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Vikings & Rooks
Appears in
Published 2021
I wonder what it would have been like to have woken up in the Hebrides on the second of July 1266? I would have pulled on my lèine, eaten porridge with my family, before heading over the hills to gather my sheep. It would probably have been just another beautiful summer’s morning on the island, but this day would go down in history. A few hundred miles away in Perth, a document written in Latin was being signed, meaning I was no longer Norwegian, but Scottish.
The mornings wouldn’t be that different for me during my summers growing up on the island in the 1980s. But as my father and brothers would take to the hills, I would climb into our rowing boat on the loch at the end of our croft. I knew the path through the water, avoiding rocks and allowing the tide to take me away from the houses in the village to a wee island. As I got closer, an Iron Age broch loomed above me. This is where my adventures would begin. Dùn Cromore, an Atlantic roundhouse built 2,000 years before me was my playground.