A forage in the Iron Age

I’m at the Scottish Crannog Centre this season, guiding and demonstrating Iron Age crafts, and it’s been a great learning experience about how people lived in the Highlands 2500 years ago. The Crannog is a reconstruction of an underwater structure in Loch Tay that has been excavated over the last thirty years or so. It dates from about 500 BC, so it’s prehistoric but the preservation of stuff in the cold waters of Loch Tay has been so perfect that it’s been possible to find hazel wattle walls, wood floors, supporting piles made from alder, turf from the roof and all the accumulated rubbish that fell through the floor, especially bracken, which was used on the roof and the floor and as cavity wall insulation, bits of chaff from wheat, barley and other crops, seeds from wild fruits like blackberry, raspberry and cloudberry and even sheep droppings from animals kept in the house over the water. It was a home that was made entirely of plants by people who knew their local environment intimately.

There was a food festival at the Crannog on Sunday, with food cooked by methods and with ingredients available in the Iron Age. We did a bit of foraging to gather spring greens from the wild, which I think must have been particularly valued at this time of year as a kind of spring tonic, full of flavour and freshness, after a winter of grains and dried meat. It was a bit of a challenge to find much this year after such a slow, cold spring but the ransoms are here in abundance, very garlicky after hanging around for such a long time before the slightly warmer weather got them growing, though most of them still aren’t in flower yet. We’ve had a some fine days, which have brought on a few more things recently and we did manage to find some early hedge garlic, lady’s smock (very fiery but good flavour, if you like hot mustard), hairy bittercress, which tastes like watercress, nettles, coltsfoot, rosebay (it has a strong flavour, I suspect it needs cooking), opposite-leaved golden saxifrage, which looks pretty in a salad but doesn’t taste of much, gosegrass (my dog’s favourite green nibble) and lots of ransoms.