Towers To Stand The Test Of Time

In this, the Year of History, Heritage and Archaeology, Scotland’s “brochs” are attracting considerable attention.

- Paul F Cockburn

IT’S not often that archaeologists have proved English writer Dr Samuel Johnson wrong.

Back in early autumn 1773, Johnson was exploring the Highlands and Islands with his friend and later biographer James Boswell. While on Skye, their attention was drawn to “a circular in closure, about 42 feet in diameter, walled round with loose stones, perhaps to the height of nine feet,” as Johnson later explained in his Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland.

Johnson noted that their temporary guide, one Mr Macqueen, believed the thick-walled ruin to be a Danish fort, while the local inhabitants thought it was “the original seat of the chiefs of the Macleods”.

Johnson, however, was not convinced. “In Skye, as in every other place, there is an ambition of exalting whatever has survived memory to some important use, and referring it to very remote ages.” He himself believed it more likely to be a cattle enclosure from what he termed more recent “lawless times”.

In 1773, archaeology as a scientific discipline wasn’t even a glint in an trowel-maker’s eye but, nearly two-and-a-half centuries later, we now know that the object of Johnson’s attention – Dun Beag – is at least 2000 years old.