15-05-2025
I tried 2600-year-old bread at an 'ancient' village in Scotland
Out of context, the small box in front of me would look to contain nothing more than a scrap of extremely well-worn rag. In fact, it's the oldest ever example of tweed found in Scotland, dating back to as early as 420BCE. "Archaeology is a load of rubbish," quips Izzie Hanby, our guide on a Scottish Crannog Centre tour. "Everything we have in here is something someone has thrown away or left behind, and we come along, pick it up, and analyse it."
She's right. Everything on display at the independently run museum in the Perthshire village of Kenmore - from a butter dish with remnants in its grooves to an ornamental clothes peg - was once discarded, left to lie in situ until someone came along and found it worthy of investigating.
"If we didn't have any of this, we wouldn't have outside at all; the museum is the most important part of what we do," says Hanby. The "outside" she's referring to is the replica Iron Age village, a series of thatch-roofed roundhouses set up just as life would have been all those centuries ago.
We follow the smoke to the first of the semi-open huts, where we're met by one of Hanby's colleagues, who's flattening and cooking blini-sized pieces of bread over the fire. They're made from emmer, an ancient grain, which would have been ground down to a fine flour with two stones and brute force. Another group member tries his hand with the crude mortar and pestle while we're given the rundown on the intricacies - or lack thereof - of an Iron Age kitchen. Piping-hot servings of flatbread topped with homemade cheese are passed around. They're so good I'm not even ashamed to go back for seconds.
I pop the flatbread into my mouth as we find a seat in the blacksmith's roundhouse. Yet another one of Hanby's colleagues is manning this hut, and he's furiously pumping the forge blower, kicking up embers and covering himself in a fine layer of soot. He's getting the coal to temperature to show us how nails would have been forged 2600 years ago. It's hard work hammering and bending the hot iron, but not as much work as the woodworker puts in next door, manually spinning the lathe to shape a wooden goblet.
The final stop on the tour is the textiles roundhouse, where Hanby reveals the details of her latest research project. She's exploring how to get different dye effects on textiles in the most unusual way: using woad - a blue dye extracted from the leaves of the Isatis tinctoria plant - and urine. Though it has shock value, using urine to develop the colour of this natural dye on wool is a recognised technique and was used by the famous Harris Tweed right up until the 20th century.
I'm happy to learn that the small hanks of hand-dyed wool for sale as we exit are urine-free, so I pick one up as a souvenir. The self-funded centre relies on sales and donations, and I'm more than happy to do my part in helping to preserve this important part of Scottish history.
The writer was a guest of Visit Scotland.
Out of context, the small box in front of me would look to contain nothing more than a scrap of extremely well-worn rag. In fact, it's the oldest ever example of tweed found in Scotland, dating back to as early as 420BCE. "Archaeology is a load of rubbish," quips Izzie Hanby, our guide on a Scottish Crannog Centre tour. "Everything we have in here is something someone has thrown away or left behind, and we come along, pick it up, and analyse it."
She's right. Everything on display at the independently run museum in the Perthshire village of Kenmore - from a butter dish with remnants in its grooves to an ornamental clothes peg - was once discarded, left to lie in situ until someone came along and found it worthy of investigating.
"If we didn't have any of this, we wouldn't have outside at all; the museum is the most important part of what we do," says Hanby. The "outside" she's referring to is the replica Iron Age village, a series of thatch-roofed roundhouses set up just as life would have been all those centuries ago.
We follow the smoke to the first of the semi-open huts, where we're met by one of Hanby's colleagues, who's flattening and cooking blini-sized pieces of bread over the fire. They're made from emmer, an ancient grain, which would have been ground down to a fine flour with two stones and brute force. Another group member tries his hand with the crude mortar and pestle while we're given the rundown on the intricacies - or lack thereof - of an Iron Age kitchen. Piping-hot servings of flatbread topped with homemade cheese are passed around. They're so good I'm not even ashamed to go back for seconds.
I pop the flatbread into my mouth as we find a seat in the blacksmith's roundhouse. Yet another one of Hanby's colleagues is manning this hut, and he's furiously pumping the forge blower, kicking up embers and covering himself in a fine layer of soot. He's getting the coal to temperature to show us how nails would have been forged 2600 years ago. It's hard work hammering and bending the hot iron, but not as much work as the woodworker puts in next door, manually spinning the lathe to shape a wooden goblet.
The final stop on the tour is the textiles roundhouse, where Hanby reveals the details of her latest research project. She's exploring how to get different dye effects on textiles in the most unusual way: using woad - a blue dye extracted from the leaves of the Isatis tinctoria plant - and urine. Though it has shock value, using urine to develop the colour of this natural dye on wool is a recognised technique and was used by the famous Harris Tweed right up until the 20th century.
I'm happy to learn that the small hanks of hand-dyed wool for sale as we exit are urine-free, so I pick one up as a souvenir. The self-funded centre relies on sales and donations, and I'm more than happy to do my part in helping to preserve this important part of Scottish history.
The writer was a guest of Visit Scotland.
Out of context, the small box in front of me would look to contain nothing more than a scrap of extremely well-worn rag. In fact, it's the oldest ever example of tweed found in Scotland, dating back to as early as 420BCE. "Archaeology is a load of rubbish," quips Izzie Hanby, our guide on a Scottish Crannog Centre tour. "Everything we have in here is something someone has thrown away or left behind, and we come along, pick it up, and analyse it."
She's right. Everything on display at the independently run museum in the Perthshire village of Kenmore - from a butter dish with remnants in its grooves to an ornamental clothes peg - was once discarded, left to lie in situ until someone came along and found it worthy of investigating.
"If we didn't have any of this, we wouldn't have outside at all; the museum is the most important part of what we do," says Hanby. The "outside" she's referring to is the replica Iron Age village, a series of thatch-roofed roundhouses set up just as life would have been all those centuries ago.
We follow the smoke to the first of the semi-open huts, where we're met by one of Hanby's colleagues, who's flattening and cooking blini-sized pieces of bread over the fire. They're made from emmer, an ancient grain, which would have been ground down to a fine flour with two stones and brute force. Another group member tries his hand with the crude mortar and pestle while we're given the rundown on the intricacies - or lack thereof - of an Iron Age kitchen. Piping-hot servings of flatbread topped with homemade cheese are passed around. They're so good I'm not even ashamed to go back for seconds.
I pop the flatbread into my mouth as we find a seat in the blacksmith's roundhouse. Yet another one of Hanby's colleagues is manning this hut, and he's furiously pumping the forge blower, kicking up embers and covering himself in a fine layer of soot. He's getting the coal to temperature to show us how nails would have been forged 2600 years ago. It's hard work hammering and bending the hot iron, but not as much work as the woodworker puts in next door, manually spinning the lathe to shape a wooden goblet.
The final stop on the tour is the textiles roundhouse, where Hanby reveals the details of her latest research project. She's exploring how to get different dye effects on textiles in the most unusual way: using woad - a blue dye extracted from the leaves of the Isatis tinctoria plant - and urine. Though it has shock value, using urine to develop the colour of this natural dye on wool is a recognised technique and was used by the famous Harris Tweed right up until the 20th century.
I'm happy to learn that the small hanks of hand-dyed wool for sale as we exit are urine-free, so I pick one up as a souvenir. The self-funded centre relies on sales and donations, and I'm more than happy to do my part in helping to preserve this important part of Scottish history.
The writer was a guest of Visit Scotland.
Out of context, the small box in front of me would look to contain nothing more than a scrap of extremely well-worn rag. In fact, it's the oldest ever example of tweed found in Scotland, dating back to as early as 420BCE. "Archaeology is a load of rubbish," quips Izzie Hanby, our guide on a Scottish Crannog Centre tour. "Everything we have in here is something someone has thrown away or left behind, and we come along, pick it up, and analyse it."
She's right. Everything on display at the independently run museum in the Perthshire village of Kenmore - from a butter dish with remnants in its grooves to an ornamental clothes peg - was once discarded, left to lie in situ until someone came along and found it worthy of investigating.
"If we didn't have any of this, we wouldn't have outside at all; the museum is the most important part of what we do," says Hanby. The "outside" she's referring to is the replica Iron Age village, a series of thatch-roofed roundhouses set up just as life would have been all those centuries ago.
We follow the smoke to the first of the semi-open huts, where we're met by one of Hanby's colleagues, who's flattening and cooking blini-sized pieces of bread over the fire. They're made from emmer, an ancient grain, which would have been ground down to a fine flour with two stones and brute force. Another group member tries his hand with the crude mortar and pestle while we're given the rundown on the intricacies - or lack thereof - of an Iron Age kitchen. Piping-hot servings of flatbread topped with homemade cheese are passed around. They're so good I'm not even ashamed to go back for seconds.
I pop the flatbread into my mouth as we find a seat in the blacksmith's roundhouse. Yet another one of Hanby's colleagues is manning this hut, and he's furiously pumping the forge blower, kicking up embers and covering himself in a fine layer of soot. He's getting the coal to temperature to show us how nails would have been forged 2600 years ago. It's hard work hammering and bending the hot iron, but not as much work as the woodworker puts in next door, manually spinning the lathe to shape a wooden goblet.
The final stop on the tour is the textiles roundhouse, where Hanby reveals the details of her latest research project. She's exploring how to get different dye effects on textiles in the most unusual way: using woad - a blue dye extracted from the leaves of the Isatis tinctoria plant - and urine. Though it has shock value, using urine to develop the colour of this natural dye on wool is a recognised technique and was used by the famous Harris Tweed right up until the 20th century.
I'm happy to learn that the small hanks of hand-dyed wool for sale as we exit are urine-free, so I pick one up as a souvenir. The self-funded centre relies on sales and donations, and I'm more than happy to do my part in helping to preserve this important part of Scottish history.
The writer was a guest of Visit Scotland.
