Excavations on the Tarbat Peninsula: Scotsburn (Iron Age Broch or Dun) Part 1

Mid Excavation Report by Oskar Sveinbjarnason (University of Aberdeen)

The excavation at Scotsburn House aims at dating the occupation as well as trying to discern if the site is a broch or a dun.

Outer wall face of Scotsburn “house” with Roland.

A single trench 20m long and 2m wide was placed over the building wall and extends northwards over four rampart banks. The round house wall has been revealed but it has not shown yet if it is a broch or a dun. The ramparts have so far shown a nice stone facing. The site is getting more complex as “new“ walls have been uncovered in the trench. The relationship between these walls and the ramparts and ditches is being investigated.

Photo from the trench with Leaf and James.

The lower left corner of the picture shows one of the banks. Behind Leaf and James is another bank and towards upper right corner is the Scotsburn house wall.

Following Oscar’s report an iron age road surface was uncovered in this ditch.

Excavations on the Tarbat Peninsula: Cnoc Tigh (Iron Age Round House)

by Oskar Sveinbjarnason (University of Aberdeen)

The excavation started as planned on the 22nd June. A 15m long trench and 10m wide was opened over the northern part of the dun. It took 2 days to open up the area (gorse removal and grass) and as the surrounding field was under crop, a JCB was not able to access the site and speed up the opening. It soon became apparent that the site has been largely robbed of stones, likely during the 19th – 20th Century, possibly to make the enclosure which sits on top of the dun. The quarry holes can still be seen. It was a hard task to plan and remove this later enclosure, mainly due to the amount of rubble and the fact that the enclosure was little more than tossed up earth and stone bank (we can firmly assume that this is not the Castle Corbet) and blended in with the dun itself.

Picture showing the surviving outer dun wall. The rubble to the left is a collapse which hid this outer wall face.

In the trench the outer dun wall face was harder to find than we expected and is it due to the large amount of collapse from the dun wall core outwards and collapse from the enclosure on top of it as well. It was towards the end of week 2 when we finally figured out where the outer dun wall was located and which made the site nicer and easier to understand.

The dun wall turned out to be a complex construction with multiple stages of construction now visible. Initially it seems to have started out as a round house with about 1.5m thick wall. Up against this wall, additional 2.5m of extra wall was added, making the wall about 4m thick.