After being repeatedly thwarted by wet and windy weather, an evening of glorious sunshine on Thursday saw an impromptu UHI Archaeology Institute expedition to a barrow cemetery in Orkney’s West Mainland.
The goal was to secure photographs to accompany the Knowes of Trotty chapter in Professor Jane Downes and Professor Colin Richards’ forthcoming volume, Animating the Dead: An Archaeology of Bronze Age Burial Practices in Orkney.
With Jane and Colin were Sigurd Towrie, of the UHI Archaeology Institute, and MRes student Sue Dyke.
The Knowes of Trotty is one of the biggest Bronze Age cemeteries between Orkney and southern England and the only one of its kind in known in northern Britain. Despite its scale and grandeur, it is also a notoriously difficult site to photograph.
Found at Huntiscarth, in the parish of Harray, at the foot of the western slope of the Ward of Redland, the Knowes make up one of Orkney’s earliest groups of Bronze Age barrows and were in use from approximately 2000BC-1600BC.
The site is made up of a series of 16 barrows arranged in two rows. Aligned roughly NNE-SSW, the two lines extend over 350 metres through what is now a damp, marshy landscape.
Until the early 21st century, the Knowes were best known for the 19th century discovery of prehistoric gold and amber ornamentation. But excavation by the UHI Archaeology Institute in 2005 revealed that the highly visible Bronze Age activity was preceded, at least 1,600 years before, by a Neolithic settlement.
Geophysical surveys in 2001 confirmed that the barrow cemetery once contained at least two more mounds and was probably made up of 20 barrows.
Re-excavation of the primary barrow – Mound one – revealed that it had been raised on top of a sculpted, natural mound to increase its height and enhance the visual effect.
It also suggested that a Neolithic structure had once occupied the mound’s summit – a building that had been levelled to allow the barrow’s construction. Another unusual element was the inclusion of Neolithic midden material and large, flat slabs in the body of the Bronze Age barrow mound.
At the Knowes of Trotty, the decision to erect a barrow cemetery on the site of a possible Neolithic settlement – not to mention placing the primary burial directly on top of the remains of a structure – was a statement.
To the 2005 excavation team, it was “almost certainly a desire … to draw power and authority to themselves and their emergent ancestors by emphasising origins, situating their burial monuments upon the remains of their ‘founding-fathers’”.
A short distance to the north-east of Mound one, the remains of an Early Neolithic house were discovered in 2002. Based on its architecture, the structure clearly dated from the fourth millennium BC – built sometime between 3400BC and 3100BC.
