HISTORY: Horseshoe Nails and Other Consequences

Here is a story to entertain. I wrote it as Covid 19 spread across the world, reminding me of previous pandemics. This story is not fiction exactly, it’s history, and history is always subjective, open to challenge and re-evaluation, but this is my version and it makes a good tale. Allegedly.

There is an old rhyme:
    For the want of a nail, a shoe was lost.
    For the want of a shoe, the horse was lost.
    For the want of a horse, the rider was lost.
    For the want of a rider, the battle was lost.
    For the want of the battle, the kingdom was lost
    And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

No one know what kingdoms will be lost when one little nail messes things up.

Once upon a time, back in the Middle Ages, Venice was the great trading power in the Mediterranean, so aggressive against its rivals that it even persuaded crusaders to divert from their intended goal, Jerusalem, and sack Constantinople instead. That is one horseshoe nail with far-reaching consequences, but I digress. Back to trade… Other Italian city states wanted a share of the action too. Genoa moved in on the Black Sea and established a large fortified trading base at Kaffa (now Feodosiya) on the Crimean coast.

One day some Genoese merchants, out for a stroll, got in a bit of a barny with a bunch of the Mongol locals, in the course of which a local was stabbed to death. This is my horseshoe nail. The end result of that street brawl was economic upheaval, the collapse of feudalism, the rise of capitalism, the Reformation, the break-up of Western Christendom and, ultimately, Hitler.

How?

The brawl and the death led to a riot against the Genoese, who locked themselves in their sea-side enclave. The angry locals besieging them were joined by the Mongol army, but the siege began to falter as sickness started to spread among the soldiers, as it tends to do in siege situations. Rather than simply give up, the Mongols took a last swipe at their enemy by catapulting their dead into the Genoese stronghold. The Genoese merchants tried to deal with the corpses but in the end decided to give up and head for home, escaping by sea.

Their first major port of call was Messina in Sicily – by which time some on the ship were dead and others were dying. The inhabitants of the port realised that they’d brought an unwelcome visitor and forced them out to sea again, but too late. At each port where the ship tried to put in on its return to Genoa, it brought the Black Death with it. Everywhere that ships and trade went, the Pestilence went too, all around the Mediterranean, all across Europe, to Spain, to Scotland, to Moscow, mutating at it went, from bubonic plague (pretty deadly) to pneumonic and septicemic plague (totally deadly). In the course of 3 years, till 1350, about a third of the population of Europe was wiped out, especially the old, sick, weakened and malnourished.

After such catastrophes, populations often spring back – the strongest have survived. A new generation was born. Then the plague returned in 1361 and hit especially hard at the young. This time there was no instant recovery. The population in England (and conquered Wales) took another 500 years to return to its 13th century levels.

The result of it all, in England at least, was the collapse of feudalism, which had been built on the backs of vast armies of peasant labourers tied to the land. Now they were in short supply, and despite attempts to round them up and bring them back when they ran off to the big cities, they became uppity. They revolted. Attempts were made to put them down, but there was no stopping the flow. Land owners had to start paying for labour and renting out land. Meanwhile, in the cities, merchants were on the rise, relying on money and trade instead of forced peasant labour.

It had been happening for a long time, of course. Earlier Medieval monarchs, in desperate need of money as well as feudal levies, had relied on the only source of capital, the Jews, since Christians weren’t supposed to soil themselves with usury, charging interest on loans (the basis of most modern economies). Edward I, finding himself in more debt than he liked, had solved his problem by defaulting on his debts and throwing the Jews out of England. But that left him needing another source of finance. Italian banks, which had learned not to be squeamish about charging interest, stepped in and, when kings, once more, defaulted on their debts, the banks went bankrupt. Kings started borrowing off their noble subjects instead – and they too went bankrupt.

But then there were the merchants of London. By the early 15th century, after the plague, a Lord Mayor of London, who had bankrolled Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V, munificently tore up the debts the king owed him, to show he was so rich he didn’t need repaying. His name was Sir Richard Whittington. (The cat was added to his legend a few centuries later.)

It took the great landowners a few more centuries to realise that they were no longer the real power in the kingdom, but the city was already on top.

In matters of faith, the Black Death knocked the wind out of easy early Medieval piety. The Church failed to save people. They were abandoned, forced to confess to other lay men or even, God help us, if all else failed, to women. Priests died as fast as anyone, faster if they were properly dutiful in attending the dying. God hadn’t saved them. Many abbeys that should have supplied replacements or offered help, locked their doors to keep contagion out, and their street cred plummeted.

Anti-clericalism rose. The Church was left wallowing in corruption. Early “heresies” of men like Wycliffe were fought with flames, but no fire could stop the eventual emergence of Protestantism under Luther, Calvin and the rest. Europe was riven with religious division – which still staggers on in Northern Ireland and certain football grounds.

Some gave up on religion entirely, opening the way for the rationality of the modern era. Others became fanatical in their beliefs instead, convinced of God’s punishment and determined to find scapegoats. Edward I had deprived England of one easy target, but on the continent murderous anti-semitism swept country after country, because it went without saying that the plague must have been caused by Jews poisoning Christian wells. Anti-semitism had been simmering for centuries, ever since St John put the blame for the crucifixion on the Jews, but now it came to the boil, and the Jews remained the main focus for amorphous fear, rage and insecurity until Hitler arrived to milk it with such industrial efficiency.

So, don't get involved in a street brawl, because you never know where it might lead.

What will be the long-term effects of Covid 19? As Zhou Enlai said of the effects of the French Revolution, it's too early to say.

 

HISTORY: So Clear, So Obvious

 There's a difference between history and historical fiction, but sometimes the two can overlap. Write about a real historical character and the author has to do all the research that an academic historian would. The facts are there and cannot be changed. The difference is that the author of fiction is free to interpret the facts and the impulses behind them, in a way that suits a dramatic narrative, inventing thoughts and words for characters.

Historians, by contrast, are expected to stick to the records. It doesn't stop them interpreting facts though, with the benefit of hindsight, and that can be a tricky matter. It can involve viewing past events through the lens of the present. And present understanding can be just as subjectively skewed as that of our ancestors. Hindsight can cast light on a great many things, but sometimes the light it casts creates wholly deceptive shadows.

One story whose interpretation has always fascinated me begins in 1144, when William, a 12 year old tanner’s apprentice in the city of Norwich, vanished. His mutilated body was eventually found in a wood. For various reasons (Anglo-Saxon v Norman politics, ecclesiastical quests for lucrative relics, sheer malice, overheated imaginations etc) it was concluded that William had been tortured and crucified by the Jews of Norwich. The case was taken up, with relish, by a Norwich monk, Thomas of Monmouth, and expanded into a hugely gothic account, offering dozens of proofs that little William had been ritually sacrificed by the wicked Jews. The Catholic church hesitated over recognising the miracles that followed, so little “Saint” William was never actually officially canonised, but he was recognised as a saint and child martyr in Norwich.

A hundred years later, the murder of little “saint” Hugh of Lincoln was also recognised as an obvious case of Jewish ritual murder, and many of the Jews of Lincoln were promptly rounded up and hanged. The Jews of Norwich were a little luckier. They had forty-five years of freedom after William’s death before the massacres began.

Little Saint Hugh was more famous. He got a mention in Chaucer and a ballad by Steeleye Span.

It’s all a typical story of anti-Semitism in Mediaeval Europe, nasty but predictable. What really fascinates me, though, is the reinterpretation of the story in the latter part of the 20th century. According to Thomas of Monmouth’s colourful account, William’s body was found dressed in jacket and shoes. Just jacket and shoes? It doesn’t say, but historian Vivian Lipman, in 1967, concluded that the body must have been half stripped. Other historians then leapt to a similar conclusion that the murder was actually a sex crime, perpetrated by a child molester. Just as Thomas of Monmouth embellished the story out of all recognition, so modern historians turned supposition into irrefutable fact. The boy was last seen heading off with a stranger, and was later found naked from the waist down with mutilated genitals. I heard one such historian discussing the case on the radio and explaining, with a scornful laugh that ‘of course, it is obvious to us now that it was the work of a sadistic paedophile.’

Yes, it is obvious, in an age where child molesters are the big, nasty bogeymen who terrorise our imaginations, that it must have been a paedophile. But back in the 12th Century, an age of unquestioning religious stupidity and fear of outsiders, it was equally obvious that it must have been Jews performing a human sacrifice. We seek out and surprisingly discover our own invented monsters. The truth is that no one has any idea what really happened to William in 1144. Maybe he was accidentally killed while playing with friends. Maybe he was attacked in the woods by a wild boar. Maybe he was abducted by aliens who performed experiments on him! Take your pick and choose whatever comes closest to your personal nightmare.

Historians in quest of “facts” should be very cautious about jumping to conclusions when interpreting them. Better to leave those to novelists, who are always right, without needing a single fact to support them.

HISTORY: How Travel Broadens the Mind

As an author (did I ever mention that), I am always fascinated with the idea of people plucked out of their comfort zone by a traumatic event that turns their world upside down. The question is always how do they deal with it? Do they crumble? Do they meekly adapt? Or do they find hidden strengths within themselves to take on the trauma and come through?

As I was wallowing in memories of childhood holidays recently, it suddenly struck me what might have sparked this lifelong interest in how people would react to terrible situations. It was a school trip and, no, nothing traumatic happened to me, other than dropping my purse in a stream. But…

I was twelve, and my high school (I was a first year – I don’t know what that is in new money) organised a trip in the Easter holidays to Switzerland. God knows how my parents scraped together the money for it, but it was the first opportunity for anyone in my family to go abroad (other than my father’s war service), so I went.

I recall Switzerland, once we’d arrived, as a picture-book place of towering, snow-capped mountains, glittering lakes, lush green meadows and happy cows, with gift shops full of cow bells and chalet musical boxes. Imagine Switzerland and it was just like that. So exactly like that that its images slipped into my memory as a neatly packaged collection of holiday snaps, dug out occasionally but no longer real. Definitely not real. I was convinced for years that I could remember driving in the coach over the old bridge in Lucerne - the one with paintings in the roof. Since it is a pedestrian bridge, that memory must be complete fantasy.

My spotted postcard home, 1967

What made a truly lasting impression on me was the journey. Birds and film stars flew back then. We went in a couple of coaches, with two overnight stops. The most thrilling part of the entire holiday was waiting in the cold dark, at about 3am, with my parents, as the coach arrived to pick us up, and then arrival at Dover as the sun came up.

From the ferry, down across France to Reims, through farmland. First mild shock of the journey was the sight of farmers ploughing – or harrowing, or whatever it would have been at Easter – with horse-drawn ploughs (or harrows or whatever). The only horse-drawn anything I had seen before that was the cart of our local Steptoes, going up the road with a nasal call of “Ra’bong!” I was entering a time machine.

The greater shock was the graves. War graves. Regimented white markers, not in the vast cemeteries like Bayeux, but in smaller cemeteries, scattered everywhere, so casually embraced by the countryside. The first World War was no longer just a few stuttering clips of faded film and an amusing poster of Kitchener. It was blood and shattered bone absorbed into the soil, part of the land. That was one of the moments when it came home to me that “history” had once been “Now.”

On our second day, heading for Basel, we stopped briefly in Domrémy. My father liked George Bernard Shaw. I’d read his play, St Joan (I’d really like to see a modern version, set, maybe, in Afghanistan). Domrémy, despite its gift shops, was a reminder that St Joan had once been an actual girl, born there and deciding, at the age of 16, to fight rather than settle for life as a peasant wife, inspiring French resistance to English invaders, and being burned at the stake at the age of nineteen. I couldn’t get my head around it. Some of the school children on my trip were 16. Could they? Would they? Joan was a long time ago. People were different then.

We travelled on over the Vosges mountains, and stopped on a hairpin bend, looking down over steep rolling forests. The real purpose of our stop was to let several of the boys relieve themselves in the trees. But it happened to be the site of a memorial. A teacher explained that it was a memorial to some French resistance fighters who were captured and executed there by the Nazis. They included a father and son who were killed at the same age that my grandfather and one of my uncles were in 1967. Which made it strangely personal. And again, it rubbed in that history had been real people doing real things, not just tales in a storybook.

As children, we tend to believe that everything before us is fantasy. The second world war, to me, had been, like cowboys and injuns, simply the subject of black and white films with thrilling music on Sunday television. My parents had been through it, but that was when they were young, an enormously remote time. By the age of 12, though, it had dawned on me that it had been happening, bombs had been dropping, people had been dying less than ten years before I was born. I had been alive longer than the time between the end of the war and my birth. I was on its heels.

It was suddenly much closer and behind the heroism and the pantomime villainy of war films was a terrifying and horrible truth. The Nazis had been real, they had done unspeakable things, they were merciless and they were strong. It was easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to take their defeat for granted, but at the start of the war, it was their victory than seemed far more likely. Would my relatives, if they had lived south of the Channel instead of north, have dared to risk torture and death, to join the resistance against Nazi occupation? Would I dare? How would any of us react if confronted with challenges we’d hoped never to face.

I was standing where people were murdered because they had dared to resist, knowing the likely cost. It was that scene, on a forested hillside, that drilled deepest into me, out of all the delightful things I witnessed on that holiday. An unknown memorial on some anonymous hairpin bend in the middle of nowhere.

There’s nothing quite so useful as Google maps and Street View to help you find spots you can’t quite place. I knew it was in the Vosges mountains. Turns out, it’s quite easy to find. A very spectacular hairpin bend with the Memorial de Steingraben. I don’t know if it was identical in 1967, but the spot is certainly the same. A pity that I can’t find anything about it on the internet apart from pictures of the memorials. One day I’ll have to go back and pay my respects to the place and the people that had such an impact on me.

HEARTH AND HOME: Going Up In Smoke

 The Tudors didn’t invent brick, or chimneys, but they experienced a small revolution in house-building, by making common use of both.

Bricks, made of clay fired in a kiln, had been around since Roman times, but they had to be mass-manufactured so they had less appeal as a cheap and readily available material for building than timber, wattle and daub. The wealthier could afford them, and so, as the country grew wealthier so did more and more people. Ironically, the Black Death helped. It may have wiped out between a third and a half of the population, and put back its recovery by several centuries, but England began to move from being a third-world supplier of raw materials to a manufacturing economy (okay, the Welsh kept goats and Scotland was Scotland). There was less pressure on land and… well, let's just settle that the country got richer, with funds available to be spent on building more substantial and durable houses.

Despite the Wars of the Roses, Spanish Armadas, Civil Wars and general uprisings, the country also became a little more civilised. There were less anarchic warlords chasing each other around and laying siege to their castles, which were no longer quite so safe now that gunpowder was on the scene. So castles of stone with walls twelve feet thick gave way to country manors and palaces built of brick.

from the Tres Riches Heures de Duc de Berry. Quite a few chimneys

Chimneys had long existed in buildings that were several storeys high, or there would be no chance of heating them without choking everyone to death. Stone-built castles were one obvious example. In modest urban dwellings of only two floors, a smoke void at the rear would be sufficient, but for prosperous merchants who had no option but to build upwards rather than outwards, because of lack of ground space, chimneys were de rigeur.

Where there was space to expand, in the country, it was more normal, in Medieval times, for at least one hall to be left open to the rafters, to allow the smoke to rise and escape through high vents.

Bayleaf at the Weald and Downland museum

Brick changed this. One of its benefits was that, unlike timber, wattle and thatch, it didn’t catch fire, so chimneys became a must-have feature of every house but the humblest hovel. Even in half-timbered houses, brick allowed a chimney to be added.

New houses could be built around a huge central chimney with several flues, bread ovens, and enclosed hearths. The taller the flue the better the draw on the smoke. The need to have a hall open to the rafters, was gone, and that meant that upper floors could be inserted. Blackened timbers, nursing old soot, hidden away in closed lofts are a sure sign that a house once was once open to the rafters.

Brick could be moulded or cut, and chimneys were regarded as a sign of status, so naturally chimney pots became a means of boasting and an outlet for artistic exuberance. No small discreet pot for the Tudors, with a cowl to keep the rain and jackdaws out. Tall and extravagant was the order of the day. If you had it, flaunt it.

Even when building with stone, the chimney was a dominant feature that demanded attention.

While chimneys allowed for upper floors and carried the smoke away quite successfully, the hearth usually remained much as it had been when it had occupied the centre of the hall. A serious bonfire was needed to heat a good-sized room. In some cases, fireplace were large enough to be almost rooms in their own rights - inglenooks, where people could sit cosily round the fire.

fireplace at Cilewent farmhouse in St Fagan's Museum

Raising the fire on firedogs or grates allowed a better airflow into the flames, but it wasn’t until the end of the 18th century that improvements were made, with the Rumford fireplace, shallower and angled to reflect more heat into the room and siphon the smoke away more efficiently. Since I always try to mention Jane Austen, General Tilney boasts that he has improved the fireplace in Northanger Abbey. Catherine, who hankers after all things Gothic, is not impressed.

Fires were not only used for heating, but for cooking, of course. Bread oven and charcoal ranges for saucepans could be added, but generally kitchens had open fireplaces with assorted ironware – spits and cradles and hooks - for roasting and boiling.

one of several fireplaces in the Hampton Court kitchens

With the coming of the industrial revolution, coal replaced wood as the fuel. It produced very efficient heat but also unpleasant and noxious smoke. Roasting on a spit before an open fire was no longer possible without tainting the meat, so enclosed ranges were introduced, with an iron oven and, frequently, a water boiler with tap.

This did mean that the roast beef of Olde England became the baked beef of Modern England, which is mostly what is eaten today. They were roasting large joints on a spit before a wood fire in the Hampton Court kitchens when I last visited, but they wouldn’t let me try any. Health and Safety, I ask you.

Fancy visiting a few places?

Try

Weald and Downland Museum (near Chichester)

St Fagan's museum of Welsh life (Cardiff)

Hampton Court Palace.

HEARTH AND HOME: Timber!

 Here's another post about old houses.

Some places have a lot of easily splitable or workable stone, and if you had it, you used it, but elsewhere the most convenient material for building houses was wood. After the last ice-age, Britain was largely covered by woodland, although that was seriously reduced with the arrival of agriculture. As an aside, I say woodland rather than forest because in Norman times ‘forest’ was a term that referred to royal hunting grounds with gory penalties for poaching, rather than an impenetrable blanket of trees.

The woodland was largely oak and hazel which, when combined, made very effective structural materials that have come to epitomise Tudor England. Oak – especially heart of oak – is hard, strong, resistant to rot and woodworm and was used (is still used, if you can afford it) as the framework for buildings, with huge timbers pegged together, allowing a bit of charmingly quirky shifting and creaking.

Pegged timber framing illustrated at the Weald and Downland Museum

The spaces between the timbers were filled with woven split hazel wattle, liberally daubed with a mixture of clay, mud, straw and cowdung. Yummie.

wattle and daub illustrated at Tintern Abbey

One of the earliest types of timber construction used cruck beams, which made use of the natural curve of some massive timbers, taking the weight of the house from roof peak to ground. Use two or more pairs of crucks, as the basic support for a house, and build the rest around them.

A cruck-built house in Weobley, Herefordshire

Smaller curved timbers were also used to brace framework, and stop the whole thing from collapsing. Bayleaf, a satisfyingly elegant wealden house at the Weald and Downland museum illustrates the bracing beams, in a house that is more wattle and daub than heavy timber.

Bayleaf

But timbers were often used more liberally. Two variations were common. Box framing produced a grid of vertical and horizontal timbers. This was especially common in the west of the country.

Box-framed house in Eardisland, Herefordshire

In the east, close vertical studwork was favoured, as in this example at Ightham Mote in Kent.

The traditional image of Tudor England is of two-tone houses with startlingly black timbers and brilliant white plaster. In reality, untreated oak will weather over time to a silvery grey.

silvered timber on a cottage in Kent

Limewash or plaster was often used to protect not only the wattle and daub but the timbers too. This house in Eardisley (Herefordshire), illustrates both plastered and exposed timbers.

Plastering, especially in the east, was taken to decorative extremes with the art of pargetting, as with this example in Saffron Walden.

Ship’s timbers, blackened with tar, produced the picture-book image of black and white houses, especially in the west and Welsh marches. The contrast of timber and plaster was recognised as a forceful visual statement, leading to timbers being used not merely as supporting framework but as decoration in their own right. The Feathers Inn in Ludlow is a prime example.

The Feathers also illustrates how timber framing could allow houses to increase in height, expanding as they did so, with jutting floors. In many Medieval and Tudor towns, houses on either side of lanes could jut out so far they nearly met. Most examples were demolished and replaced in later times. One five-storey example that survived until the 18th century, to be recorded in an etching, stood on the corner of Chancery Lane in London, resembling the stern of a galleon.

By Tudor times, brick was becoming ever more common as a building material. Timber was still used as framework, but herringbone brickwork began to replace wattle and daub as the infill.

Brick infilling at the Weald and Downland museum.

The appeal of at least the appearance of half-timbering survived its decline as a genuine means of construction. The Gothic revival that began in the 18th century resulted in stone or brick houses being given a fake half-timbered facelift, like Plas Newydd, in Wales, a stone house “improved” by the Ladies of Llangollen.

The lure of Merrie England reached the spread of middle-class suburbia in the 1930s, with a rash of mock-tudoring. Never miss an opportunity to slap on a bit of timber.

Coulsdon Road, Couldson, Surrey

Recommended Place to Visit

Weald and Downland Museum, Chichester

HEARTH AND HOME: Ancient Houses

 I spent thirty years making hand-crafted, carved and turned miniature furniture. Well, you have to do something, don’t you? My business, Pear Tree Miniatures, came to an end because I reached retirement age but, more importantly, my eyes could no longer cope with the fine detail. But as I relinquished my business website, along with all the articles I had created on the subject of (British) old houses and furniture, I thought I would transfer much of it here, to my author’s website. So here’s the first instalment, about the very earliest houses in prehistoric times i.e. in times before written records.

Creswell Crags, image by Nigel Homer

There’s a lot of talk about the property market, regarding houses as investment, but down the centuries what a house really meant was a home. Homes start with shelter. In a society of hunter gatherers, permanent shelters are not required. Better to make do with a hastily raised shack of whatever is available, or maybe an available cave, if not already inhabited by something hairy with big teeth.

Starting about 4,000 BC in Britain, the neolithic era introduced farming, which meant settling down to tend a particular piece of land, so shelters were intended to be more permanent. Their inhabitants worked on turning them into an environment of their choosing, with furnishings and, most important, a hearth for cooking and for warm. The majority, built of wood, wattle or turfs, have long vanished into the dust but the homes of Skara Brae on the Orkneys were built of the only material available - stone, and were buried in sand that kept them surprisingly intact until are more than 4,000 years old, until a storm in 1850 uncovered them.

It wasn't just the houses of Skara Brae that were built of stone. It was the furniture too, which has survived to proved that they but they had it all, even toilets. The houses were all similar, half buried int the earth for extra warmth and protection, without windows, but with an all-important central hearth, a dresser facing the doorway, cupboards, bed frames. Pottery and beads have been found there.

Skara Brae, image by M J Richardson

The Bronze-age, starting in Britain in about 2,500 BC, didn't make significant changes to house styles, using materials readily available, and since they were usually wood or wattle, very little has survived other than post holes and burned hearths. An exception is the bronze-age village at Must Farm, in the fens, which was built on piles over water. When it caught fire, it collapsed into the water and was buried in silt, so for once timbers, wattle, thatch and textiles have survived.

Round houses continued to be the normal construction through the Iron Age (from about 800 BC in Britain), and through and beyond the Roman occupation. Since a reconstructed Iron-age village, Castell Henllys, is just around the corner from me, I have got to know them quite well.

Castell Henllys Chief's house

Round houses are big. The chief's house at Castell Henllys is 13.75 metres diameter (45 feet to those still using groats, furlongs, bushels and gills). There is just one room but areas are partitioned around the central hearth - areas for sleeping, for food preparation, for weaving etc.

Construction is all guesswork, of course, but based on the postholes left by the originals. The wall are woven with hazel wattle, finished with daub containing essential ingredients such as hair and urine.

The most important place in the house was the central hearth, providing heat and a source of cooking, although clay ovens could be built for baking. There is no hole for the smoke to escape. If there were, the house would probably burn down, set ablaze by flying sparks. Instead, the smoke is trapped at the top of the house, quenching sparks, before gradually filtering out through the thatch.

Then the Romans came, bringing with them roads, windows, upper floors, under-floor heating, pretty mosaics and nice square corners, at least for the wealthy Romanised Brits, living in villas.

North Leigh Roman Villa, image by Richard Croft

Most people probably continued living in round houses, and virtually nothing of what the Romans brought was adopted by later generations. It all disappeared into the earth... except for one thing: writing. As history is about written records, the arrival of the Romans marked the end of prehistory.

For more about Castell Henllys,

check out Tiny Homes of the Ancient World.

Places to visit

Skara Brae Prehistoric Village

Castell Henllys Iron-age Village

Find out more about Must Farm