A wide shot of a rugged, windswept coastline under a cloudy sky. In the foreground, a vibrant green grassy bank slopes down to a shingle beach, where the land meets the choppy grey ocean. To the right, a low, circular stone retaining wall is built into the landscape, with a concrete base extending towards the water. In the centre is a ruined broch, its stone obscured by patches of the small pink flowers of Thrift, which are also dotted across the green grass. In the middle ground, there's a small body of inland loch, beyond which the land appears to be a mix of green machair. In the far background, a range of dark, hazy mountains rises under the cloudy sky.

Dùn Vùlan

This was an unexpected discovery on South Uist, though the Gothic lettering on the map did hint at something worth noting.

Rubha Àird Mhuile is a low, sandy peninsula that juts into the Atlantic. Most of it is taken up by a shallow ‘inland’ loch. On the summit of a storm-thrown shingle ridge, barely ten feet above the high tide line, sit the remains of Dun Vùlan. This circular Iron Age fort lies close to the loch, parts of it now protruding from the shingle. Built between 150 and 50 BC, it is older than it looks.

Excavations in the 1990s revealed the broch was no small affair. It once rose to about ten metres, with internal chambers, galleries and stairways. It was reused in the later Iron Age, with the entrance raised two metres. Two rectangular outbuildings from the 2nd to 4th century AD were also found nearby – the oldest known examples of such buildings in the Western Isles. A Pictish house was later built inside the broch. A midden from the 2nd or 3rd century has yielded a wealth of finds.

An eye-level, wide shot shows a rugged, shingle beach with a concrete seawall broken into large slabs, running above the high water line. The concrete is cracked and appears to have buckled, with some sections lifted and revealing the rounded, grey stones beneath. To the left, the dark, choppy ocean meets the shore, which is covered in dark brown seaweed. Further along the coastline, the beach curves into the distance, with more dark seaweed visible. The sky above is overcast with a light grey cloud cover.
The crumbling sea wall.

The digs were prompted by erosion. Atlantic storms were eating away at the site, so excavation was done alongside the building of a concrete sea wall. That wall, like most things that try to stand up to the Atlantic, is not faring well.

The work showed this was not just a “dùn” but what is now called a Complex Atlantic Roundhouse – a broch in modern terms. The loch beside it was probably once freshwater or brackish, later swamped by the sea. A further excavation in 2018, again triggered by erosion, focused on stabilising the surviving wall head. Erosion had begun to destabilise parts of the later internal structures. Steel mesh gabions were also added to absorb wave energy and slow the damage.

The Atlantic, of course, remains unimpressed.

1Dùn Vùlan Broch/Midden/Settlement. Canmore ID 9825. http://canmore.org.uk/site/9825


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