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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| ...All 2000+ were apparently well defended... |
2000+, Frank? That's one every 5 miles!
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| 2000+, Frank? That's one every 5 miles |
Most are small (including duns) and clustered in Wales and the Scottish borders (Hogg shows a very good plot in his book). Adding the brochs in Scotland and Islands would increase the total much further.
I understand Ishmael will shortly be putting up my revised map of Hill forts/bury/worths which better illustrates the spread than the earlier attempt.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Hogg shows a very good plot in his book. |
Can you find or scan Hogg's picture and post it for us?
Come to that, anyone know about hillforts in Ireland and on the continent?
| Adding the brochs in Scotland and Islands would increase the total much further. |
The brochs are clearly different and typically later, aren't they? Dunno 'bout crannogs.
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| Last I heard, orthodoxy was bending over backwards to show that a self-sustaining arable life was possible in the Shetlands if they spread enough alkaline(?) sand on the acidic(?) soil; but it is only necessary to conjure up this (unevidenced) scenario if we think the broch people were agriculturally self-sufficient. They'd have to be bonkers. |
West Shetland was the best land, and with a temperature 4c higher, Val Turner estimates that the population could have been 10,000. To put that in perspective the present population of the whole of Shetland is 21,000. Farming began about 5300 years ago, coming from the north if Stephen Oppenheimer is right. See his book, Origins of the British.
The farmers fought the encroachment of peat on the higher land for 500 years, finally abandoning the area about 1500 BC. The evidence of the neolithic farming lies preserved beneath the peat, perhaps one of only three areas of the British Isles where it is possible to study Neolithic farming. Other sites are Cladh Hallan on South Uist and Dartmoor. Val needs money for the dig. Anyone got any?
Shetland is more fertile than you might think, but most of Shetland has been subjected to rubbish farming for millennia. That includes runrig, crofting and common grazings. One place looks good, Weisdale, where the landlord evicted the tenants and took the land in hand. As a result it supports a higher population than any area where the common grazings system carries on.
Rousay in Orkney is a good place to study ancient settlement. The good land divides naturally into 15 areas. Around 3000 BC each had a chambered cairn. The one which best survives, Midhowe, is fantastic. It is 85 feet long and shows mastery of dry stone technique. On the same site is a well preserved broch, but all the other 14 probably had a broch. In medieval times, each acquired a church, usually adjacent to the cairn and broch.
Both Orkney and Shetland are musts for students of British archaeology. Now we know the vast age of the remains there, their importance is enormous.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| The farmers fought the encroachment of peat on the higher land for 500 years |
D'you mean water-logging of the ground spread uphill? What are the signs that they fought it, rather than just did what they could on crappy and worsening land until it wasn't worth any effort anymore?
Since peat is just the product of what grew there, if they could grow anything there at all in the first place, the farmers should have been pretty well placed to decide whether it turned to peat. Praps they weren't any good at it.
| One place looks good, Weisdale, where the landlord evicted the tenants and took the land in hand. As a result it supports a higher population than any area where the common grazings system carries on. |
Curious then that they were trying so hard to spin a story of self-sufficiency from paltry evidence. If, as you say, it just takes a bit of proper land management to turn the place around, then the lack of evidence probably means they weren't farming at all (in the broch period). But it's only orthodoxy that is desperate to show that they were, because orthodoxy assumes everyone was. But that's not normal.
| Rousay in Orkney is a good place to study ancient settlement. |
Spoken like a true archaeologist. Unfortunately, the rest of us will need to be convinced first that Rousay in Orkney is in any way representative of ancient settlement in the British Isles at large. Archaeologists are terribly misbehaved in this area.
| On the same site is a well preserved broch, but all the other 14 probably had a broch. |
What makes you say that? If the cairns and the churches have survived, what happened to the other 93% of brochs (or 98% of large, stone constructions)?
I tend to assume the brochs were not built by Scots, so it doesn't surprise me that they are out of proportion to other features here. Is Midhowe also the largest cairn, at the posh end of the island -- the first, and apparently only, place to attract a broch there?
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| Can you find or scan Hogg's picture and post it for us? |
Will do, but would you kindly advise on how to paste a scan into this website?
Also quickly looking into Brochs via Cunliffe, Hogg only covers hill forts and Duns.They are as you advise mostly in the NE Scottish Highlands,Orkneys,Shetlands, Lewis and Skye.
All these localities have(a few) burys(i.e. brough,burgh).
Nevertheless judging from their apparent performance in England, the bury builders were an aggressive lot indeed. Perhaps the original local people needed Brochs as defence, but I guess were short-lived as the burys are still functioning as settlements.
As an afterthought, the Hill forts/Duns scattered about the Highlands, might they be the result of a different people escaping from the bury builders in the south - the borders are packed full of them??.
Thus, if I understand correctly, as Ishmael explained in another thread 'Scotching the Scotch', a barrier of this kind in the borders region would isolate ( i.e. scotch) the northern part of the island from other bury people in the south and thereby possibly generate the term Scotland.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| would you kindly advise on how to paste a scan into this website? |
Send it to Ish as before: the first step is to get the picture hosted on the internet somewhere.
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| Come to that, anyone know about hillforts in Ireland ? |
On checking the web, apparently very few, if any, of the Hill fort type found on the British mainland are present, but plenty of undated so called stone built ring forts. Presumably the bury builders didn't venture into Ireland?
Nevertheless there are a few English place names around Limerick,Cork and Waterford and elsewhere along the coast - might they predate the Norman incursions? For example Harold II (of Hastings notoriety) had estates at Wexford, so maybe some form of English speaking settlement existed in the area at this time. I guess it's not too much of a sea crossing from there to Pembroke where the villages have an old English place name look to them in the SW corner.
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When I said that Rousay was a good place to study ancient settlement I was referring to the abundance of evidence, not that it was representative, which it clearly is not. The remains of some brochs are vestigial so we have to assume they were brochs. I did not want to be too dogmatic. I had only a few hours on the island.
The quality of the masonry is due to the abundance of stone of the ideal shape and the sizes needed. That is, one assumes, why Orkney has the oldest masonry in Northern Europe.
I neglected to explain why the higher land on West Shetland had to be abandoned. It was the fall in the temperature to the critical point where in a wet climate peat starts to form. So it started on the higher ground. To answer the other questions one would need the help of Val Turner. I expect she explained but I took no written notes of what she said. I seem to recall that there was a general fall in temperature in Britain around 1400 BC. But some at least of Orkney was, for other reasons, abandoned much earlier, about 2400 BC, if I recall correctly, about the time that the Egyprians started to construct masonry buildings. Anyone want to make something of that?
_________________
G W Gardiner
Author of Towards True Monetarism and The Evolution of Creditary Structures and Controls
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Nevertheless there are a few English place names around Limerick, Cork and Waterford - Might they predate the Norman intrusions? |
It is the contention in THOBR that Ireland was English-speaking in the east and Gaelic-speaking in the west, just as on Great Britain.
It's not especially clear in the map I posted on the Beaker People thread, but I believe beakers are found at least around the Dublin area. The distribution of beakers seems to me an uncannily good fit for the English speaking parts of the British Isles, as well as modern cities across western Europe: as though very little has changed.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| When I said that Rousay was a good place to study ancient settlement I was referring to the abundance of evidence, not that it was representative, which it clearly is not. |
Then Rousay is a good place to study ancient settlement in Rousay. But that won't stop archaeologists extrapolating an awful long way.
| The quality of the masonry is due to the abundance of stone of the ideal shape and the sizes needed. That is, one assumes, why Orkney has the oldest masonry in Northern Europe. |
That's one way of looking at it: that the availability of materials (and the meteorological encouragement to use them) meant they got good at this very early on.
On the other hand, that the materials are still there means they were never exploited in a big way; and that the ancient remains are still there means they gave up and buggered off a long time ago.
A contrary conclusion might be that lowland England made the best and earliest use of stone, as evidenced by the lack of such stones littering the ground and the extent and age of "hard infrastructure", to coin a phrase.
| It was the fall in the temperature to the critical point where in a wet climate peat starts to form. |
You're only underlining the fact that it was a crappy place for farming. At the time of the brochs, there is little evidence of farming, so why do they work so hard to interpret the place as having been populated by farmers? It's only because they are wedded to the idea that farming is the most basic activity without which nothing else is possible. Please see the Jacobs Crackers? thread for a debunking.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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Are the borough/ burgh/ bury separate identities or are they intricately linked to the nearby 'high place' where the local population could go for protection in difficult or dangerous times.
And how is it this 'high place' Hill Fort bears a GREEK name?
Purgos is Ancient Greek for
1. a fortified structure rising to considerable height to (a) repel a hostile attack and (b) to enable watchmen to see in every direction
2. a tower
Burgh is supposed to be Old English/Germanic but it is clearly Ancient Greek in origin.
I guess they just borrowed it from the Romans.
Nope there is no variant of Purgos/Burgos/Berg/ Burgh/Borg/Borough anywhere in Latin. The Latin word is Castrum/Castle.
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| Burgh is supposed to be Old English/Germanic but it is clearly Ancient Greek in origin. |
I understand an updated version of my original plot of these plus Hogg's detailed diagram of Hill forts may shortly be posted up by Ishmael for comparison.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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I went off to the UK before posting it. Will be back home tomorrow. Try to post on Sunday.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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I mentioned that Burg/Borough which is assumed to be Anglo Saxon/Germanic is actually Ancient Greek -- Purgos.
It is famously used in the Homer's Iliad as Pergamos, the highest place in Ilium/Troy over looking the battle/flood plain. Contrary to what is interpreted by scholars, Ilium was not a city of stone it was a palisaded Hill Fort.
It was transcribed as a stone city because classically schooled scholars have always placed it in a GREEK context.
When Odysseus and his crew left the 'Mediterranean' island of Circe they feasted on wine and sweet meats before setting sail. The Ancient Greek word used in the Homeric tale is Methu which has been transcribed as WINE. This is not the Ancient Greek word for wine (oinos).
Methu is the root word of Metheglin and Medu which is MEAD a fermented beverage made of honey and spices that comes from Norse Europe. Mead was unheard of in the Med before the Vikings travelled to the Black Sea.
How could Odysseus be drinking mead at a time when it was unknown in the Mediterranean until the Middle Ages?
The principal river or the Troad was the Skamandros which appears to have no explainable origin.
That is unless you combine the Ancient Greek
Skamma = that which has been dug, trench, pit.
And
Andros = man, of man
Skamma-Andros -- Skamandros = a river/canal dug by men, a manmade river.
Now where in the world would you find a massive palissaded Hill Fort overlooking a floodplain crossed by manmade canals/rivers?
Perhaps the Romans not only built new roads over older ones they also built new canals over existing ones.
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