CRANNOGS. By Rev. F. O. Blundell, O.S.B., F.S.A. (Scot.) Read 9 Nov., 1923. RANNOG is a Gaelic word meaning a wooden struc CRANNOG ture. In its antiquarian application it denotes an island, built for habitation, partly or wholly constructed of wood; and though in some few cases exactly similar islands have been constructed of stone, this has always been where no wood was available. The history of the subject is well given in an article of The Times, 16th Aug. 1922, from which I shall freely quote, as being an authority of unquestioned reliability. Investigations, we are here told, carried on for over half a century have left little room for doubt that there was a time when some of the inhabitants of Britain and other parts of Europe, chiefly on the ground of greater safety from attack, preferred to live on piles, or at all events on artificial constructions, surrounded by water. The study of the subject was first undertaken in Switzerland, where drainage works on a large scale had been started in the middle of the last century. The lowering of the water in these lakes revealed the fact that islands of artificial construction occurred very frequently along the shore of the lakes. Thus in the Lake of Neuchatel, 35 lake-dwellings were found in a lake 23 miles long; in the Lake of Geneva, in a distance of 20 miles there were 27 lake-dwellings, and in the neighbouring Lake of Constance they may be said to occur every mile along the coast. The number of relics found in these islands was very great indeed, and enables us to reconstruct the life of the inhabitants with considerable detail. The continental research in the 'fifties and after caused similar excavations to be carried out in the Scottish and Irish crannogs, recently discovered by the Arterial Drainage Commission of those days. At that time analogous structures south of Scotland were apparently unknown, but later somewhat similar sites were revealed in the meres of Norfolk and Suffolk, in London on the Thames, in Wales, near the shore of the Llangorse Lake, in Shropshire and Buckinghamshire, and in the Holderness district of Yorkshire. Few notable examples, however, had been found in England until the lake village of Glastonbury, discovered by Dr. Bulleid in 1892, was investigated. The relics found here date approximately from B.C. 200 to A.D. 70. The influence of Roman culture had not reached these habitations when they were abandoned, and thus only late Celtic work has been discovered. The methods of building may be ranged under four types: I. True pile-dwellings (Pfahlbauten, palafittes, crannogs) are built on wooden piles driven thickly into the bed of a shallow part of the lake, leaving the tops projecting at a uniform height above the water, so as to be capable of supporting a platform. Such structures were prevalent in Central Europe and the Swiss lakes during the Stone and Bronze Ages. II. A second method was to erect a series of submerged wooden basements in the form of small rectangular compartments, the sides of which were formed of horizontal beams laid one above the other, like the logs of a Swiss chalet. When the structures attained the requisite height above the water, the usual platform was laid across. Such dwellings have been found in France and North Germany, and are mostly of the Iron Age. III. A third method was to construct a stockaded island of mixed materials-timber, trunks of trees, brushwood, earth and stones-arranged so as to form a firm foundation for a dwelling. This was the almost universal plan on which the Scottish and Irish crannogs were made. IV. Lastly, where no wood was procurable, as in the Outer Hebrides, the island was constructed entirely of stone. It is |