Broch of Mousa

On the western shore of the small island of Mousa, off the east coast of Shetland's South Mainland, a windowless drum of grey stone rises more than 13 metres above the water's edge. The Broch of Mousa is the tallest broch still standing anywhere and one of the best-preserved prehistoric buildings in Europe. It was raised around 300 BC, one of over 500 of these Iron Age round towers known across Scotland, yet almost all the others survive only as stumps and rubble. Mousa stands nearly to its full height, its walls laid entirely in dry stone without any mortar.

The secret of its survival lies in its proportions. Compared with other brochs it has an unusually small diameter, a very thick wall base and a cramped interior, and this massive build, together with its remote position, has protected it for over two thousand years. A single low entrance on the west side, five metres long and still keeping an original bar-hole, leads into the central court, where a hearth, a stone floor tank and a low bench around the wall survive from early occupation. Three chambers are set into the thickness of the ground-floor wall. Higher up, the tower is built as two concentric skins of stone with six galleries between them, and an original stair climbs inside the wall to the very top, which makes Mousa the only broch preserved this completely. Ledges in the inner face may once have carried a timber roundhouse; at a later stage a small wheelhouse with stone piers was built inside.

The tower appears in Norse literature. Egil's Saga tells of a couple eloping from Norway to Iceland who were shipwrecked and sheltered inside it, and the Orkneyinga Saga describes Earl Harald Maddadsson besieging the broch in 1153 after his mother had been carried off and held there. Antiquarians followed much later: George Low drew it in 1774 and Sir Walter Scott came in 1814. When the interior was cleared in 1861, finds included otter bones, pottery and a carved fir model of a Norwegian boat. The island itself is treeless grassland, and on summer nights thousands of European storm petrels return to it; some nest in the crevices of the broch walls.

Getting there

The broch stands on Mousa, an uninhabited island in Shetland reached by boat across Mousa Sound from Sandwick on the South Mainland. Sandwick lies about 22 km south of Lerwick, Shetland's main town. The nearest airport is Sumburgh Airport (LSI), about 14 km to the south on the Mainland.