The Broch of Carn-liath, in Dunrobin Park, also excavated by Rev. Dr. Joass, consisted of a wall 18 feet thick, enclosing a central area of 30 feet in diameter. The doorway was 7 feet high and 3 feet wide. As usual, it goes straight through the wall; and at a distance of 8 feet within the outer face of the wall there are checks for a door, and a guard-chamber opens on the right side of the passage immediately within them. This Broch differs from that last described in having no chambers in the thickness of the wall, and it also presents the unusual feature of having two underground chambers faced with slabs, underneath the level of the central area. The only opening from the court into the thickness of the wall is the entrance to the stair, of which 25 steps remain, but the galleries are gone. Around the outside of the tower are the foundations of irregularly-formed constructions, of which it is now difficult to determine the character with certainty. The objects found in the excavation of this Broch consisted of about a dozen querns, three large stone mortars, a considerable quantity of hammer-stones or pestles, a large number of rings of shale or lignite—many in process of manufacture, two stone cups, scooped out of steatite, and a large ladle-like dish of the same material, a stone sinker rounded, oblong, conical at top and flat at bottom, and the top perforated by a hole for a cord, and another sinker with a longitudinal groove and circular depressions on either side. Of bone objects, there were two long-handled combs, and a piece of whalebone like a club, 14 inches long. Among the objects in metal, the most interesting were two plates of brass, each a little more than ⅙ inch in thickness, the one (Fig. [193]) oblong, rectangular, 11 inches in length, and 7½ inches in breadth; the other nearly semicircular, and about 7½ inches in radius. Both were found near the floor of the interior area of the Broch. They are hammer-marked with blows of the pin end of the hammer in lines across the surface. Dr. Joass remarks of them that this perhaps was one of the forms in which the metal was imported into the northern districts of Scotland for home manufacture. That they are brass and not bronze is certified by the analysis made of the one now in the Museum by Dr. Stevenson Macadam. The composition was found to be 82 parts of copper to 16 of zinc, with one part of tin, and a trace of lead. This fact is important, because while the alloy of copper and tin, which constitutes bronze, has been in use from an indefinitely remote prehistoric period, the alloy of copper and zinc, which constitutes brass, is not found earlier than the period of the Roman Empire. A silver fibula of peculiar form was also found in this Broch.[[84]] The form is not Celtic, but belongs to a type which is widely distributed over Central and Southern Europe, and is commonly associated with objects of a late Roman character. The only article in iron found in this Broch was a dirk-like blade greatly corroded. The pottery was abundant, but coarse and fragmentary, and destitute of ornamentation.
Fig. 194.—Ground plan of the Broch of Yarhouse, Caithness, with its Secondary Constructions, on a peninsula in the Loch of Yarhouse, cut off from the land by a ditch.
Fig. 195.—Circular Brooch of Brass, found with a burial in the mound covering the ruins of the Broch (2½ inches diameter).
In 1866 and 1867 I excavated the Broch of Yarhouse, situated in the south end of the loch of the same name, about six miles south of Wick, in Caithness. The ground plan of the structure is shown in Fig. 194. Its appearance before excavation was that of a conical grass-covered mound, 200 paces in circumference, and 18 to 20 feet high. It stood on a low flat triangular projection of the shore of the loch, and was cut off from the land by a ditch now silted up, and varying from 25 to 30 feet wide. In the upper part of the mound we found portions of two human skeletons, at a depth of from 2½ to 3 feet under the turf; and at different places on the sides of the mound, lower down, the remains of three other skeletons were met with. Near one of those first found was a flat circular brooch of brass (Fig. [195]), of about 2½ inches diameter. It was rudely inscribed with letters which appear to be a blundering attempt at the formula ISVS NAZAR [ENVS], a common and popular talismanic inscription on the brooches of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These skeletons were not enclosed in cists, but simply embedded in the earth and stones of the mound. They were not deep enough to have any determinable relation with the structure of the Broch below. They were all incomplete and the bones in disorder, though this might perhaps be accounted for by the movement of the loose material of the slope of the mound in the course of ages. The inference appeared to be that they were casual interments made in the mound long after it had become a grassy knoll. This was also the conclusion to which Dr. Joass came with respect to the burials in the mound at Kintradwell. It is easy to see how such a practice might have arisen in remoter districts, where burial-grounds connected with ecclesiastical sites were distant and roads were few. In point of fact, there is evidence which seems to connect the custom with the later Paganism of these northern parts. Mr. Petrie found a small cemetery of stone cists, containing interments after cremation, overlying the ruined Broch of Okstrow, in Orkney. In this case, the mound which covered the ruins must have been chosen as a place of heathen sepulture because it was a mound. A grave containing two oval bowl-shaped brooches, and therefore belonging to the heathen Viking time, was found in the upper part of a mound covering the ruins of a Broch at Castletown, in Caithness. I found a single burial in a stone-lined grave laid close to the doorway of the Broch of Brounaben, not far from Yarhouse; and burials were found in the mounds covering the ruins of the Brochs of Thrumster and Dunbeath, in Caithness. It is therefore probable that in all such cases the interments that are found immediately below the surface of these mounds belong to a time when the Broch had been so long in ruins that it appeared to those so using it as a natural grassy knoll.
Fig. 196.—Interior aperture of Doorway in Broch of Yarhouse. (From a Photograph.)
Fig. 197.—Entrance to the stair and window-like openings over it, in the Broch of Yarhouse. (From a Photograph.)