Further mysteries to be explored as lid goes back on Westray excavation
(From The Orcadian dated October 3, 2002)

Archaeologist Graeme Wilson inside the walled structure which forms the centre of the Knowe of Skae. The excavation revealed that the walls of the structure were built at different periods of occupation. (www.orkneyphotographic.co.uk)

A team of professional archaeologists from Edinburgh are about to put the covers back on top of a rescue dig on a headland at Berstness, south of the farm of Langskaill in Westray.

It is the second full season of excavation funded by Historic Scotland on the Knowe of Skae which is threatened by coastal erosion. The surrounding area is rich in archaeological remains from different periods and the mound on the promontory which has been opened up this summer has revealed some equally interesting, but puzzling finds. These were put on show at an open day at the site last weekend.

Permission to work on the site has been granted by the local landowner, Mr Morris Barton. In charge of the excavation has been Mr Graeme Wilson from the company, EASE, or Environ-mental and Archaeological Services Edinburgh.

Mr Wilson explained what the team have been able to establish from the knowe.

“It is probably 7th to 8th century AD. Everything we’ve been finding, all the finds, have been pointing very securely to that kind of date. We’ve had a few pieces of bone comb, perhaps two complete bone combs, actually. They were very nice, decorated objects and you can quite securely date that kind of thing.”

They have also had some bone pins and bits of iron, all pointing towards the late first millennium AD. But the peculiar thing about the site, says Graeme, is a big structure that everything has been sitting inside.

He explained: “The interior is actually rectangular, at one end anyway. But outside you’ve got this massive wall, which must be up to maybe about four metres thick in places. It’s not a broch. You can see that the body of the house wall is composed of skins of wall lines, and each wall is tipping at mad angles.

“It seems like they’ve not built it very well and as the thing has tipped over, as the outer face has fallen out, they’ve shoved up another skin to try and shore it up a bit.”

The diggers have put some trenches through the wall to try to make some sense of it, and have been picking up wall lines in various locations.

“It’s a bit puzzling. Although we’ve removed a lot of the features in the interior, the interior of this house is more or less rectangular. They had box beds along the edges – something like at Skara Brae, that similar kind of arrangement. But much later in date, and there was a central hearth and one or two other little compartments. An interesting thing on either side of the hearth, at the north end, we had little holes, maybe for a spit or something, a nice little feature.”

Graeme Wilson feels that the knowe could well have been built in such a prominent spot for a number of reasons, not least for show.

He said: “It doesn’t appear defensive in any way. I think that the location, to my eyes at least, looks so unusual that they must have chosen it for a particular reason. Whether that’s because they actually wanted to be seen and make a statement. ‘This is us, we’re easily seen, we’re out on the end of this point’. It’s a big ‘South Fork Ranch’, if you like.

The team of archaeologists working on the Knowe of Skae in Westray have come across a jumble of human bones which indicates that the area may have been used as a cemetery at some point. (www.orkneyphotographic.co.uk)

“The promontory behind us has got a lot of burial cairns on it – from a much earlier date as well, so it makes you wonder what on earth was happening out here. The other thing you have within the body of the mound that this building sits within, are an awful lot of burials – lots of human bone – hardly any of which appears to be ‘in situ’ or how it was when it was first buried.

“You’ve got odd bits and pieces which go together, bits of leg, bits of arm bone, but just generally concentrations of bone. It is beginning to look like the site has been used as a cemetery at some stage. But we don’t have dates for these burials. My guess is a similar date or slightly later than the house.”

One thing which is evident from the site is that each of the walls from the different periods seem to be well constructed.

Graeme Wilson believes that this may be provide the best clue to the original use of the whole headland site. He gave his preliminary thoughts.

“It’s extremely well built and the stone that this structure is actually made out of is quarried stone. You can see the faint fracture marks that are made on the stone when it has been prised up from maybe a bed of stone. That’s a building technique which you don’t normally associate with this date and this period. It is possible that we’ve got a much earlier building here, which has been re-used during the Iron Age.

“Whenever the building was built, we can see that there has been a lot of alterations to it through its life. Walls have been put up and taken down, little cells have been blocked off, changes in the entrances and everything.”

There was, he felt, a very interesting story about the life of the building, and the life of the people who had lived in it.

He indicated what the team from EASE hoped to do at the Knowe of Skae site next season.

“This is the tip of the iceberg. We can now see in the floor of the Iron Age building on top here, other structures, other stones poking through from below. So we’re fairly sure there’s something else under here. Plus, we haven’t really had time yet to examine the whole of the mound and we know from last year and the year before that there is a whole load of more structures out there, a lot of different things happening.

“Until we get a better and wider look at this whole site, we won’t really be able to understand how it has developed and how it fits into Westray as a whole and Orkney.

“It is a really typical Orkney site, where you’ve got one thing on top of another, and because it is all built out of stone, it has survived, so we can find it fairly easily. It’s not like a site further south where things were made out of wood and disintegrated over the years.”