What they found

Brochs are only found in Scotland. And their design of two concentric walls gives them a unique, easily identifiable footprint. Or at least that's the theory.

The reality is a little more complicated. At Applecross, on the north-west Scottish mainland opposite Skye, Time Team found itself looking for dry-stone walls built on a stony landscape and covered with stony rubble. 'The challenge isn't so much finding a needle in a haystack as finding a needle in a very big pile of similarly sized needles,' quipped Tony Robinson.

There were times when the sense of humour of Time Team's hard-pressed diggers was tested to the limit at Applecross. The presence of an 11,000-volt electricity cable directly above the main excavations ruled out any help from a mechanical digger, so the human diggers had to shift seemingly endless tons of stone by hand.

Did we mention the rain?
And did we mention the rain? It might have been June, but the Scottish skies showed no mercy on Time Team's decreasingly merry band of campers. By the end of the second day, the ceaseless downpour was turning any kind of digging into a very wet, muddy – and hazardous – operation.

It was proving difficult to distinguish which stones were part of the surviving broch structure, which were part of the collapsed broch structure, and which were nothing to do with the broch at all. Even when a clearly defined line of a wall was uncovered, it wasn't easy to work out whether it was the inside or outside of the wall, or whether the wall was the inner or outer one. Working in atrocious conditions, as trenches were extended or new ones put in to try to solve the riddle, all of the diggers put in a heroic effort to get on top of a site that stretched them to the limit.

'Footprint' of the broch
Eventually, thanks to the diggers' industry, Time Team was able to get a clear picture of the 'footprint' of the broch. Eighteen metres in diameter at its outside wall, it consisted of two concentric circular walls, which were 4.6 metres wide at their base. Phil's excavation of what he initially thought might be an entrance in fact uncovered the remains of one of the stone staircases that would have gone up to the higher levels inside the broch.

Dating the structure had not proved easy either. The archaeologists' commonest method – dating based on pottery finds – wasn't as helpful as usual here. Local archaeologist Cathy Dagg, who worked on the programme, explains: 'The problem with pottery here is that for millennia people just used the same local materials, so body shards aren't going to tell you whether it's Iron Age or Pictish – or much, much later because making pot from local clays went on right through the 17th or even 18th century in some places.'

Nonetheless, the Team did eventually manage to uncover some 'diagnostic' pottery, which was dated to between the second century BC and the first century AD. This placed the structure firmly in the Scottish Iron Age: the period when brochs were being built throughout north-western Scotland. Despite the great reluctance of Time Team's various experts to commit themselves until towards the end of the dig, there was no doubt now – this was a classic Iron-Age broch.

Outside the broch
Outside the broch itself, meanwhile, Brigid had found what she described as 'definite evidence of Iron-Age activity, cut into the natural – dark soil with a lot of charcoal, maybe even slag in it'. This turned out to be a hearth or a furnace for metal working. It was dated to about 200 BC by a fragment of cordoned ware pottery found in the deposits.

Also outside the broch, a number of rectangular structures on the same ridge were found to be post-medieval barns. An interesting anomaly that showed up well on the 'geofizz' turned out to be the burnt remains of a Silver Jubilee bonfire in 1977. A tantalising geophysics result on the final day, which seemed to show a possible 'wheel house' (so named because its walls have the outline of a spoked wheel), could not be investigated for lack of fresh diggers.

Challenging
All in all, then, what you might call a 'challenging' dig – and one that gave everyone associated with it a new respect for Scottish stone and weather – and for the Iron-Age people who knew how to handle them both so well.

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