BROCHS – IRON AGE BLACK HOLES

While black holes are one of the most mysterious phenomena in the universe, brochs are not very far behind, holding a parallel not only in their mystery, but also in their reality: brochs, it can be suggested, were literal black holes; dark, enclosed spaces without openings or any ventilation other than the small, guarded entrance. Of course, this assumes that the broch was roofed; the argument for these structures being fully enclosed has been put: see – https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2017/01/on-brochs-enigma-of-meaning-form.html. Shetland’s archivist, Brian Smith, might disagree.#

The point of raising this characteristic of brochs has been stimulated by the history of the illustration of the interiors that attempts to clarify the functioning of the broch which is not very well understood at all. These drawings typically show the precise detail of the ideas proposed as the broch’s purpose, sometimes with each rock being clearly visible, along with precise structural details, implements, storage items, and even faces; everything is usually shown as being crystal clear in a bright, even light, as though everyday life had been brought indoors, into a large, comfortable, castle-like space, looking like a carefully arranged, well-lit tableaux. The clarity is persuasive, but the reality is very different.

Broch interiors were dark; black; illuminated only by the soft, smoky flame of the peat fire, or the flickering yellow flame of an oil lamp or candle. Nothing was clear; figures must have been difficult to distinguish in the gloom enclosed by the cold, rock walls across which the floating shadows must have moved like mysterious phantoms of the night. Most suggestions made by the illustrators are fanciful visions that could never be, yet they form the basis of how we consider brochs, or are prompted to do so. Only very rarely do we see gloomy renderings of broch spaces; the eye settles easily for the light, bright detail that ‘explains’ functions with a clear, uncritical certainty; but we must remember that broch interiors were very likely to be far from these hopeful visions. We are encouraged to imagine a bright, clean and cosy interior, just like home, when the space was black, almost impenetrable until the glum light of the flickering glim, the flame, highlighted something for the eye to guess at.

The cave painting researcher, Izzy Wisher, noted this reading of forms as pareidolia – see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2024/11/pareidolia-cave-painting-theory.html. The broch must have been as mysterious as any cave, completely devoid of light other than that of a flame.

We live in a bright, well-lit, LED world, where everything and anything is flooded in light of any brightness and colour we might choose; we expect this. Our involvement with the dark is always managed with light. Izzy wears a convenient LED head lamp when she enters a cave to inspect the paintings. Broch dwellers had, at best, a candle. We have to overcome our desire to bring our world and our experience to a judgemental understanding of other’s lives in other times. These eras were a separate totality embodying the same, raw human emotions that we are engaged with today. These broch times were neither good nor bad; not better or worse than ours: just different.

We can start with dark: experiencing dark in our time is a difficult challenge; just ask any astronomer. The only times I have experienced true black, dense darkness was in Shetland – see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2023/04/shetland-dark.html - and in France. The Shetland dark was remembered as one night driving through the naked hills in the safety of the car. We stopped, turned off our lights and stepped out into the void. It was in Chartres cathedral that the fear of total darkness overcame all senses late one overcast autumn afternoon during a quick visit as we were passing on our way back to Paris from Brittany. We were following the advice we had been given: “You must see Chartres.” While milling through the nave space with hundreds of others, one suddenly became aware of the dark that had descended, a gloom that made faces indistinguishable, and forms vague. One lost one’s sense of location as well as all contact with one’s colleagues: one was truly alone, in an unknown, unfamiliar space, surrounded by strangers. One was vulnerable, exposed, lost, left without any visual or emotional anchors or references: the interior of Chartres was pitch black. Relief came only when one had managed to discover an exit.

This experience must have been the norm for the broch dwellers, yet it is rarely envisaged or illustrated. The ironic cliché here is that an illustration, a word from a Latin source, seeks to 'throw light onto a subject,' making the expression of darkness a real dilemma. Rather than envisaging this dim world, we like to assume a broch is like a castle, with similar functions. One can draw these analogies and parallels - see : https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-castle-broch.html - but the significant differences are vital to understanding the purpose of the broch. The broch, with its entry sealed off, has no windows or specific ventilation other than the air that might flow through the stone walls. It hardly offers a reasonable habitable space.

Even the blackhouses of Lewis that are named after their grim appearance, have windows. The interior of the house at Arnol is frequently photographed showing sunlight streaming in to highlight the homely wisps of smoke rising from the central, smouldering peat fire on the floor. The blackhouse could be opened up to breezes as required for threshing and winnowing, and for cleaning the byre. Brochs offer no such delight or facility. They have to rely on flames for light, and lack any flexibility for other purposes. Was it this lack of flexibility that caused their demise? Was the broch too specialised a structure to endure? Without flames, one is left with a pitch black interior with the only shaft of light coming from the open entry: close the door and the darkness is complete, with the broch becoming the Iron Age black hole.

Light would have been essential for any operation inside a broch. Even the photographs of the ruins today suggest just how grim and gloomy the interiors must have been. Light would have been needed in the lower level for its general purposes. Here a central fire is frequently suggested: this would have given some general light for packing, unpacking, collection, and distribution, as well as warmth and smoke that, it has been suggested, was useful in preserving and protecting the stores above. Light would have been needed on these upper storage levels to place and retrieve stores critical for survival; light would have been useful to help negotiate the stair, and would have become critical for the ceremonies in the ‘chapel’ space. Carrying a flame on the stairs would not only have been useful for the climb/descent, but also necessary for any fire in the ‘chapel’ - for want of a better description for a place for spiritual ritual/celebration/retreat.

Even with flames, the darkness would have prevailed, dancing around as shadows in grim, black voids, shaping the experience of place. There was no clarity of vision in the broch. Physiognomies must have been difficult to interpret, either for recognition of identity or mood. Little wonder the entry was so well guarded: a stranger could never be let into a broch, such is its cloistered concealment.

Even the darker interior representations reveal an unreal clarity of detail.

Our understanding of ancient interiors as unchallenging spaces, all nicely illuminated for cute display, is only reinforced by tourist-friendly experiences created in places like Maeshowe and Newgrange where clever lighting is used to highlight the matters the guide wishes to chat about, with a powerful torch being used to illuminate other specific details that might form part of the blurb – see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2020/02/its-amazing-how-maeshowe-amazes.html and https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2013/02/newgrange-modern-mystery.html. Cave experiences in Southern France, (Roffignac), offer much the same in well-illuminated displays, but do let the visitors have some sense of the cold darkness. The train travels down into the blackness to stop at various places that are dramatically illuminated with the familiar flick of a switch to reveal the chosen paintings/engravings with a classy drama. The safety of promised light and the comfort of the open train is able to counter the fear of the dark. Only at Chartres has the primeval fear grasped the mind and body. It must have been a fundamental experience for the broch dwellers, making the broch a more comfortable place to visit at night; access during the day would have involved a stark, dramatic contrast between inside and out. Brochs could be seen as a constant night, a sensory involvement that causes one to wonder: what were the smells in a broch? Might one sense in this darkness, the pleasantly overpowering smell of peat, interfused with that of life and its processes and materials and functions? What did a broch sound like? We need to involve all of our senses if we are going to understand how a broch was used. Are we too comfortable, too safe with our display of detailed, bright illustrations; perhaps too engaged with the story the drawings suggest to comprehend that brochs were serious black holes?

Why do we always see things in glowing light and colour, as though through rose coloured glasses? Broch renderings are rarely black; rather they are interiors drawn to illustrate every detail with an informative precision and an educative intent. Just as the stairs are seen today as never experienced in broch times, so too are the interiors shown to be bright, happy, and clean, as never before experienced; but as with the stairs, the interiors were black and forbidding. Spaces had to be navigated in pitch black or, at best, by the light of a candle or oil flame carried in one hand, with the other limb used as a guide, to feel one’s way, and to offer support as one navigated the uneven twisting corridors and levels.

It is obvious, but rarely noted, that the stairway does not access any other part of the broch other than the top. The spaces between the walls are not accessible, even though various texts suggest that they are: these voids are, at best, crawl spaces; the stair cuts through them and blocks their circular continuity. The holes in the inner walls give no sensible or useful access to these spaces. It is hypothesised that these openings allow for and promote air movement; mould will grow where the air is still, damp, and at an appropriate temperature. The broch modifies and controls all of these factors with a dry inner skin, an insulating outer wall, and vented interior spaces. Some proposed interior illustrations fancifully suggest accessible levels from the stair, as if this access serviced a multi-storied building. Broch studies needs much more rigour.

The core concept that one has to remember is that broch interiors were pitch black; only a flame illuminated things, multiple flames at best, heightening the confusion with a muddled multiplicity of cast shadows. Our life is flooded with light. We need to experience darkness to sense the broch’s reality; its fearful dark like that of a night on the remote, bare, bleak hills of Shetland on an overcast evening; or a late, autumn afternoon in Chartres cathedral. This darkness is the basis of broch life, not the clear, bright, precise images that illustrators conjure up for the satisfaction of our gleeful consumption. The broch has a unique set of spaces, dark voids holding the known and the unknown, and forms an ideal secure store and sacred, spiritual refuge for a community which it anchors to place. The central axis is identified and located, and remains the core of the whole build from the very beginning of its conception and construction to its completion, creating a vital symbol for being itself and place-marking with its axis mundi: the meeting of heaven and earth – the life-giving spirit and stores: light and dark; the high and the low; the sacred and the profane all in one place..

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Apart from the argument for the roof that uses the experience of being in Mousa broch during a brief downpour, and claims that no one would go to so much trouble to create such an inconvenience, there is the dimensional argument.

With no roof, one proposition is that an interior, multi-storeyed, lean-to structure was built around a central opening. Drawings show such an idea all nicely occupied and busy; but for Mousa broch, one has to understand that the interior diameter is only six metres, a dimension that might suggest that the lean-to structure could be only about two metres wide around an opening of the same diameter. Such sizes would indicate that the width of the structure would only be the length of a bed, forming a very narrow verandah with an available depth that would be reduced by the required passageway, leaving minuscule spaces for everyday living functions that require more area than a narrow, circular strip shaped around an open zone that would feel crowded with just four standing people without any central fire.

These are the same dimensions of the floor levels proposed in the storage concept, and, for such a purpose, these sizes do offer an appropriate facility: a perimeter storage area about 1.25m deep, with an accessible length on each level of about 18m, assuming an access way of 750mm is provided around the central opening. The setout offers an effective and efficient store, minimising the space for access while maximising that left for storage.

These dimensions also mean that the lengths of the timber needed for these interior levels would be, for the posts, about 3m (say 18 per level, allowing 6 centrally, and 12 around the perimeter); and for the floors, about 2m (say 60 joists, allowing 10 to be spaced radially, between the sets of six core posts that are 1m apart - forming a central, 2m diameter hexagon. This arrangement would give a joist spacing of about 300mm at the internal rock face).

Such lengths would all be easily managed by one man during construction, even with access only through the one door. The longer lengths required for the roof would be lifted in over the stonework. These sizes would also be convenient for the progressive erection of the interior levels that form the permanent scaffolding inside the broch, meaning that everything would have to pass through the central void if not carried in up over the stonework from the exterior, for the upper levels.