same spot over time. We will have to await radiocarbon dating of charcoal from the earliest hearth to be sure, but the hand made pottery seems to be a good indicator that the house was occupied at least as early as the 1500s.
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Andrew takes a well-earned rest. |