Mousa broch
After the first overnight crossing, we arrived in Kirkwall, Shetland Islands at 07:00am, had breakfast on the ferry, then disembarked to start a two-day tour of the archaeological highlights of the islands. Mousa Broch is an iron age round-tower, from around 100BC, still surviving to nearly its full original height. You can see from the people at the bottom just how tall it is. It consists of two concentric dry-stone walls with a staircase between them, so you can actually still climb up to the top. It’s open to the elements now, but originally would have been roofed over. We saw several other brochs on the islands, but all the others had been robbed for their stone, and were much lower in height. This one was on a very small uninhabited island, so that may explain why it has survived in such good condition.
Jarlshof prehistoric village
Another highlight was Jarlshof Prehistoric village. I’d never even heard of it before, but it was fascinating. A community had clearly lived there from ~2500BC through to medieval times. Every few generations, the style of building changed so the people abandoned their previous house and built a new one right next door. So there is a spiral of houses, starting from late neolithic, and moving through bronze age, iron age, Pictish, Viking and medieval settlements. The house in the picture above is neolithic – you can see the low entrance with a lintel in the bottom left, and there are saddle querns for grinding grain in the centre of the picture and the lower right. I loved wondering around the village, stooping through the low entrances (I had to crawl to get into one house!), and imagining what the houses would have looked like originally. They were semi-subterranean, and would probably have been roofed with turf, so from a distance would have looked a bit like a hobbit village from Lord of the Rings.
