Dun Fiadhairt

During the Iron Age, builders raised a broch on a low rocky knoll above the shore of Loch Dunvegan, choosing a peninsula site that let its inhabitants watch the water on almost every side. The tower's outer wall, some 16.8 metres across, was built hollow rather than solid, with a stairway and a ground-level gallery threaded through its thickness, and a single guarded passage on the west forming the only way in.

The entrance passage was built 3.7 metres long and flanked by two opposing guard cells, small chambers set into the wall on either side where someone could watch anyone approaching or leaving. Inside, a double cell was built into the side wall and a further guard cell placed at the foot of the stair, while the rest of the inner wall was given over to a mural gallery running around at ground level.

At some point, whether during construction or in a later modification, a second opening was cut right through the thickness of the wall from the mural gallery, forming a small subsidiary entrance to the broch. Elsewhere in Scotland similar second doorways through broch walls are usually judged to be later insertions rather than part of the original design, and the same uncertainty applies here, since nothing about this passage confirms which it was.

In 1892 the Countess Vincent Baillet de Latour excavated the broch, though she left little record of how the dig was conducted or what exactly was found where. The excavation recovered a substantial quantity of pottery, a large amount of corroded iron debris, and a set of worked stone tools including a rotary quern for grinding grain, a whetstone for sharpening blades, a hammerstone, and several spindle whorls used in spinning thread.

Among the smaller finds were a fragment of a stone or shale armlet, glass beads of several colours, and a necklace-like group of 59 amber beads shaped as short cylinders, evidence of ornament and probably trade reaching this Skye peninsula. A baked clay object recovered from the site was thought to represent a Roman votive model of a bale of wool, a small but striking sign of contact, directly or through intermediaries, with the wider Roman world to the south.

Around twenty years after digging Dun Fiadhairt, the same Countess Vincent Baillet de Latour returned to excavate the broch of Dun Beag elsewhere on Skye, this time working with noticeably greater care and better recording than she had applied here in 1892. The contrast between her two excavations means Dun Fiadhairt's finds survive with far less context than those from her later dig, even though the objects themselves still speak to a working, inhabited broch rather than an empty watchtower.