Loss

I like the TV history/genealogy programme 'Who Do You Think You Are'. I've discovered that the celebrity who is the focus of the show doesn't really matter much to me. What grabs me is the part where they have gone back 4 or 5 generations and found a character to focus on, dug into their lives and unearthed (or imagined, it does not really matter) their circumstances, their choices, their journey. The contrast between their lives and ours, the things that mattered to them, the risks they had to run always leave me slightly giddy at the gulf between the world then - such a short time ago - and our world now

How much harder, then, to conceive of the world two thousand or more years ago - the iron age - when this structure was created. It seems that we know so little of how people lived. Interpreting the artefacts we have appears to be as much imagination and guesswork as it is logical deduction. A world lost

This is a 'broch', a feature of much of north and northwest Scotland. Many (but not this one) have very thick walls. Thick walls means a defensive structure, guess the archaeologists. But, more recently, some guess that maybe they were not; maybe they were status properties for the elite, or maybe they were the gathering point for a family or clan. We are fumbling in the darkness, staining for meaning. This one has architectural complexity: galleries and an entrance designed to accommodate a framed door. Nothing here is 'primitive'.

And the scale is astonishing. 10 metres across. The standing walls are approaching 2 metres high but would have been much higher. The stones are massive, but dressed and laid with precision. I measured and calculated that one of them must weigh 850kg. How did iron age technology create that and move it and lift it into this elevated spot and place it and all its fellows to produce a perfect circle? I'm tempted to mystical, magical answers: an age of giants

This place is not in the guide books, not on the tourist web sites, not written about in any non-specialist language that I could find. There are no paths to it - we followed cattle tracks through the 3d labryinth that is Mull's landscape, not sure where we were going. Its ghosts, it seems, are mostly undisturbed. It has been subject to statutory visits by government surveyors over the years, so there are some rather dry and data-heavy descriptions. Only when they came to assess its 'value' did I find a little emotion - in the form of apprehension - seeping through...

"The loss of the monument would significantly diminish our future ability to appreciate and understand the development, use and re-use of brochs, and the nature of Iron Age society, economy and social hierarchy on the western seaboard of Scotland". Well said