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Early Viking Houses on the Brough of Birsay, Orkney
The island was taken over by the Norwegian Vikings in the 9th century and the earlier Pictish houses were demolished to make way for new homes. Many Pictish and Norse objects have been found during excavation.
Up the slope from the churchyard is a typical group of Norse houses , sometimes called half-houses because each consists of a single large room. The walls were built with a thick inner face of stone, a core of earth and turf and a rough outer face of stone and turf with thickness varying between 1m and 1.5m. There were no windows but in some cases as many as 3 doors. Only the lowest courses of the walls survive but these would originally have stood to about 2 metres with a timber framed roof carrying a turf mantle. In the centre of each house was a long hearth, flanked on either side by wide wooden benches. Internal timber posts would have helped to support the roof. Little of this is visible today apart from the raised footing of the benches. Alongside these houses is a barn with a byre at the far end where there is a stone covered drain. All the buildings are aligned downslope to reduce drainage problems. The results from the excavations which have taken place here show that throughout the four or five centuries of rebuilding , the same building plots have been maintained and respected from Pictish into Norse times.
The Brough of Birsay is a small tidal island off the north west tip of mainlnd Orkney. This shows the causeway which you need to walk across to raech the island - access to the Brough is restricted to a few hours each day, at either side of low tide
Early Viking houses
The early Norse settlement was served by a system of stone built drains . The covering slabs are visible here
The drains are under the paved causeway which ends abrubtly at the cliff edge nowadays - one of the casualties of coastal erosion. It has parallel sides and a sloping floor. It must have been a grand entrance way though the width may have been designed to allow boats to be drawn up out of the reach of the sea.
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