by Jonathan Wordsworth
The recent Zoom lecture by Matthew Knight on the Late Bronze Age Hoard found in a peat cutting behind Poolewe in 1877 (the talk can be viewed on the Gairloch Museum Youtube channel at Poolewe: The last Bronze Age hoard in Scotland? by Dr Matthew Knight) and the recent Feats of Clay project (http://archhighland.org.uk/feats-of-clay.asp) led by ARCH relating to a metal-working site with rare clay mould fragments found during excavations at Bellfield, North Kessock, demonstrate bronze casting was occurring in the Highlands. Together with the Stittenham Axe Mould these are important finds for Late Bronze Age Scotland.
Stittenham Axe Mould © ARCH
But this is a speculative blog examining the possibility that there might have been copper and other ores extracted in the Highlands during the Bronze Age and is meant to stimulate research by NOSAS members on some of the ore sources. While current research has not identified any prehistoric mining in Scotland, except possibly in South West Scotland, there is certainly nothing on the scale of the Great Orme mine in North Wales. The received wisdom is that the copper and other metals alloyed with it such as tin, zinc and to a lesser extent lead, were brought into the area as ingots from metal extracted from elsewhere in the British Isles or from further afield in continental Europe. Recent metallurgical analyses have shown very mixed compositions for the metal tools and the recent work on the Poolewe Hoard shows at least 5 different mixes of metals to produce the surviving material (see the research results at https://www.academia.edu/44587605/Poolewe_The_last_Bronze_Age_hoard_in_Scotland).
Certainly by the end of the Bronze Age it is likely that a variety of broken or discarded objects would be thrown into the mix for melting down, making it difficult to identify the original ore source from trace element analysis.
Copper Ore in the Highlands
However research over a number of years by the British Geological Survey has mapped extensive copper ore sources in Wester Ross and some of these have even been looked at commercially (e.g. https://resources.bgs.ac.uk/meiga_reports/meiga/ae173.txt) and the ‘gossan’ at Gairloch is even used as the frontispiece for the British Geological Survey report Minerals in Britain – Copper (which can be viewed online at https://www2.bgs.ac.uk/downloads/start.cfm?id=1324)
NOSAS Archaeology Blog 