If I lived in the Iron Age at Loch Tay

We were on our two and a half hour drive to the Cairngorms National Park while I caught up on the local area with Rick Steve’s Scotland we got from the library. Note: He says to prepare before your trip and read up on the area to be an A student. So I suppose that makes me a C student cramming before the final exam. In the course of reading, I learned of the Crannog Visitor Centre that has a recreated iron age dwelling with interpreters dressed in period clothing explaining life in the Iron Age. I was sold! Additionally, Adam’s pick at the local Stockbridge Library just two days ago was a book on the Stone Age which he loved and has been talking about consistently. He’d asked me if we were going to see things from the Stone Age on our trip. This was off by about 8,000 years but as close as I think I could ever come to meeting that request! So a quick Google mapping showed we should exit in 5 miles and detour to the center. The visit was fantastic and the boy’s writing assignments that night were to write a story about living in the Iron Age. To that end, here is my writing assignment including what I learned. Parenthesis include a few modern era additions.

I’m a farmer. That’s my chosen trade and that of my parents and their parents. We first came to Loch Tay a few generations ago (in 2,500 BC). We live in a remote part of this land (of Scotland) without many other people living nearby. When we first arrived, a dense forest surrounded the loch (lake) and we had to work as a group to clear the land enough for me to plant. In addition, we used the trees we felled to build our shelter. The shore was too forested to build a shelter large enough for our tribe of 20. Additionally, it took us many months to clear the 700 trees we needed to in order to have space for our crops and we couldn’t afford to use up that clearing with our home. We also want anyone coming from far away to know this area is claimed by us and our chief gets to have the best house. So, we set about using our lumber to build a shelter over the water, called a crannog (that’s what we call it today, anyway).

Loch Tay is a medium sized lake that has several other crannogs and we chose a site away from our neighbors and where we could see far in each direction. The bottom of the lake is covered with clay so that we could sink long poles in about 5 feet and they would stay. It took many men from our group to float the pole out, upright it and screw it into the lake bottom. We made a circle of these poles, about twenty in all. We also built a pier to create a bridge to our crannog. This will protect us and our domestic animals from the wild animals on shore (lynx and the like). It will take us 10 months to build our shelter and we must work fast before the heart of winter sets in (which arrives 5 weeks earlier than in the modern age). I help soak the holly branches to make them pliable so we can weave the walls for our lodging. The inner and outer woven walls have wool and bracken (ferns) stuffed in between to keep out the wind. The floor of the crannog is also covered with wool and bracken to keep wind out and items from falling through the cracks. Even so, some things do fall through (and are found by archaeologists!). We fence off an area inside for our animals: sheep and chickens (and maybe cows).

As soon as the field is cleared, it is my job to plant the land and I do my best to provide a good variety of foods for my tribe. I mostly plant barley that we will use to add to soups or stews and to make beer and bread. The slaggings at the bottom after we make beer will hold good yeast to make leavened bread we can enjoy together. But I also plant flax, yarrow, spelt, mugwort, emmer, bog myrtle, and hawthorn. I also spend my time foraging in the forest and surrounding hills for other plants or berries to eat and even collect some for our weavers to use as dyes for our cloths. Uric acid was used to set the colors - bet you can guess where we got that from!

My tribe has people who specialize in many trades. We have blacksmiths who can forge iron from bog ore. We used to use bronze but iron is stronger and lasts longer, so now we make weapons and tools from iron. We have weavers who have looms and make colorful fabrics for us to wear. Trees and levers are used to create simple machines to run bellows for the forge, lathes for woodworking, and drills.

When the Romans visited, they noted our flaxen hair and brightly colored clothing. We trade with people who visit from far away, for example we have opium seeds from Afghanistan. We are told the best freshwater pearls come from our Loch Tay.

This is my life in the Iron Age.