Ancient ‘monument’ — likely thousands of years old — found by students in Scotland

While excavating a small peninsula in the far north of Scotland, a group of students made a remarkable discovery.

The land they were standing on, it turned out, was likely a monumental man-made structure dating back thousands of years.

The strip of land juts out into a lake on Orkney, a Scottish island in the North Sea, according to a May 20 news release from the UHI Archaeology Institute.

In order to learn more about the peninsula, of which little is known, postgraduate students accompanied by a lecturer dug two trenches.

One trench contained large quantities of rubble, while the other held stone remains.

“The overall impression given is that the entire (islet) is an artificial one made up of masses of rubble,” lecturer Martin Carruthers said in the release. “A structure made up of some very large masonry seems to lurk at the heart of the cairn makeup.”

“Constructing this ‘monument’ must have been a very substantial undertaking,” Carruthers said.

The structure appears to have been a crannog, a type of artificial platform. These geographical features, which have been found throughout Scotland, date to the Iron and Neolithic Ages.

“There are around 1500 known sites in Ireland and 400 in Scotland (but only one in Wales and none in England),” according to research from the University of Plymouth.

They were often built on stilts over bodies of water, typically with a bridge that connected them to the mainland, according to The Guardian.

Mystery surrounds these features, which were likely used for both monuments and settlements, according to the Islands of Stone project, devoted to researching crannogs.

“In terms of artifacts, apart from some later post-medieval glazed pottery, we recovered a single worked flint, probably a ‘thumbnail’ scraper, which is most likely later Neolithic in date,” Carruthers said.

The flint tool could help date the crannog to the Neolithic period, which spanned from 7000 to 1700 B.C., according to the Smithsonian Institution.

This story was originally published May 31, 2024 at 10:30 AM with the headline "Ancient ‘monument’ — likely thousands of years old — found by students in Scotland."