In Aberdeenshire, Scotland, near the village of Rhynie, is a big hill called Tap O' North, and crowning the hill is an ancient stone fortification. The Tap O' North Hill Fort has drawn the attention of archaeologists for 150 years, and it dates to between 450 and 600 AD.
At the foot of the hill is another Pictish settlement that overlaps with the modern village. This place was long known for its carved Pictish stones, such as the Rhynie Man, which is famous enough that you can order it on a stone or silver pendant.
And the Craw Stane, i.e., Crow Stone.
I wrote
back in 2011 about excavations taking place in Rhynie, which identified a settlement surrounded by a wooden palisade, along with glass and pottery imported from the Mediterranean. Oddly, the time periods for the two sites overlap, with the lower town dating to between 500 and 650 AD. It may have been destroyed by fire, maybe more than once.
This week's news is the release of a study done on the hilltop by mapping with laser-equipped drones. Notice on that top photograph that the central fort is surrounded by an outer wall. Within that outer wall archaeologists working on foot had identified about 200 hut sites, but the laser mapping reveals 600 more. A settlement with 800 houses ought to have been pretty big, and the investigators are throwing around numbers like 4,000 people. I feel compelled to point out that this assumes all the huts were occupied at the same time, which is not at all certain. But anyway it is strong evidence that this was a major settlement.
And that tells you something about Scotland in AD 500, because the top of that hill would have been a miserable place to live: howling winds, no water, no soil where you could plant even a single cabbage. You would, if you could, live in the valley, where everybody lives today. And it seems that these Pictish folk did try to live in the valley, but got attacked and burned out. So they kept going back to that inhospitable hilltop, where life might be grim but at least they were safe from being axed in their sleep.
4 comments:
"I feel compelled to point out that this assumes all the huts were occupied at the same time, which is not at all certain."
"And that tells you something about Scotland in AD 500, because the top of that hill would have been a miserable place to live: howling winds, no water, no soil where you could plant even a single cabbage. You would, if you could, live in the valley, where everybody lives today. And it seems that these Pictish folk did try to live in the valley, but got attacked and burned out. So they kept going back to that inhospitable hilltop, where life might be grim but at least they were safe from being axed in their sleep."
I think the probable explanation here is that most of the huts weren't normally occupied at all, and that (as is not remotely unusual in history!) this was a fortress built largely as a fallback point - a secure place to retreat to when invaders arrived who couldn't be driven off.
Such a site would quite naturally need enough room to house many people fleeing from surrounding areas (along with stored supplies to sustain them), but most of the time it likely sat mostly unoccupied, needing little more than a minimal garrison to keep it in good order.
As you point out, it would have been a miserable place to live longterm - but it's exactly the sort of place you'd want to have available to hole up and outlast invaders, and a place from which to send out raids to harry said invaders, then retreat to before they can respond. Just hunker down and make life hell for the attackers until attrition forces them to leave, if for other reason than food.
The Craw/Crow stone looks like a fish and a dolphin.
@Susi
The top symbol is clearly a fish, but the lower symbol looks to me like a long necked waterfowl such as a goose.
In particular, I believe it should be compared to other Pictish stones such as the Easterton of Roseisle stone - which quite clearly shows a fish and a goose (or similar bird) in a strikingly similar style.
Or the Gairloch stone, again showing a fish and a remnant of a symbol that appears to be the lower portion of a bird - suggestions being either an eagle or a goose, as they're both apparently quite common on Pictish stones. The fish themselves also seem fairly common, even on stones without birds such as the Dunrobin stone, and the popular suggestion is that they likely represent salmon in particular.
As for the name "crawstane" or "crow stone", it's clearly not a reference to what the stone depicts. The other stones I've mentioned are named after the places they were found, but this stone stand off by itself a bit and clearly wasn't named after any nearby locations. My guess? Occam's Razor would suggest that it was given its name because crows perched on it.
Addendum: I decided to look up the locations where the fish / bird stones come from, and they all have nearby rivers or streams.
I find myself wondering if these might simply have been markers to indicate a location suitable for fishing and for hunting wetland fowl?
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