Yesterday, despite a bitter southeasterly wind, I was up in the hilly land to the east of Glas Bheinn looking for traces of the people who lived here anything from hundreds to thousands of years ago. West Ardnamurchan is a wonderful place for anyone who has an interest in archaeology as, unlike many places which have either been built over or worked as farm land, the remains of old structures are relatively undisturbed and there to be found.
My trouble is that I don't have any background in archaeology, so probably miss far more than I see. For example, is this pile of stones man-made, perhaps some sort of cairn, or is it entirely natural? Worse, even when something is clearly of human construction, I often have no idea what it is. There are times when I stand beside such a site and feel like screaming with the frustration of not knowing.
Learning a new subject completely from scratch is daunting, but times have changed for the better. The internet is a valuable source of both explanations and pictures, and there are some super books that can be bought. But here on West Ardnamurchan we have a wonderful way of learning new things - the
Kilchoan Learning Centre, run by Pat Glenday. I followed a module of a degree-level archaeology course last year, and have just embarked on my second, both run by the
University of the Highlands and Islands. There is a weekly video-tutorial, linked to Lews Castle on Lewis, a structured course to follow, and access to a wealth of learned journals. But I can't learn quickly enough. Judging by the way the stones are arranged, the structure in the picture above has seen a human hand, but I really don't know what it is.
To some extent West Ardnamurchan is, archaeologically, a closed book. We have some first-class sites, such as
Greadal Fhinn in
Ormsaigmore (pictured) and the incredibly rich
Camas nan Geall, but they haven't really been investigated. The one place that has is Swordle, on the north coast, where the
Ardnamurchan Transitions team have made some very exciting finds, including a buried Viking longship. The place is waiting to be explored.
Satellite imaging ( google earth and terrasat ) provide us all a wonderful new perspective on the ancient communities and surrounding agricultural developments of the past. As the resolution of images available to us all improves year by year, drains and boundary lines, walls and constructions we might not even spot on the ground are revealed. The sheer scale of what was done in ancestral times to improve the ground all along the west highland coast is astounding. The energy and persistence this required over millenia quite staggering from our lazy mini digger/quad bike/power drill perspective.
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