Background information on Mine Howe

The circumstances of its original discovery are unclear. Some say the structure was first found when a man with a horse-drawn plough hooked a flat flagstone to reveal a flight of steps leading to an underground chamber. Others report that a farmer, fuelled by stories of 'mysterious' things in the hillocks or 'howies' on his land, decided to investigate several of the mounds. With a group of local enthusiasts he started to dig into Mine Howe and its neighbour Long Howe.

Investigations at Long Howe were quickly abandoned when an entrance started to appear in Mine Howe and a flight of steps was revealed. Over a period of some three months the steps and chambers were cleared, with reports of many stone tools being found. The whereabouts of these tools is presently unknown. Due to uncertainties about the structure and fears that animals might fall down it, the farmer ordered the hole to be backfilled, using oil drums to block the stairs, with topsoil and stone thrown on top.

Rediscovery
And so the site remained until Douglas Paterson decided to investigate the story of the spooky underground house he'd heard about as a boy. With the help of Sandy Firth, who had visited the site as a boy, and his neighbour, Clifford Shearer, he managed to find the exact location of the 1946 'excavations'.

Even by Orkney standards, which has some of the best upstanding prehistoric archaeology in Europe, the site Douglas rediscovered was amazing. In a mound, which from its external appearance looks largely natural and no different from a scatter of similar mounds in the vicinity, an extraordinary underground structure was revealed. A flight of 17 stone steps descend to a half-landing where they turn back on themselves and a further 11 steps descend to a chamber.

This chamber is only about 1.3 metres in diameter but is over four metres high with a corbelled roof. The bottom step into this chamber is 0.9 metres high and gives it a cistern-like appearance. At the half-landing two subsidiary chambers/passages open out, one above the other. It was at the entrance to the lower chamber that Douglas found a single dog skull. Most of the structure is lined with beautifully built dry-stone walling.

Geophysics
Click here to view John Gater's geophysics survey findings.

The remarkable nature of this structure and the 'mystery' surrounding it was further enhanced when John Gater, the Time Team geophysics expert, was hired by the Orkney Archaeological Trust (with sponsorship from Historic Scotland and the Orkney Islands Council) to survey the mound and the area around it.

Using various techniques – ground-probing radar, magnetometry and resistivity – he discovered that the underground chamber was not the only archaeological feature associated with this mound. The mound was surrounded by a massive (though now completely invisible) ditch about two metres deep, five metres wide and fifty metres in diameter, with a single six-metre-wide entrance gap. Several smaller and shallower ditches encircle this main ditch. Beyond the ditch entrance strong readings, suggestive of an extensive area of settlement, were recorded.

All of this throws up many questions about the site: how old it is; what it was used for; how the various separate elements of the site relate to each other; whether they are contemporary or we are dealing with a multi-period site; what the local environment was like; whether there was a structure on top of the mound etc.

With these and many other questions in mind the Orkney Archaeological Trust devised a strategy for the excavation of the site. The location of their proposed trenches can be seen on the printout of the geophysics results. These trenches were designed to answer as many questions about the site as time and money allowed – most importantly the relationship between the mound, its encircling ditches and several other anomalies. Until the post-excavation work is complete many conclusions remain speculative, but OAT offered the following tentative answers to the most commonly asked questions prior to the excavation's completion.

Dating
Several elements of the site, such as the dry-stone construction techniques, would indicate that the site is probably Iron Age in date – that is about 2,000 years old. This is also backed up by comparison with other known similar Iron-Age sites. Although the scale of Mine Howe marks it out, several smaller, but similar structures are known in northern Scotland.

Several broch (large Iron-Age tower) sites have underground chambers associated with them. At the Broch of Gurness, also on mainland Orkney, a so-called 'well', again accessed by a flight of stairs and with associated side chambers, was excavated earlier this century. Many brochs are also surrounded by series of ditches. However, the main ditch at Mine Howe does superficially resemble the ditch around the Neolithic henge site of the Standing Stones of Stenness, also on mainland Orkney. So perhaps we are looking at a multi-period site.

Function
As at Mine Howe several of these underground structures exhibit a scale and complexity that would argue against their interpretation as simply wells. Recently Anna Ritchie has argued that the Gurness 'well' may have acted as an oracle or shrine. Indeed, contemporary Roman documentary sources inform us that Iron-Age Celtic religion partly involved the worship of natural spirits – water, earth and sky. Often their shrines tended to be in places that were conceived of as liminal – on the borders of two places.

Could Mine Howe have had some similar religious or ritual function as a place for communicating with the earth spirits or underworld?

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