Shaped by a RIVER

Our five-part series Shaped by a River begins today with a visit to the Crannog Centre on Loch Tay. Picture: Mhairi Edwards.

The Tay. Longest river in Scotland. A 117mile force of nature that has shaped the landscape and its people for millennia. The river itself begins a little to the west, near Tyndrum on the flanks of Ben Lui, and gathers in size and strength as it loops and tumbles to the North Sea. From its source, it’s only 20 or so miles to Oban and the Atlantic, and before tarmac and trains, this would have been a vital route for traders and travellers. Here, in the 15-mile stretch between Killin and Kenmore, with Ben Lawers at its back, the water slows and stills into Loch Tay. It’s a place to pause and draw breath and, for some, a place to put down roots. People have been drawn here for thousands of years. It’s easy to see why. Just as today’s waterside boltholes are prized by high rollers and good lifers, a Loch Tay des res would likely have been the last word in Iron Age luxury. If we want to explore what the Tay means to this area, we dip our toes here where, once, the earliest settlers were learning how to get along in small, closeknit communities, and where today, their 21st-Century counterparts are still figuring it out. It’s fair to say the Scottish Crannog Centre is one of the more remote outposts on the Museums and Galleries Scotland circuit but at the centre, on the south shore of the loch, the atmosphere is one of purposeful bustle and the chatter surprisingly cosmopolitan. Local primary school pupils giggle and oop – the pportunity to t your hands on iece of prehistoric will do that to ld – and American and opean holidaymakers every bit as eager to try eir hands at fire-starting or wool-dyeing as they try to get into the minds of the folk who lived and laboured here 2,500 years before. Some of the earliest evidence of human habitation in Scotland has been found here among the remnants of the crannogs preserved beneath the airless glaur of the loch bed. The remains of 18 prehistoric roundhouses – raised homesteads built on wooden stilts, where as many as 20 people lived – have been uncovered by archaeologists. River mud makes a remarkably good preserver. With no light or oxygen to decay them, sections of floor, still carpeted in bracken, have survived relatively intact, along with elm and oak stumps that once made up the walkways to the shore. Life’s detritus has provided insights into our ancestors’ way of life. Ellen Pryde, our guide, holds up a charred fragment of pottery and imagines a harried Iron Age cook burning the dinner and booting the ruined meal, dish and all, into the Tay. “I love that most of these artefacts will have fallen over the edge of the crannog or through gaps in the floor,” she says. “They’re not the high status trophy objects people might have chosen to put on display or leave behind, but they can tell us about their day-to-day lives.” Ellen is responsible for marketing and social media, although her CV has expanded to include spinning wool into thread, making jewellery and cooking recipes – the kind that begin “first, grind your grains” – on an open fire. She said: “A crannog, here on the loch, would have been as much a status symbol as a home – a sign that the owners were doing quite well for themselves, compared to the people back there in the forests and the hills.

And because of the Tay’s importance then – we’re just a few miles from the west coast here and you can follow the river all the way to Newburgh and out into the world – they would have been coming into contact with all kinds of passing people, objects and ideas.”

We’re standing in the replica crannog that has sat offshore since 1997. Another is planned nearby.

Curator Frances Collinson said: “What I like to think is if the people who lived on the crannog two-and-ahalf thousand years ago came forward in time to visit us, they would look at that crannog and they might think: ‘It’s a little bit like the house we lived in.’

“They would perhaps recognise some of the skills that we’re attempting to demonstrate to the visitors – they might have a laugh at our attempts – but if they came into this museum and they saw these artefacts, they would say: ‘Yeah, I know that. I recognise that.’

“And because it’s been in the water in very anaerobic conditions, it has preserved beautifully, so they would probably look at it and think: ‘Oh that’s exactly the thing that I dropped. It fell through the gap in the floor of the crannog two-and-a-half thousand years ago, and here it is!’

“I’ve got that very personal, very powerful connection to the original artefacts that the people who lived on Loch Tay here in the very early Iron Age left behind for us, and it’s my job to care for these objects, to preserve them, to look after them, to interpret them and to make them available for visitors.

“That’s a big responsibility, but it’s one that I absolutely love.”

Ellen and Frances are part of a 20-plus team who work at the centre, making it a significant employer in an area like this, where jobs are thin on the ground, and its presence is a vital contributor to the all-important tourist economy.

Not that the jobs are entirely conventional. Emma Harrison is teaching herself how to tan leather using the remains of a roadkill deer – an unlikely turn of events for a vegetarian.

Charlotte Legendre is baking flatbreads, using ingredients she picked that morning, over a fire she built and started herself, and former taxi driver Daniel McQueeney is a gift shop worker, self-professed master of the two-minute conversation and “morale manager”.

Much like small communities have been doing in Scotland since crannog times, it’s an example of what a diverse group of people can achieve when they pull together.

At Loch Tay, life’s detritus has provided insights into our ancestors’ way of life