The 19th-century complex (students left), the excavated house (students centre) and the house on the knoll above (students right) (Photo: Michael Given)
It’s a slightly depressing thought that so much of learning archaeology is done by sitting in a lecture room or in front of a computer. That’s certainly been the case with my course ‘Landscape and Environment in Gaelic Scotland’ – which in the spirit of its acronym is supposed to show how important it is to get out of the lecture room and walk through the landscape you’re studying.
Towards the end of March we finally managed to do exactly that. With the kind permission of the National Trust for Scotland and with the support of my Glencoe colleagues Lizzie Robertson and Eddie Stewart, we took the class on a field trip to Achtriachtan in Glencoe. At last we could walk through this historic landscape, tell stories about what we saw, experience the sounds and smells of the plants of the soil, and on this particular day feel the wind driving horizontal rain into our faces. The authentic experience of Glencoe!
Above the old road is a small settlement of the 18th century which we knew well, thanks to the excavations of Derek Alexander and the NTS. The students quickly identified the cluster of three houses, including the one that Derek excavated, and then as they walked up and down and backwards and forwards across the hillside they found another big one up on a knoll above the settlement.
But it’s not just about houses. There are enclosures for animals or haystacks or growing vegetables, and a grain-drying kiln so that on days like this one you can dry your grain before storing or grinding it. There are patches of rig and furrow where the barley and oats were grown, and a sharp-eyed student spotted some very faint ones right among the houses.
GPS map of the features north of the A82 at Achtriachtan. The older settlement is on the left, the later complex on the right. The older houses are labelled ‘S1’ etc, i.e. ‘Structure 1’. (Map: Rob Ferro)
As part of the course, we spent a lot of time in the seminar room spotting exactly those sorts of features on satellite images and trying to work out their chronology. A common pattern is a little cluster of houses and kailyards and enclosures with rig and furrow round them in the 17th–18th centuries, just like here at Achtriachtan. Then there’s often the crofts of the late 18th and 19th centuries, long strips of land each with a house in them, as you can still see as you come into Glencoe village from up the glen.
And then there are the sharp-cornered sheepfolds and straight stone walls bordering rectangular fields which are slapped down over the older houses and cultivation ridges in the 19th century. These were for big, commercial sheep farms that were more profitable than small-scale tenant farmers. There are two such sheepfolds and long, straight stone walls at Achnacon just down the glen for exactly that purpose.
It’s hard making sense of the lumps and bumps that are all that’s left of a lively, bustling community. The archaeological solution to this (and almost any other problem) is to measure it and map it. The students battled with the wind and rain to draw sketch plans and, on one occasion, had to go chasing after a clipboard blown away in the gale scattering its papers across the site. Rob Ferro had brought his super-accurate GPS, and with a group of fellow-students walked round recording the features that the rest of us had identified.
Lower house on the left; energetic GPS survey in progress on the right. (Photo: Michael Given)
Below the older settlement at Achtriachtan there’s a complex of walls that we’ve wanted to look at properly for as long as we’ve been working in Glencoe. The weather made it hard to do it ‘properly’, but we managed enough to show that it doesn’t fit that nice chronological scheme at all.
Furthest down is what really looks like an older house running down the hill, very likely because the byre was in the lower half so the effluent would run out of a drain in the end wall. Beside and above it are a series of very 19th-century looking terrace walls creating some tidy right angles; the lowest has a line of structures or rooms below it, making another neat right angle, as if part of a farm courtyard. The top terrace wall has a line of enclosures built into it – some with right angles, some irregular.
The 19th-century (and earlier?) complex below the old road, with waterfalls on Aonach Dubh beyond. (Photo: Michael Given)
This is a puzzle. It’s not a classic 19th-century sheepfold or sheep farm, like at Achnacon and in numerous places across the Highlands. One of the houses is apparently older than that, but has become part of a later complex. The whole thing is neither one nor the other, as if it’s grown into the 19th century rather than the older remains being wiped out and replaced with a tidy modern complex, all right angles and straight lines.
What’s interesting about this is that we have other examples of these hybrid complexes, most striking at Achnambeithach just behind the later 19th-century house – as we found out on another very wet and windy fieldtrip.
And that’s the great thing about being out in the landscape. It challenges your ideas and simplifications when you haven’t thought them through – or, more specifically, when you haven’t walked them through.
A wet lunch… (Photo: Michael Given)
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