Experimental Archaeology: Learning about Technologies in the Past

by Susan Kruse (ARCH and NOSAS)

Thanks to funding from Historic Environment Scotland and the Heritage Lottery Fund, ARCH launched an exciting project ‘Experimental Archaeology: Learning about Technologies in the Past’ in October 2017. The project had three main strands. In the first year, 13 experimental archaeology days and 10 school visits took place where craftspeople demonstrated and explained different technologies used in the past. The workshops were filmed and the edited videos and blogs for each workshop can be accessed on the ARCH website.

Jim Glazzard at the Viking ring silver workshop

In the second year, the objects resulting from these workshops will then be used to create loans boxes which will be freely available to borrow. Our workshop leaders often generously provided more than one object. An archaeologist and teacher will now work together to create learning materials, so that the loans box and videos of the experimental sessions can be used in schools and other groups. The project already has attracted a wide and diverse audience, and we hope that the loans boxes will also contribute to this legacy.

The idea for the project emerged from North Kessock & District Local History Society’s Feats of Clay project, where ARCH helped facilitate a visit by Neil Burridge who demonstrated Bronze Age metalworking. Everyone in the audience was caught up in the excitement of the day, and learned so much about how objects were made, what raw materials were needed, and how craftsmen in the past managed without gauges and modern equipment.

Neil Burridge at the Bronze Metaworking workshop

In the first year 13 workshops took place, one a month, each showcasing a skill from the past, spanning from earliest settlers to more recent times. The workshops were exciting to attend, but were also filmed.

Torvean Hillfort, Inverness: Managing a Forgotten Site

by Jonathan Wordsworth

Lying less than 2 kilometres from the centre of Inverness, Torvean Hillfort  is a much neglected Scheduled Monument (SM3806 –see also Highland Council MHG3749) of national importance, situated on the edge of the former Torvean Quarry and currently obscured by mature woodland, scrub and rough vegetation.  It is also suffering from persistent trail bike damage that is continuing to cause erosion to the fabric of the monument.

As shown in the 2017 Atlas of Hillforts, this orange spot marks site of Torvean Fort ©Bing (Note the image taken in 2015 also shows the AOC trial trenches for the new Kilvean Golf Course.)

Located at NH 6437 4315, the fort is situated on one of a series of periglacial ridges that are considered nationally important, forming part of the extensive Torvean Landforms SSSI 1557.  In the JNCC statement  for the site it is described as follows:

Torvean is notable for glacial geomorphology, containing an outstanding range of landforms and deposits formed by the meltwaters of the last (Late Devensian) ice-sheet, between approximately 14,000 and 13,000 years ago……… it contains what is believed to be the highest esker in Britain, with a height of over 68 m.

The area immediately to the east of the fort has been extensively quarried for sand and gravel and though this quarry closed in 1989, the morphology of the area has been severely altered. The quarry lies outside the immediate environs of the fort, but the excavations and dumps from these works have affected the situation of this monument.

Unlike Craig Phadrig to the north which has been long recorded, Torvean Fort was not shown on the earliest maps of the area, such as Bastide’s 1725 or Roy’s Military Survey of c1750, where it is shown as an undifferentiated treeless ridge to the west of Tomnahurich.

©NLS. Detail from Bastide’s A General Survey of Inverness and country adjoining to the foot of Loch Ness 1725.

This continued ignorance of Torvean is continued in a fine series of later maps held in the National Archives Scotland concerning a long standing dispute relating to the rights to catch salmon in the River Ness.  Dating from 1765 onwards these continue to show Torvean as a single ridge and the best of these, John Home’s plan of 1774, showed the ridge as now obscured by a plantation of trees. The ridge and fort have been largely wooded ever since. The Home map is also important for showing the Cairn at Kilvain (Torvean) later destroyed during the construction of the Caledonian Canal and where an important and substantial Pictish silver chain was recovered in 1808.  It was recorded in the Old Statistical Account for Inverness and Bona Parish in 1791 that

There is a very large cairn near the river at the foot of a hill called Torvean. It some years ago was partly removed, a coffin was found composed of six thick flags.

The Lovat Estate Map Project

by Roland Spencer-Jones (NOSAS)

©Colin Prior

In 1756 a young man had been sent by his employers to Coigach, a rough, remote area on the west coast of Scotland, just north of Ullapool. He wrote to those employers on 21^st July:

The estate of Coigach is a very large country, and the subject difficult and tedious to measure, being little else but high mountains with scattered woods, steep rocky places, and a number of lochs in the valleys, which with the great distance there is between houses makes me obliged to sleep in the open fields for several nights together, which is dangerous in a climate where so much rain falls. I wish (you)  would condescend to allow me a tent or otherwise I’ll have great difficulty to go through. There is no such thing as sleeping in their houses in the summer time, they are so full of vermin[1].

The man was Peter May, an Aberdeenshire land surveyor, and his employers were the Commissioners for the Forfeited Estates. After Culloden the British (London!) government forfeited, and therefore took possession of, the estates that had “come out” in the 1745 rebellion. Six years later an annexing Act was passed, in 1752, and three years later the Commissioners for the Forfeited Estates finally met. They wanted to know what lands they now administered, and also wanted to improve the economic performance of those lands. They therefore appointed land surveyors for the main 13 estates that were their responsibility, including the estates of Cromartie (the Mackenzie Estate, and hence Coigach) and Lovat. Peter May was appointed to these two estates, and produced a series of maps, surveying the entirety of the estate ground.

The archaeology of Urchany.

Urchany on the 1757 Peter May map.

I had seen a hand-drawn copy of one of these Peter May maps, pertaining to the Barony of Kilmorack, when NOSAS had undertaken a survey of the lands of Urchany, a multi-period deserted settlement west of Beauly. I was keen to see and study the original, which was said to be in the Lovat Estate offices in Beauly. After a little persistence, I was allowed to look at the map, which was a valuable experience. I then realised that the office contained many more maps that could also be relevant to the survey. Not all of the maps were known, even to the estate manager. I asked him if I could  catalogue and therefore research the whole map archive. He said yes!