The Dig For The Iron Age Highland Tower | Time Team | Odyssey

[Music] this is the apple cross peninsula in north west scotland with the isles of rona and rasay and skye providing a stunning backdrop but we're not interested in the scenery this being time team we're going to the campsite over [Music] here nick goldthorpe and his family have lived here for over 30 years and ever since he was a boy he's been playing here among the strange stones and mysterious structures on this site but now he wants to know more which is why we're about to unpick this the remains of what could be a massive 2000 year old tower that once dominated the skyline it means removing tons of rock by hand and then excavating through possibly a thousand years of occupation and we've got just three days to do it oh and we're right underneath an 11 000 volt power line [Music] you don't get much more remote than this [Music] apple cross is cut off from the rest of the scottish mainland by a range of mountains its main road is frequently closed in bad weather and yet this small piece of land seems to be awash with archaeology potentially spanning thousands of years what did you got on this land in theory they tell us we've got a brock and up here and some iron age buildings a stone circle some agricultural cycle stones or equinox stones yeah it's not bad about having your backyard it's not at all i mean you can't fail to notice that ridge though yeah well you can't miss it and there's all sorts of things on the top if you wander across it you know what odd earth works bits of stone and so on so there's something up there what well the suggestion is a brock isn't it that's what you've got that's what you were saying so like victor like victor's drawn here which you know you need to think of them as sort of 45 stone towers and i tend to think of them as something like the the small medieval castles or the sort of local minor lord might have lived something like that but but you know 1500 years earlier well a large poshstone tower sounds like a good place to start and mick hasn't wasted any time [Music] in fact he's already opened two trenches across the top of the ridge to look for the structure this must be some kind of record for you how come you hadn't seen the gfiz we hadn't had the discussion even about what the thing was going to be and there they are hacking away because if you look at the topography you can see that we've got a great round rounded flat top mound here so this is the the curve of it going yeah and you see you get to somewhere like here and it starts to drop away and it's flat on the top so we've just put a trench across that to see if we're going to pick walls up within it and we've done the same over there we've got great big blocks of stone work so it's the old way before geophysics but it's all looking rather promising yeah it is which scares the life out of me [Music] and of course there is a problem as we strip off the turf it quickly becomes clear this is one of the stoniest landscapes we've ever done isn't this horrible to work and our tasks been made all the more difficult because of this an 11 000 volt electricity cable passing directly over the site which means no matter how much we'd like to use them mechanical diggers are out of the question that ain't much of a tool here i have heard that before we've brought in experts on the scottish iron age from all over the country we're looking at a site that's been occupied for a long time and their first task is to help us determine if the stone tower is a brock a monumental structure that would have been the focal point for the local community basically these are dry stone towers there's no mortar or anything uh involved it's a big stone roundhouse you've got a massively thick wall foundation how tall would they have been best preserved ones today are up to about 13 meters in height now not every brock would have been that high but certainly up to that sort of level and how did they build them that high one of the keys to it really is that you have this trick of building two concentric circular walls oh it's not just one mole no no you've got a corridor or a gallery that runs in between and basically the two walls then kind of lean in on each other so why doesn't it just collapse really it's the intricacy of the bonding of this dry stone it's a fantastic level of achievement in dry stone masonry to actually build this thing but the whole thing just kind of holds itself together brocks are only found in scotland and the design of two concentric walls gives them a unique easily identified footprint [Music] well that's the theory the reality though is more complicated we're looking for dry stone walls here built on a stony landscape and covered in stony rubble the challenge isn't so much finding a needle in a haystack as finding a needle in a very big pile of similarly sized needles so this one's good but this one this stuff isn't any good yeah i mean i think all this stuff in here is interesting with all these voids i mean you can you can feel there's a lot of air under these stones all over the place so conceivably you might have collapse from the wall going down with all these voids in it and then perhaps some kind of surface consolidated over the top something like that but even when gfa's managed to filter out some of the stony noise look this is the resistance we've got a clear curve coming around here the results aren't enough to convince the bronchologists so is that conclusive well we've certainly got something we've got a nice uh flat top stoney mound so um if it's not a brock it's going to be something like what i would think well really in this area you've got iron age settlement sites of all shapes and sizes built out of stone so even if we don't have a brock tower in that sort of very striking conventional sense there's every chance we've got some kind of uh version of that overall tradition so we need to keep digging to see if this circular structure has one wall or two and at last it seems that features are emerging from a sea of stones i mean we're beginning to make some sort of sense of it or we think we are right we think that this might be either the inside of the outside of the wall right you know one edge of it in other words yeah and then possibly it looks like we've got some of these stones in here that are actually bedded in than actually uh interleaved and formed the core of the wall so so i'm on top of the wall and you're on the outside there you're i'm on one one edge of it you're on the other edge and through the middle was the actual core of the wall i mean it it really is early days yet but that's pretty good it is for for just starting like that phil's wall fits in rather nicely with john's geophys results and gives us a possible exterior wall line for the tower and there could be an even more important discovery in matt's trench i'm pretty certain we've got the inner wall there i thought i'd be standing in the void do you think the inner wall here yep and you're standing in the the corridor of the gallery standing in the gallery yeah and then this would be the the outer wall the outer wall yeah so outer wall would have two faces then there's one and potentially one down there bridgette well we haven't got to one down here yet all we've got is the one that you can see here which is just you know straight up towards you well an outer wall a corridor and an interior wall that seems to me pretty convincing evidence that a brock once stood here but brock experts aren't given to such rash judgments is he the broccoli it's too early to say i mean if we're digging these type of sites it would usually take probably a week of de-turfing etc yeah a slightly larger area to try and get the walls if you like but there are enormous amount in the morning but at the moment we're seeing large stones that may be part of walls maybe a couple bits of coursing and this jumble of stone it's quite easy to and plan just to invent walls if you like i'd be happier when we had a couple more bits of course and more substantial walls so it's like out of focus at the moment there are nice hints but it's not there just yet [Music] we're now well into the afternoon of day one it's beginning to get very wet and we've still got loads of other archaeology to investigate around nick's campsite but you seem to have some walls don't you coming across here yeah it looks uh it looks man-made yes well i think we might clear that up and have a look at it later on so i can't help but feel frustrated that no one's prepared to commit to what this big round circular structure is even though brock's apparently dominated the iron age highlands and islands i've got this map which shows a distribution this this is sky here you can see there's a lot round the edge and this is a peninsula we're working on here this is apple cross just here why are the dots lots of different colors well these are sites that either could be brooks or they could be dooms or they could be hill thoughts no that differentiation is very difficult to make these sites all fit that same pattern so all over scotland they've been having the same problem as us it's brock ish but we're not quite sure i mean this is one of the things i think we're experiencing on the excavation that there's a wide range of variation in these structures and unless it's really well preserved and unless you've got it excavated you really can't distinguish these things in the ground what about the landscape stuart could we work out whether or not it's likely that there's a rock here from what's around it i think i think i think that's a very legitimate question what we've got to do is look at the factors which affect where brox is situated what's going on here which makes this such an attractive place to be so what do you think he should be looking for um really i mean it's it's agricultural resources it's a range of resources that would support a population you know throughout the seasons it's all of those kinds of things good access to the coast we know we've got here it's those kinds of things that all come together in the bay apple cross so you're going to have to go out and find that unfortunately yes lucky it's not raining stewart's search for traces of iron age agriculture may be the only evidence we find of the people that once lived and farmed around the tower because fines that we can reliably date are a rare commodity on scottish iron age sites the problem with the pottery here is that for millennia they just use the same local materials to make the pottery so body shards aren't going to tell you whether it's iron age or pictish or even much much later because making pot from local clays went on really right through the 17th almost the 18th centuries in some places well hopefully we'll have more luck with the big archaeology possibly these rectangular structures just outside the stone tower where mix decided to move some of our diggers we can see what we think is the edge of the block clearly we can see bits of those structures but we're not getting anything extra out of it okay but clearly we should do something across this shouldn't we andy i think we should open a long trench here because um it's not it's not that common to find external buildings outside the brock in this part of the world right if we're going to find them they're going to be in this but here we can see that there are buildings here on the ridge [Music] this trench won't just hit these rectangular features but also the edge of our large circular structure and as soon as we open it we hit stone but good stone as in something that looks suspiciously like dry stone walling this is looking like another face wall isn't it ellen yeah well it's in the right position on the slope it's completely and it's exactly the same stone with the same kind of wear on that side yeah and if that wasn't enough within minutes we find a second wall happy with that andy suddenly we seem to be finding walls everywhere in matt's trench the broncologists think they've now sorted out what all these stones mean you may conceivably have an interface running along in here and here it's much looser much smaller rubble then obviously in here where you've got nice packed big chunky stones so conceivably this is the inner face to go with our outer face so we seem to have picked up in two places uh elements of walling so one of the places is over here somewhere yeah that's what this bit here yep yeah yeah and if we can match that up with uh what we've got around in the other trench then we can begin to see if the walling is reflecting the overall shape of the mound that we're seeing topographically so we're getting somewhere we're getting somewhere the only problem now is that the newly discovered outer walls in matt and bridget's trenches mean that the big solid wall in phil's trench has got nothing to do with the tower it's probably a later structure built of re-used stone mick i didn't know as many brock experts as i've found today at the top of this hill so why do they keep changing their minds as to precisely what's going on here well i suppose what we've been doing is looking for an outer and inner wall and then inner and outer walls within that and so every time we come across what looks like a line of stones there's a another suggestion that might be a passage it might be a chamber then they clear the rubble away and it disappears i have to say i was a bit nervous about this dig i thought well it's either going to be a mound of rubble or it's going to be a brock in case in which case we'll have solved it by the end of the day not as easy as that it's quite exciting and even at the end of the day the bronchologists refuse to budge from their cautious approach so have we got the brook you've not not got a bra let's be starting all right that's the first bid we've got a bra it's the right size and it's the right shape and it's hard to think what else it's going to be the walls we found seem to fit a shape that seems to fit the geophysics so possibly i think they're almost saying yes tonight but not quite do you reckon we know tomorrow yes it's day two of our iron age dig in apple cross and another not so sunny day in western scotland a bit cream up north and that's bad news for the members of our team who inspired by the rugged beauty of the place have decided to camp on site mick i don't understand why people go on mediterranean holidays when they can enjoy the great british summer normally normally it's ridiculous isn't it come camping instead we're still trying to work out if this huge pile of rocks is a brock a large stone tower unique to scotland and despite finding a number of walls yesterday our jury of bronchologists is still to be convinced what they are sure of is that there was once a very substantial building on this ridge these must have been fairly simple farming people and yet they're building these incredibly sophisticated structures well yes but i'm sure the analogy is something like the towers that you get in scotland in the middle ages which are basically a series of rooms one on top of another one it's like a stacked manor house and what you get in there is the local the local bigwig but he needn't be very big you know he's just a bit more wealthy and influential than all the other farmers and and that sort of idea i find quite attractive for these things i can't believe everybody lived in there but if you talk to each of the experts today you'll get at least three different opinions if not more surprise surprise to qualify as one of these high status broks the structure has to have two concentric outer walls with staircases and corridors in between them and we found bits of wall in matin bridges trenches that suggest we could be looking at the footprint of a substantial tower it's 18 meters in diameter the walls in the trenches match exactly with the geophysics that's a big structure up there it's got to be a broth ian tell us it's a bro it's even more probably a brock than it was oh come on mate what do you need i'll tell you what it is it's the right size it's the right shape it's a big dry stone roundhouse so we're in the right territory definitely but these broth-like things are pretty varied and the real clincher's going to be back up on site in the new trench we can get two concentric walls for a definite then we've got a bra we've closed phil's trench as it's now obviously outside the tower and now he's extending matt's trench where we think we may have a corridor let's liberate some more dork [Music] and bridges trench is looking promising too we've got the three stones that we got yesterday with the facing on this side we're interpreting that at the moment as the external face of the external wall right of this probable possible brock feature so sort of the massive stones like we've got over there aren't they on the edge and they're very very big yeah yeah quite similar and then if you come to here it looks like we've got good packing within a wall and then we thought yesterday we might have another face to the wall where this line is across here yeah we've got these three stones basically running straight up towards you parallel to those ones there the outer wall is substantial well over a metre thick but bridge and andy think they've also uncovered another similarly sized internal wall with a potential corridor running between them they now need to prove it by digging to be fair to the bronchologists their refusal so far to confirm what we have isn't just down to the architecture it would help if we had proof our structure is from the scottish iron age that 700 bc to about 480 and that search for dating evidence has led us to this potential midden or rubbish tip situated rather inconveniently on the increasingly slippery side of the ridge why on earth would there be a midden two thirds of the way down the hill well it didn't start off two-thirds of the way down the hill somebody stood at the top of the slope there and chucked a bucket of kitchen slops out and it just found its way down so can you date some of this stuff um we've got second bit of pottery from the whole dig unfortunately not diagnostic possible hammerstone i think it's got area of wear there from being used like that for possibly crushing bone for their marrow we've got shells we've got limpets mussels that's all from meals could any of this stuff be iron age not definitely not here yet no it's the middle of day two and all we've got to show nick goldthorpe who invited us here are a big round structure of indeterminate date and design a pitfall of rubbish of indeterminate date and design and a lot of very very wet archaeologists many of them of indeterminate date and design so do you think that's natural the whole ridge is a natural feature yeah it's it's created by glaciation thousands and thousands of years ago as the glaciers melted they drop all the sand and rubbish below them and boulders and so on and it's like a long thin tail of what's called moraine so it's a it's a natural ridge and the brock if that's what it is was was sat on top of it another thing nick's asked us to look at are a series of stones in his dad's back garden which he's been told a part of an ancient stone circle what do you think then raksha just a quick look i've had an earlier look and i quite fancy this one here right it's kind of half sticking out and some of it is still in there but a quick archaeological inspection by raksha and her trusty helper show they're just more relics of the receding ice age okay can you just have a look under there yeah you see that we're actually at the bottom of it now and it's actually sitting on the on the bottom of this clean soil oh yes i see how's it going we're getting there we've got to the bottom now i'm afraid there's no cut there's no packing stones there's nothing it's just very clean it's just been naturally deposited i'm afraid there are boulders like this all over applecross but stewart believes that even though they're a natural phenomenon they hold a vital clue in his hunt for evidence of iron age agriculture and this one's particularly nice it's completely free of stone in this area and this very large slab of rock here has got little stones piled on top of it now in upland areas this is very typical of clearance to create fields in the prehistoric period this sort of activity occurs from the bronze age onwards and it's it's literally man settling down the landscape starting to create little fields and then when you start turning the soil over you start digging up smaller stones and these uh it's the evidence that they just put them somewhere out of the way so you get all these canes dotted all over this landscape here and this is quite possible some of these fields actually go with the same period that they the brock's been built as well so this is really stunning to see this you got some here john yeah i think it's defeated thank you up on the ridge our luck may just have changed this could be our first dateable find stonehenge how did you manage to identify that in this dirt it's beautiful but it's tiny yeah taste it and remember kids don't try this at home ah yeah i got a bit of green on it yeah definitely there you go phil taste that it's tasty now the all-important question can you tell how old it is i can't but i've seen almost identical black glass beads in an iron age context not that far away from here it's perhaps the smallest thing on site but this bead seems to put us firmly in the iron age the time of the brocs and the big archaeology is beginning to shape up as well what are you doing andy well um we think this is the outside of our brock or roundhouse wall yeah do you see this big stone here yeah this is very similar to the ones that bridgette's been getting around and hearts right the big very very massive ones yeah so we're really running out of room so we've recorded all this it's all been planned but i really want to try and have a look at in here now so we're going to peel back to about here remove all these stones so you're going to lift all this stuff out well i'm going to clear that one yeah and dougie here is going to clear that one i think you've chosen the right bloke for the job yes come on dougie it's only when you see these stones being moved manually that you begin to get an idea just how massive an undertaking it would have been to build a stone tower that may well have been over 13 meters tall but doug is a big geezer and that was just one stone how on earth did they manage to shift thousands of those things well it's back to the issue of of status if you're like the officer didn't have jcbs or cranes or anything so you'd have to physically manhandle this type of thing but this is why i'm we're fairly confident that these big stones aren't near the foundation because we actually look at upstanding brocks the higher up you get the thinner the stone is just purely because you know you wouldn't be able to lift one of those like that yeah even dougie couldn't do that it would have taken a colossal amount of effort to build one of these towers which begs the question what on earth was the point of them [Music] well ray san has a theory having experienced the bracing scottish air our resident architect feels a brock was a sophisticated building designed to defend its inhabitants against the elements one thing that occurs to me is that this double skin is a response to thermals how heat is used in the building and if you have a central fire the heat rises and you're getting convection currents but you're drawing the cold air in through the cavity giving it a chance to warm before it actually enters the living space does that make sense to you absolutely yeah you'd have your central hearth either on the ground floor or more likely on the first floor and exactly as you say you know the heat is being channeled around the walls i mean i think the other thing with the walls is that you know rainwater that's battering against the side of a brock structure like this is allowed to penetrate that outer wall but then of course it encounters the cavity and it never makes that leap across to the inner wall so that inner space stays dry stays warm basically protected from the elements if only our diggers had some of that protection now because if possible the weather has taken a turn for the worse [Music] and yet surprisingly we've made progress this might be the the foundation of the brock and the rest is gone and these are actually maybe chalking or pinning stones to give the bigger stone stability before you actually dig it if you like the outside wall in matt's trench is now beginning to look really substantial and the archaeologists suspect they may also have an inside wall hopefully we'll uncover the inside wall tomorrow but we do have some form of architectural features here this is definitely a wall face so you still got the double skin effect well what this is actually doing at the moment is but we don't actually know it and it's a similar story in bridges trench but unfortunately the weather's hampered her attempts to see if she's got a corridor between the two walls the crucial evidence we need to confirm we've got a brock i mean how wide do you reckon this wall is four or four and a half meters well if you think this is the internal wall here roughly it's gonna be about one two three four four and a bit meters the bridge has made one discovery another structure on the ridge that seems to be made of the same stone as the tower you can see here we've already got the face of that wall coming along yeah on the other side of it there's a lot of collapse and tumble so we've probably lost the face of the wall on that side and then in here see where the the pit is there yeah that's a wee trench that nick put in a few years ago to have a look and unfortunately he's gone right through the archaeology and we just can't assist the preservation as it is at the moment which is why we need we've come out this far you need to go down there then i need to go down alongside it slowly and surely the weather is beating us the archaeology and the equipment and some of us are now literally treading water john are you not geofitting something that you jiff is eight and a half hours ago yes why because i thought that because we watched you didn't we from the from the van well slight problems for the rain look at it i mean yesterday was bad enough but it's just turned into a sponge so why are you doing this again well we've got soaked the equipment's got soaked we've tried drying it out yeah and so we thought we'd give it another go it's just impossible to work yeah i think we should we should pack up for the day and how would you feel about it oh no i want to carry on you can't see have you seen this you can't see out of these and i can't wait to get back to my tent despite our best efforts this afternoon is turning into a washout all we can do is keep our fingers crossed that the weather improves tomorrow the archaeologists have been heroic trying to excavate all these stones which have kept disappearing in a morass of mud but that means we've only got one day left to try and sort out this labyrinth and find evidence of a date for this massive building which would have dominated the skyline and provided some shelter from the rain nearly 2 000 years ago beginning of day three here in west scotland and those of us who aren't camping over in applecross have to make this scary 18-mile mountain pass drive full of hairpin bends every morning which is quite a way to get to work but it really does bring it home to you that 2000 years ago the people who lived in applecross would have been virtually unreachable unreachable and as far as i can tell soaked for most of the time [Music] our bedraggled diggers are already back on site and trying to unpick the stone tower at the heart of this settlement and through the modern stones we're finally beginning to see recognizable archaeology you see you've got these big stones here yeah and they're in a nice uh line and they're all packed up against one another and you've got this line running across there and in fact you've got this big stone there which is still on that line and so what we're thinking is that this is the wall on this side and that maybe that on that side is is rubble this wall line is the first example we've got of the internal face of the building in this trench while over in her trench bridge is now convinced that she's got evidence that the tower consisted of a separate inner and outer wall look at this crikey is the most convincing solid wall i've seen on this site yeah well that line there certainly so we've got this face along here and then on the other side we've got the white shell which looks like it's midden within the brock and then we've got this packing here so we've now got the inside wall the outside wall something in the middle on in this trench and in that trench over there so we can start drawing it in now can't we yeah absolutely that's brilliant yeah and joining up all our discoveries so far gives us this a structure 18 meters in diameter and constructed from two thick dry stone walls but the work isn't over yet for our diggers because if we want to be sure we've uncovered a brock a uniquely scottish iron age tower then we need to find out what's going on between those walls for a community rich and capable enough of building such a prestigious and physically impressive piece of architecture as our stone tower i have to say this isolated piece of scottish coastline seems a strange place to set up shop the brock's over there behind those trees nobody around at all except for a couple of camper vans all these hills shrouded in mist you come over the pass you never pass another car this beach it's the middle of june and it's completely empty except for professor mcaston and myself so 2 000 years ago the people who lived here can't ever have seen anybody yeah but i think you're standing by the biggest clue that that wasn't the case which is that out there what do you mean well it was very difficult to get here by road until very recently but that's because everybody traveled up and down these these seaways and the real clue comes from the monastery over there that's where applecross monastery was see where the little chapel is in the in the trees there yeah and we know that the monks originally and the the founder of that place came from northern ireland they came from bangor in northern ireland but there would have been a lot of traffic from northern ireland across through the islands up and down the straits up the west coast it really alters your perception about the brock doesn't it up until now i've thought of it as something that was dominating the countryside but if you cleared those trees away you'd see that actually it's overlooking all these boats that are coming in from far away yeah the apple cross peninsula is a massive piece of land but stewart's investigations lead him to believe that for thousands of years most human activity centered around the tower on the ridge what's quite interesting looking at the an estate map of 1810 which actually has got useful information on it because it's got place name information before the modernist state changed all the agricultural patterns and settlement patterns and you've got north place names applied here to the brock you've got borrowdale and borrow is the derivation of bruff or fort or berg and you've got cullen dune which means field behind the fort two very very old place names implying there's been long and complex settlement at least back to the north period in that area that immediate area there and we're now finding evidence of that earlier activity outside the tower bridge has already uncovered one potential iron age building on the ridge and the geophys is looking quite busy too we've extended the survey along this ridge and we've got what appears to be a whole series of structures right in this sort of area we've got these massive responses down the slope i think those are more likely to be geological i think this is a far greater interest in this sort of area on top of the ridge john's identified a potential target and as luck would have it our host nick has already started digging it albeit quite a long time ago we dug it back in 1977 to put a bonfire for the queen's jubilee right see what we're thinking nick is you've already done a lot of the work for us here you know you've done a lot the worst part of the job taking the top off so if we could clean the sides up it would it would tell us what there is in section inside this structure it's not often even in the world of archaeology that you start a trench and only get round to finishing it 29 years later now we've got rid of all this rubble look at that that's conclusive that is the inside edge of the of the back in the tower phil's cleaned up his trench and it now seems we've got another piece of the inner wall you lose it slightly here but then we pick it up very nicely over in this area where you would see online about three or four stones are actually on exactly that curve you reckon that is the inside of it i think so well there's one way to test it because if you measure from there to there that was 4.6 meters that bridges was four point six all right if this we're on the tape right we think there's a stone over there that might be the outsides and why do you wanna give it a try why not let's see and i won't accept anything other than bang on 4.6 is it 4.6 yeah bang on excellent brian absolute wow that that that cracks it then the size of these walls shows just how monumental this structure would have been but phil's also uncovered a gap in the inner wall and it seems to be intentional as the tower builders have incorporated facing stones on either side of it well that's one possibility is you've actually got perhaps an entrance here i mean you've got an alignment coming through on that side and you've certainly got two beautiful standards there these are very clear so i mean are you actually you know potentially looking at the either the main entrance into the structure or alternatively even uh an entrance into the the gallery between the walls bearing in mind how long it took us to find these walls phil's really got a job on his hands if he's going to reveal an entrance before the end of the day but the crucial thing is we now have inside and outside wall lines on three separate points on the ridge train the evidence for a brock would seem to be overwhelming we can see here i've got the positions of the trenches and also been plotting in uh some of the walls where we actually have decent alignments and on the base of those i've extrapolated a circle for the inner wall and a circle for the outer wall around here a distance between two walls of 4.6 meters so that is that kind of what you imagine it would look like that's about right i've placed it onto the 3d model so this is the model from the gps survey so it just contours this top of the hill here and i've placed a reconstructed brock type features 4.6 meters wide walls a couple of galleries is that the sort of thing you're expecting that's looking nice that's just perfect and if that wasn't enough just as the sun begins to break through the space in between the walls has provided the clincher i actually just found this piece of pottery um in the gallery just over there and it's actually probably dates the second century bc to first century ad so perfect for the date of brock so can we now say what the iron age structure was that we're currently standing on it was a brook yes yeah i'd go along with that it definitely is yep it's several no doubt so why what is the evidence that finally gave you the confidence to say this abroad it's the structural evidence really you've got everything you could want you've got the massive thick wall you've got the galleries it's very very regular it's the same all the way around all of these things added together and it's abroad well that's a relief but we still haven't finished with this side phil's got to determine whether or not he stumbled upon the brock's entrance while bridge's trench also continues to intrigue can you see this orange here yeah nick this is what we will come straight down to the natural center of the natural geology she now thinks the structure outside the brock is post-medieval but she's found definite evidence of earlier activity but can you see how there's this curve here cutting into the natural and then inside we've got this very very dark soil and it's got quite a lot of charcoal in it and some of it looks as though it might be slagged that's associated with metal working and it's had a little piece of pottery out of it which has been dated to the iron age period our work on the rest of the ridge has produced mixed results the rectangular structures were probably post-medieval barns while the strong geophys results in the trench started by nick in the 1970s were caused by the silver jubilee bonfire which was the reason nick dug the trench in the first place but john still believes there were other iron age structures on the ridge look at this i'd love to think that that's maybe something like a wheelhouse that's pretty convincing what's the wheelhouse well it's a sort of stone-built chamber with lots of like alcoves off it isn't it so it looks like a wheelie planned but the trouble with that is you don't really get them in this part of scotland do you they're all sort of further north and could be at first it could we haven't got time to do anything about it anyway but it's obviously just going on and on and on along this ridge isn't it over in bridges trench she's found just how industrious apple crosses iron age community were wow and then we come down to this mig yeah this is a hearth or a furnace right contemporary with the brock so we've got people living at the top of the hill and we've got people doing small stale kind of industry workings down here so you are thinking of metal working here then actually producing iron yeah and what really conclusively makes it a furnace is we've actually got the slag itself which is pretty light so the technique that we're using was getting out all of the iron from the stone oh yeah yeah how do we know that this was happening at the same time that the brock was around well we've got some pottery here we've got this wonderful little bit of cord and we're here there we go what is it meg it's cordoned where it's it's a part of a big pot but it's got a strip of pottery pressed onto the side you can see the finger marks on it do we know what date this is that's about 200 bc and we've also found pottery of similar date at the other end of the trench near the brock which makes these two contemporaneous it's now almost the end of day three and thanks to some heroic work by phil and the diggers the brock has got one last surprise for us we thought that we had possibly a hint of an entrance coming through these big stones so we thought well if this is an entrance it ought to go right the way through the wall so what we did was we opened up this trench here right but this is your outer wall here isn't it carrying precisely so this is not the main entrance what it is is an internal entrance coming through from the inside of the building into here now the question is where does it go so we we think that maybe we thought that maybe it would go this way yeah we dug there fantastic look what we've got a set of steps yeah these are your steps that you would walked up into the higher galleries so just walking up here after basically taking you up to first floor level so you're sort of walking around between the walls up at the first floor of the brock these stairs would have led you into the very heart of the brock a warm dry living area protected from the extremes of weather by a sophisticated architectural design [Music] the brock would have towered over this terrain its mighty double walls defying the frequently harsh hostile conditions of the western coast of scotland and yet no one can say for sure why it was built but that hasn't stopped our team coming up with their own theories for this enigmatic building wherever you went in that community whoever you were you'd always see that tower it's always it's a sort of it's a pillar of strength that uh it's a sanctuary it's sanctuary it's something which makes you feel secure what you're seeing with the brock is we've got the community here we've got this area of land it's ours we can defend ourselves we can defend our wives and children you come raiding into us with our wives and children in here and we'll come out with our swords spears whatever and take you on basically i think what they are are sort of very very flashy monumental farmhouses where the uh sort of local social elite are likely to have lived it's a machine the building works as a controlled atmosphere and the more height you have the more you can build in and get the temperature regulated keep it hot all the time or in the summer if there is a summer here you can cool it off as well i think the jury's out and what they're used for i think i think it changes throughout scotland you can't just have one picture of abroad do you have any idea that the brock and all the other things that are up here would have been so complex i had no idea at all it's a very complicated site it's a beautifully made thing isn't it it is yeah a huge amount of labour a long step but it's not still here really it would have been a fantastic focal point for applecross absolutely when we first started to unpick this huge pile of stones in the pouring rain the thought that we might actually be seeing structures there by day three seemed optimistic to say the least but thanks to some epic hard work from our diggers in frankly atrocious conditions we can now see things that are clearly corridors and stairs and massive walls the key elements of a brock one of the largest and most complex examples of prehistoric architecture in britain [Music]

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 104,469

Rating: 4.9314284 out of 5

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, time team, iron age, ancient scotland, celtic documentary, scottish history, tony robinson, ancient britain, highland tower, scottish broch, scottish ruins

Id: 1FTp92hvSpk

Length: 47min 36sec (2856 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021