History / Excavations offer more insight into history of Gletness coastline
GLETNESS was a hive of archaeological activity over the weekend as trial excavations took place to try to unearth more history about the area.
Among the results was confirmation that there appears to be a couple of large Iron Age buildings on the coast there.
There is also now greater understanding of a Bronze Age burnt mound there, which unusually appears to have a well.
Evidence of human activity from more than 1,600 years ago – including a possible broch and village – had previously been identified at the coast in Gletness in the Nesting area, which is a site under threat from coastal erosion.
The SCAPE Trust, from the University of St Andrews, and members of Archaeology Shetland undertook trial excavations there between Friday and Monday to glean more insight into its history.
SCAPE works to save and record some of Scotland’s coastal heritage which is at risk of erosion.
Principal research fellow Joanna Hambly said SCAPE was first alerted to the Gletness area around ten years ago by regional archaeologist Val Turner.
“We’ve been keeping our eye on a section for a long time,” she explained.
“Archaeology Shetland have also been paying regular visits to the site to keep an eye on it and document it.
“We’ve been up here for more or less a month, and we’ve been doing surveys in Yell. But we also did a few days at Gletness with Archaeology Shetland.
“We cleaned the section again, and we opened up some trenches to properly understand the structures to help us with the dating and understanding the significance of the site.”
Hambly said it looks like there are “at least two” Iron Age buildings in the eroding section of coastline.
They are damaged, though, and appear to have been “comprehensively flattened” at some point.
“They’re big buildings, they look quite significant,” she said.
“They’ve only a few metres away from a little islet with a broch on it.
“In the Iron Age it wouldn’t have been an islet, it would have been a peninsula.
“So we’ve got a broch on the island, which would have been connected to the mainland in the Iron Age, and on the shore side it looks like an Iron Age settlement which is probably associated with the broch.”
Hambly said some Norse items were found too, including a fishing weight, which would have come from later inhabitants.
“It looks like there’s very long-lived occupation from the Iron Age, all the way through into the medieval period, and it’s all right on top of each other,” she said.
“There’s definitely a Norse site there and underneath is a big Iron age site.”
There is also a burnt mound in the area too, which was previously known about.
A burnt mound – which date from the Bronze Age – is described a collection of fire-cracked stone, which were used to heat water.
In Shetland the many burnt mounds recorded here have shown evidence of small “rooms”.
Archaeology Shetland chair Stephen Jennings said the excavations established that the burnt mound in Gletness is a “complex” one, and unusually, appears to contain a well.
He said the local group first undertook a “clean and record” on the eroding coastline a couple of years ago, establishing that there may have been a broch off the mainland.
This time around the digging established that in the coastal area “it looks like there are two distinct buildings”.
“The trenches weren’t wide enough to tell exactly what kind of buildings we have, but they are drystone constructed buildings.”
Jennings said this suggests there may have been a village that once existed around the broch.
Describing the four days in Gletness as “very successful”, he added: “We’re hoping that has given impetus to perhaps work in the future, to take a closer look at what these buildings might be, even if it’s non-intrusive, like some updated geophysics on the landward side.”
Archaeology Shetland had around 10 volunteers on site on most of the days, while two people from SCAPE and one from the University of Aberdeen were involved too.
The next steps are to compile a report on what was discovered.
There was little time to rest for Archaeology Shetland, however, with volunteers then helping out with excavations in Cunningsburgh this week led by the University of Aberdeen’s Northern Picts project.
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