Crannog

Our clothes and hair now smell of wood smoke. Today we crossed a wooden causeway then sat on deer skins beside a fire in the centre of a roundhouse while listening to accounts of life as it would have been on a crannog 2500 years ago. Despite it being summer it was pleasant to sit beside the warm fire as water lapped below the bracken covered wooden floor and swallows swooped onto the high beams under the high thatched roof. Draughts were being kept out by the walls woven with hazel twigs and stuffed with sheep fleece, goat fibre, and bracken while a variety of dried herbs and plants hang from the rafters. Later we watched bread being made and sampled beer made in the way it would have been brewed. Even the remains of ancient butter had been found in a dish below the loch floor. Children tried making fire and turning wood and marvelled at the dugout log canoes.

The Crannog on Loch Tay is a reconstruction of an Iron Age lakeside dwelling based upon the actual archaelogical remains and built in the manner that would been used for the original crannog on the site. Crannog sites are found all over Scotland in lochs and many were built out in the water as defensive homesteads and represented symbols of power and wealth. They were of wood and built on platforms set on piles or stakes to maintain them above water level with an underwater causeway or built on stilts as here.