A Visit to Jarlshof

Jarlshof is a multi-period settlement in the south end of Shetland. Its meaning is home of the Jarl and was invented by Sir Walter Scott in his book ´The Pirate’. He had visited Here in 1814 from what I remember

So here I talk about 2000 years of habitation I was working on memory and it goes way back to the Neolithic. In fact habitation for 4000 years. I don’t actually mention the medieval farm from the 1400’s.

So I basically started in the Pictish part, or at least the bit obviously Pictish in the wheelhouse.

So after mooching about in one of the open-top wheelhouses, I found one that was more enclosed:

leaving the Picts I headed off into the Viking/Norse part of the site… sorry for the wind… it’s normally a constant up here! I mention in this video the house is from the 1600’s I meant the 1700s. I also said John Bruce did the excavation…it wasn’t all of it, a lot of this was done by modern archaeologists… he basically started with the wheelhouse and broch.

This hopefully gives you an indication of how close some of this stuff actually is… Oh yeah, I was in full wind here (this was the second attempt) I seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There is a high likelihood that a lot of the stone in the 16th-century house came from various buildings that are only a meter high now. At about the 59-second mark, I point out the Pictish area of the site. The ruined broch is up against the manor house. The enclosed wheelhouse is the stone wall in the mid-ground.

This final video is a sweeping view of the site from the Pictish to the left, the Viking/Norse in the centre, and round to the manor house to the right. There is a path with a visible panel towards the fence. Just below that, towards the camera is the Neolithic house.

You can see a pile of gravestones in the video above, there are a coupke of theories as to why these are here, one involves shipwrecked sailors and the other is a church graveyard was falling into the sea..choose your theory :).

Steatite… aka Soapstone… aka Talcum Powder

As I said yesterday I was off today to look at the Viking and Norse Steatite quarry down in the South Mainland.

This is down at Catpund, just a bit below the village of Cunningsburgh. The actual quarry is a bit of a climb up a hill, it is only 150m up, but it is a steep ascent, luckily a modern talc quarry ran a track up there in the 90’s so at least it was a dry walk. The quarry was used to make industrial Talcum Powder… from what I remember they removed over ten tons in the time they were in operation.

The historical strategy is about 50 – 60m away from the more modern site.

So we got up there and had an explore around the site.. we spent most of the time in a small area, but the actual original quarry went up and down the burn… so anyway here we have some spots where the Norse workers removed some blocks…

As you can see, these are rectangular gaps, this is pretty specific to the Norse period. More circular gaps are either earlier or later.

We also found evidence of where the chisels had done their work in removing the blocks…

The above photo was a pure fluke as the light was pretty rubbish due to cloud and mist. Just when I was about to give up, the clouds parked and the chisel marks leapt into focus.

I took a photo down the burn to show some of the Mills and associated buildings, including a planticrub (a walled raised bed).. this is the squarish structure on the left of the photo.

So if you would like to learn a bit more about steatite on Shetland then please have a look at the following blog post all about it (written by my wife)… https://www.archaeologyshetland.org/post/2016-1-16-in-depth-steatite-in-shetland

I got myself a couple of bits from the modern spoil heap and will try and make an oil lamp and a spindle whorl.

Exploring the Neolithic Landscape

Today was an exploration into the wilds of Collarfirth Hill to look for the evidence of neolithic stone factories. Now to be fair lots of people knew where they were… I didn’t though. This a view South from where we parked.

The body of water visible to the right is the head of Ronas Voe, the place mentioned in my naval battle post a while ago. Ronas hill is the one in the distance to the right of the photo.

As you can see from the photo it is a pretty rough landscape with loads of Granite strewn around.

Granite is one of the reasons we are here. Felsite is an igneous rock that is found alongside granite, it is an intrusion so on the hills the veins of felsite are in stark contrast to the reddish granite.

After about 45 minutes walking we came across the first of the quarries… we parked at the towers in the distance.

All of the felcite has been taken, and interestingly once this has been done the quarry was back filled. An archaeological excavation took place just behind where I took the photograph. The OSL (optically stimulated luminescence) data came back with a date at the bottom of the trench as 3600bc… so quite a while ago.

The stone was removed from the ground using hammer stones and wedges, we know this as they have been found nearby with some of the wedges still in situ. They were roughly worked at the extraction site and then moved for further work about 500m further down the hill.

When we get down to the main work site we found hammer stones and part worked axes…

This is a one that was left behind as it would seem that something had gone wrong with it. The weird thing is that I might have been the first person to touch this in thousands of years. The chips around it are spread for tens of metres with here and there hammer stones and the remains of failed axes.

A couple of hundred metres away from the work place we found the first of the houses. This hasn’t been excavated so we can’t be for sure the exact date. The Guy in the red, Steve, was our guide for this expedition. Steve and my wife Esther started Archaeology Shetland.

So there we have it a very ancient part of Shetland’s history, or rather pre history. The axes got further worked nearer to home, this is an example of further working

Once Felsite is exposed to air for thousands of years it loses its colour. The axes were either left worked or for a higher status item they would be polished.

The axes are found all over Shetland so it would seem that they were traded up and down the islands.

One thing we don’t know is why this particular stone was chosen as a high status item. It is a good old height (230 metres) up on the top of a rather large hill and would take a lot of time and effort to extract it , shape it and then hundreds more hours to polish it.

The one thing we didn’t find was ‘the tree stump. Shetland is known for being pretty treeless overall and then at 220m is rarer still. But evidently in dry weather the Peat recedes and the stump appears. It is from a Scots Pine that was 18 years old when felled. Dating would have it in the second century. Unfortunately when Steve took the GPS reading of where it was he emailed it to himself then lost the email. So, as you can imagine, trying to find a short tree stump amongst all the boulders, and Small valleys was nigh on impossible.

It was really good day out, I managed 14000 steps even with my injured back. Somehow I ricked it last night and was dosed up in paracetamol to help me out.