Are you ready for this? I have never been as excited as this to make
a YouTube video because today we re in Shetland. We re going to see something that s uniquely
Scottish, but we re going to the absolute best example of it,
and we re getting to take you to it when there s nobody else there.
We re going to Moussa Broch. So if you re interested in the people,
places and events in Scottish history then click the subscribe button at the bottom
right of the screen. In the meantime,
let me take you to someplace you d be crazy to miss
Say Scotland and people think bagpipes and kilts and haggis and tartan
Now I love them all, but all these marketing
men s wet dreams are things you ll find in other countries in one form or another.
What we re going to visit today is something you ll only find in Scotland
and yet I wonder how many of you have ever been to one.
Well today I m going to show you the best broch you can ever see
Mousa Broch
Now Mousa Broch is in Shetland , and I feel like the luckiest man alive,
because Promote Shetland have sponsored me to come to talk about Shetland.
Say Shetland and you don t think about bagpipes, kilts or tartan.
You think about Up Helly Aa, fishing, oil, fiddle music
And brochs are even more Shetlandy than they are Scottish if that s possible.
The point is I ve wanted to go to this one for years and they ve paid me to come here,
So, what is a Broch? I hear you ask
A broch is an Iron Age construction that s unique to Scotland.
In fact they re almost exclusively found in the north of Scotland and its islands.
Here s a map showing where you ll find known broch remains.
They reckon there are between five to six hundred of them across Scotland, that have survived since
the Iron Age in various states of disrepair , but a quarter of them are in Shetland.
So if you want to see brochs in their natural habitat, this is the place to be.
From five to fifteen metres in height In case you re younger than fifty,
twenty to fifty feet internal diameter in casef you re older than fifty.
If you re European or American, you can fight it out amongst yourselves.
They re big, round and mainly collapsed ancient buildings
but not the one we re going to see 2min55 A broch is a bit like a tower of two concentric
cylinders, an outer wall and an inner wall
and in between the two walls a spiral staircase takes you from one level to another.
There may be compartments inside the tower on the ground floor,
wooden flooring across to create upper floors and probably a roof on top.
It s difficult to be too definitive about brochs because they come in different types.
Some have smaller round houses on the outside. Some are next to rich farmland; others
are solitary and on rocky outcrops. Their name is synonymous with fort,
but keep your pants on, I ll come on to function in a minute.
Most of them were built around 100 years before or after the birth of Christ.
Now I m not suggesting that he had anything to do with them.
Three wise men saw a star in the east and much further north and east again they
heard tell of cylindrical forts that were uniquely Scottish and the shepherds said:
Lo I heard you get some bonny, good-looking sheep up there and they re proper good at kissing.
No, I think the whole Jesus thing was coincidence
and there were some outliers that had been built a bit before that.
I m just saying that most of them appeared in the north of what we call Scotland
on exactly the day that Jesus was born assuming a rounding error of about a hundred years
or more But why did they appear?
The obvious answer would seem to be for defence.
Big strong towers appearing at a time when iron weapons started to become available.
Fifty percent of brochs are surrounded by some kind of defensive formation or barrier.
People had been consolidating for some time; living closer together.
The next step was to live communally for protection.
The locations where there were houses round about the broch
surely meant that people retreated from these houses into the broch in times of danger
like a Norman castle a thousand years later. The problem is that, apparently,
archaeologists have never found any evidence of conflict, battle or aggression around brochs
although I ve got a wee snippet from a Viking saga for you later.
Another explanation was that this was just a big posh house for the Iron Age lord of the manor.
A des res for the local toff, where his underlings literally
lived under him or maybe around him.
The broch was a status symbol rather than protection
so why is it that some of them are found in remote barren areas?
Post codes where everybody s shooting, but nobody s hunting or fishing
That ll be America then? There may be trouble ahead
I m saying postcodes where self-respecting estate agents have to resort to the descriptive
up and coming where you look at the particulars and say:
A five bedroomed house with an integral double garage, a swimming pool and a tennis court,
and we can afford it! and the sales agent says Aye
it s in Fife It s OK, the Fifers can take a joke
and most of them don t have guns
The point is that people who know way more than me are still arguing over the motivation,
so if you thought a deeply insightful answer was more likely than a puerile joke then
you ve only got yourself to blame. I will make one observation though.
As we head across the sound to the stunningly preserved broch on Mousa, the island of moss,
on the mainland opposite are the remains of Burraland Broch.
Like two sentries guarding the sound they stand.
If there is a pattern then that type of watchful sentinel seems to repeat on land and sea.
Are they forts set up by a military society to scan and protect the land and seas?
but it s time to meet the star of the show and not just this show.
Mousa broch also starred in Ian Rankin s 1997 Rebus crime thriller Black and Blue
I won t spoil the plot. Are you Rebus readers?
I love the Rebus books. They feel about as authentically Scottish as
any other books I can think of. Let me know in the comments if
you ve read Rebus and if not why not?
Mousa Broch also starred in a Viking Saga in fact two.
Both sagas involved eloping couples, but two hundred years apart,
who stopped off at Mousa Broch.
It was the Gretna Green of Norse Medieval romance.
The Orkneyinga Saga tells us that in 1153
a certain young Erlend eloped with Margaret, the mother of Earl Harold Maddadson.
What? His Maw?
Have you no shame sir? Truth be told it was all
mixed up in the complex power politics between the Canmore Kings of Scotland
and the Norse kings and who would control Caithness, Sutherland, and these Northern Isles,
during the reign of David I of Scotland. Anyway Erlend and the cougar mum
came from Orkney to Shetland to elope and settled down with Elrend s band of followers.
Earl Harold, let s call him Cougarson (and I d love it if that was actually a real name)
came up and laid siege to the broch, shouting: That s ma maw
ya randy radge ! but apparently, he found it too secure to storm.
So there was a reconciliation, Erlend married Margaret
and they put down their weapons and just had a series of awkward Christmas dinners
followed by a murder. It s the kind of thing that happened up here.
You can see how it might have been difficult to storm.
They reckon it s stood since 300 BC. One of the outliers we mentioned
but an outlier in more ways than one. It s the tallest surviving, and was probably
the tallest ever, broch at 43 ft. 6 in tall. It has the smallest diameter of any broch,
but at fifteen feet its walls are much thicker than in others.
Is that what has preserved THIS broch? Is this why it s stood the test of time?
Thousands of stones, about a foot by six inches, placed carefully and held together, not with
cement, but gravity and balance. There would have been a surrounding
wall about 20 feet out from the broch, that was more than seven feet thick.
They tell me that the wall came first and the broch came later.
So if not for defence, then why this arrangement?
To be honest, it s not the WHY of this broch that lures me here , it s the fact of it.
To walk through a door that was walked through by our Iron Age forefathers.
To look into the guard cell of the watchman who kept the door.
To walk into the tower and inhabit the space where pre-history comes to life
is magical. People cooked here. People
talked here. People laughed, exchanged news, They planned for the following years, setting
out goals and dreams for the future. Did they scheme? Did they plot?
Were they happy with their lot glad to be within these protective,
or respected walls? Later they built huts and
wheelhouses inside here but as I sit on a bench,
on which people sat centuries ago, I wonder, did they wonder what the future would hold.
As they sat on this bench could they have imagined
a boat that crossed from Shetland mainland to Mousa, without oar or sail,
but driven by diesel oil drilled from the very rock beneath the sea out there?
Could they have conceived machines that fly,
bringing visitors from the huge island to the south.
Did they build this place as protection from visitors from the south?
As they burned what scarce fuel the surroundings provided,
could they have imagined a world where there would be so much burning
that it would change sea levels around them
How did you see life my Iron Age Shetlander?
I ve visited lots of historical sites in my journeys to understand the people,
places and events in Scottish history. All have been intriguing. Some have been magical,
but few have been quite as magical as this. Did they climb these stairs to bed or to work,
to play? Did they feel proud,
special, safe? There are so many
questions I d like to ask the spirits of the men and women who walked these galleries
passing on the stairs, apologising for getting in the way,
asking to borrow a needle so carefully carved from bone.
Showing a cousin a new tool made from the so recently discovered iron.
Who would have been in there? How would they have lived?
When they climbed to the top of their broch did they feel as privileged as I do now?
They could hardly have imagined the journey to our time
but we can come to Shetland and visit theirs. We can stand in this same place that they did.
For years I ve wanted to come here and see this for myself.
I m not disappointed . This is truly astonishing
You d be crazy not to want to come here and experience it for yourself.
If you want to know about another must see place from our history then there s one coming
up on screen now... In the meantime