(https://c4.staticflickr.com/4/3409/3197979866_093616fb35_b.jpg)
I've published my every-second-Saturday post at The Wranglers blog. You'll catch that post HERE ... although I've now reblogged it below, since I'm home again.
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Today, I’m out with my FOCUS Craft Fair group at an
Aberdeenshire town named Insch (Scottish Gaelic: An Innis or Innis Mo Bheathain), about 14 miles North West of my home.
The Gaelic name for Insch is intriguing to me, especially
the Bheathain part, because one of
the minor characters in my Celtic Fervour Series is named Beathan. Beathan means ‘lives by a clear stream’ and when writing Book 1 of the series, I also found a reference to it meaning 'one with a great future'. That sounded like a perfect name for a child who had been predicted by Nara's ( my main female character) druid brethren to be one who would, in the future, be a leader of the tribes. Back in 2011, I chose to simplify the spelling to make it easier for my readers - but now I'm not sure I should have.
Beathan is
in Book 4 of my series (currently being written and that's an 'oh, dear still at it' moment) and, according to my long term
plan, he will be the major character in the last planned book of the series -
Book 5.
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| Wikimedia Commons |
But back to Insch. (pronounced IN SH) Today, is the first time I’ve visited
Insch to sell my novels and like all of the new venues that I’ve visited during
the last year, I’ve learned a little about the place I’m visiting. Though it’s
only a small town of just over 2 thousand inhabitants, it’s on the train line
between the main cities of Aberdeen and Inverness . That might not seem like earth shattering
information but most Aberdeenshire towns and villages don’t have a direct train
link.
I’ve driven past Insch many times and have always admired
the imposing structure that’s up on the nearby hillside. From a distance it
resembles a folly but it’s not - it's a lot more than that.
The Hill of Dunnideer (locally also spelled as Dunnydeer)
was the site of an ancient hillfort, thought to be of the Middle Iron Age ( maybe 350 B.C.-190 B.C.) though
dating of it is uncertain. As with many of the other high hills around
Aberdeenshire, the view from the top of Dunnideer is spectacular. It’s easy for
me to imagine how those ancient inhabitants of the hillfort observed what was
going on in the valleys below them. It’s not too far a stretch of the
imagination to envisage a system of ‘fire’ signals between these high spots
which would have alerted the tribespeople of the Garioch area to any
substantial threat to their livelihood – like the huge threat of the Ancient
Roman invaders I write about in my Celtic
Fervour Series and in The Taexali
Game, my time travel novel for teens. As a centre of power, religious or secular, those walls would have made an impressive impact.
There's almost nothing left of the structure of the original hillfort. What’s still visible now is the
arch of a pointed medieval window, which originally gave light to a first floor hall of
a rectangular tower house. When intact, the tower house must have been a sight to see towering even higher over the landscape than the hillfort would have done. It was possibly very threatening to what would have been a simple agrarian community working the foothills below. By then, it would have stamped the 'serfdom' status of the people of the land as few other things would have done. It wouldn't have seemed that the overlord was an 'out of sight -out of mind' ruler. His tower house was definitely 'in their face' and would have been a daily reminder of who was boss.
The building was first mentioned (in writing) as the stronghold of Sir
John de Balliol in 1260, though it's likely to be much older than that.
Possibly the earliest tower house of its kind in Scotland , one
of the walls has been known as Gregory’s Wall and it may have been built by
Gregory the Great in AD 890. If not by Gregory, it could have been constructed
by order of David, Earl of Huntingdon and Garioch in 1178. This David became
King David I of Scotland .
These sites give more details on David I, some of which may explain why he was possibly the one to commission the building of the tower house.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/david_i.shtml)
What's also unusual about the remains of Dunnideer Tower house (sometimes named Dunnideer Castle) is that the granite blocks
used to build it had been vitrified. A vitrified hillfort was one where extreme
heat caused a fusion of the stones, and some form of integrated wood, the continued conflagration melding them together. Charcoal deposits from the vitrification process have been carbon dated which have furnished us with the 'B.C' dates mentioned above.
This vitrification process of
adding such extreme heat on purpose is not well understood, yet. The reasons for it remain
unclear though archaeologists don’t believe the ‘heat’ process was done to
strengthen the building during construction. One theory is that vitrification
took place after a deliberate destruction of the stronghold, either because it
was under threat from an enemy or because the structure was no longer needed
for its original use. Some theories indicate that the hillforts were not built for protection reasons but were perhaps religious or spiritual centres, and that the eventual destruction may have been due to a change in the belief system, or because the site was no longer used for the same sacred purposes.
I'd very much love to know a whole lot more about these ancient hillforts.
How about you?
Here are a couple of photos taken from my phone camera on the way home today- a bit far away but what a beautiful early dusk!
Slainthe!
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