Grand Designs, Iron Age style

Ros and I are still in Scotland, minding our own business and doing some tourist stuff, and yesterday was an opportunity to 'stretch the legs' of our trusty hire car, as we set off out of Perth to the north-west, up the A9 and then off towards Loch Tay, following the river.

Our destination was the Scottish Crannog Centre, just outside Kenmore, a village where the Loch becomes the River. Now, as you all know, a crannog is a small, reclusive member of the weasel family, and extremely hard to spot in the wild.

Actually, a crannog is rather more interesting than that. A crannog was a circular dwelling, built over water, connected to the land by means of a raised walkway. In itself, the notion of building over water is quite unusual, but given the relative levels of technological advance, it would be difficult enough now, but without heavy equipment, significant levels of manpower and metal, it would seem like a challenge too far.

Steve, our guide, took us out to their reconstruction, and explained how they worked. The first task was to sink around 120 poles, each up to forty feet long, into the silt at the bottom of the loch, set in four concentric circles. Next, you built a wooden platform, made of logs with a smaller diameter, before building a circular building on top, using more poles, hazel wicker panels and bracken stems to make something recognisably like thatch. Incredibly effective, amazingly resilient, there is evidence of crannogs pretty much everywhere in Scotland.

I do find myself wondering one thing though. Building over water is very complicated, so why not build a house and dig ditches around it? However, once built, a crannog was sturdy, easily secured and convenient for trade. And someone had had the intellect to see the idea and to design a solution.

Not so clever, we twenty-first century folk, methinks...

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