Since I’ve been at the Scottish Crannog Centre I’ve been doing some dabbling in Iron Age technology. Not just Iron Age technology, some of it is Stone Age especially making holes in stones. Oakbank Crannog, the underwater original, has produced quite a few stones with holes. It’s not clear what they were all used for but some of them were spindle whorls, the weight at the bottom of a drop spindle. Inspired by their simplicity I made myself a drop spindle by making a hole in a likely looking stone, i.e. one that’s looked fairly soft, with a piece of quartz, then whittling a shaft out of a bit of firewood. Then I spun some yarn out of wool from Soay sheep that belong to one of my fellow Crannogistas. It took me a while. I’d not done any spinning before and I was trying to make a fairly thick yarn since that’s what I’m used to knitting or crocheting with. They didn’t knit in the Iron Age, or at least I don’t think they did 2500 years ago on Loch Tay, and I don’t think they crocheted either. They did weave, but I don’t, and I don’t have a loom so I decided to make something with crochet. I didn’t have a crochet hook with me so I whittled that too out of another bit of firewood and used it to make a little drawstring pouch. It’s not the most beautiful thing I’ve ever made but it was deeply satisfying to make a finished object out of stuff that I found locally and mostly gets treated as rubbish, burnt or ignored. The only thing I used that I didn’t make or find was the knife to whittle the spindle and crochet hook. Just like the Iron Age. There was a little iron knife found at Oakbank Crannog. It’s not easy to work iron so it probably came from somewhere else. It would have been a special thing, but damned useful to make something out of not much.
