The Scottish Crannog Centre
Martin Shields / Scottish Crannog Centre
Up at Loch Tay, waterlogged archaeology preserves the ordinary materials of daily life, allowing crannogs to tell us about a rich and varied role they have played in Scotland's history.
The Scottish Crannog Centre cares for more than 5,000 objects connected with crannog dwellers, while the archaeology of sites such as Oakbank has preserved material that often disappears elsewhere: worked wood, organic matter, tools and rare textiles. Put together, those fragments can reveal food, farming, craft and daily routines in remarkable detail. Reconstruction and experimental work then allow different questions to be tested and discoveries to be made.
It involves looking closely at the ordinary things. A grain of barley, a worked piece of timber, a pot, a tool or a small piece of woven wool can explain as much about daily life as a weapon or prestigious object. This place tends to the never-ending 'just one more question' effect: am I looking at something excavated, something reconstructed, something that expands current thinking or something entirely groundbreaking? Each can evoke a slightly different emotion and experience.
What fascinates me about crannogs is how close the archaeology can take us to ordinary daily living in a distant past; one that's been lost forever on the surface. Waterlogged sites such as Oakbank preserve worked wood, plant remains and even textile, so the story is much broader than defence, status or display. I also like the uncertainty: crannogs were built, abandoned, rebuilt, and reused in different periods and did not all serve the same purpose.
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