Old Scatness

The broch at Old Scatness was built more than two thousand years ago, during the Iron Age, and went through at least three major phases of use. The first phase saw the construction of the primary tower; the second involved rebuilding the interior, adding a secondary skin of stone to the south and east of the inner wall along with a set of radial piers to form a new internal structure; and in the third phase, a further building was inserted inside the broch itself, made up of six or more curvilinear cells clustered around a central area with a corridor leading out to the east.

To the west of the broch, the settlement's seaward limits took shape around a large circular aisled roundhouse known as Structure 12, roughly ten metres in diameter with walls still standing over two metres high in places. A second, less well-preserved building stood to its west, while a similarly sized but oval roundhouse, Structure 14, lay to its south. North of Structure 12, a further range of buildings included one with a set of seven or more small wall-recesses, and to its east, closer to the broch, the partially collapsed top of a corbelled cell survived as a ring of inward-tilting stones.

East of the broch, a slightly later roundhouse, Structure 21, proved the largest on the site at around twelve metres internally, its short piers later rebuilt as long thin ones. A wheelhouse, Structure 11, was added to the southeast of the broch, and a multi-cellular semi-subterranean building, Structure 5, was inserted into the fill of Structure 21 — a form of construction regarded as characteristic of Pictish architecture.

After Iron Age occupation of the site ended, its stone walls and grassy mounds remained a visible feature of the landscape rather than disappearing from it, and later communities went on reusing parts of the settlement. Archaeologists have recovered Viking Age artefacts from several of the earlier buildings, showing that Norse settlers occupied and reused structures the Iron Age community had left behind.

By the early modern period the ruins had been absorbed into the surrounding agricultural landscape. Excavation has uncovered the remains of a 17th-century barn and corn drier built among the older structures, part of a wider pattern across the Northern Isles in which prehistoric stone buildings were repurposed by later farmers incorporating existing walls into new agricultural use. By the mid-19th century a crofthouse had been built on the north side of the site, and the broch mound and surrounding ruins went on shaping local patterns of settlement and land use even after their original purpose had faded from memory.

In the late 1970s, construction of the perimeter road for the newly expanding Sumburgh Airport exposed part of the broch wall within a grassy mound, bringing the site to archaeological attention for the first time. Full excavation began in 1995 under the University of Bradford, supported by professional archaeologists, students and local volunteers, and has since uncovered the multi-period settlement of broch, wheelhouses and later dwellings described above, with the site now managed and presented to visitors by the Shetland Amenity Trust.