Broch

These archaeologists suggested defensibility was never a major concern in the siting of a broch, and argued that they may have been the "stately homes" of their time, objects of prestige and very visible demonstrations of superiority for important families.

Place names in Scandinavian Scotland such as Burgawater and Burgan show that Old Norse borg is the older word used for these structures in the north.

Eighty years ago most archaeologists believed that brochs, usually regarded as the 'castles' of Iron Age chieftains, were built by immigrants who had been pushed northward after being displaced first by the intrusions of Belgic tribes into what is now southeast England at the end of the 2nd century BC and later by the Roman invasion of southern Britain beginning in AD 43.

Yet there is now little doubt that the hollow-walled broch tower was an invention in what is now Scotland; even the kinds of pottery found inside them that most resembled south British styles were local hybrid forms.

The first of the modern review articles on the subject (MacKie 1965)[3] did not, as is commonly believed, propose that brochs were built by immigrants, but rather that a hybrid culture formed from the blending of a small number of immigrants with the native population of the Hebrides produced them in the 1st century BC, basing them on earlier, simpler, promontory forts.

This view contrasted, for example, with that of Sir W. Lindsay Scott, who argued, [4] following V. Gordon Childe (1935),[5] for a wholesale migration into Atlantic Scotland of people from southwest England.

MacKie's theory has fallen from favour too, mainly because starting in the 1970s there was a general move in archaeology away from 'diffusionist' explanations towards those pointing to exclusively indigenous development.

Meanwhile, the increasing number – albeit still pitifully few – of radiocarbon dates for the primary use of brochs (as opposed to their later, secondary use) still suggests that most of the towers were built in the 1st centuries BC and AD.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, archaeologists such as V. Gordon Childe and later John Hamilton[11] regarded them as castles where local landowners held sway over a subject population.

Some of them were sited beside precipitous cliffs and were protected by large ramparts, artificial or natural: a good example is at Burland near Gulberwick in Shetland, on a clifftop and cut off from the mainland by huge ditches.

In Shetland they sometimes cluster on each side of narrow stretches of water: the Broch of Mousa, for instance, is directly opposite another at Burraland in Sandwick.

In Orkney there are more than a dozen on the facing shores of Eynhallow Sound, and many at the exits and entrances of the great harbour of Scapa Flow.

Writing in 1956 John Stewart suggested that brochs in Shetland were forts put up by a military society to scan and protect the countryside and seas.

[15][16] As in the case of Old Scatness in Shetland (near Jarlshof) and Burroughston on Shapinsay, brochs were sometimes located close to arable land and a source of water (some have wells or natural springs rising within their central space).

Examples include Howe, near Stromness, Gurness Broch in the north west of Mainland, Orkney, Midhowe on Rousay and Lingro near Kirkwall (destroyed by a farmer in the 1980s).

[21][22] Those that have been properly examined show that they continued to be in use for many centuries, with the interiors often modified and changed, and that they underwent many phases of habitation and abandonment.