Читать книгу Walking on Rum and the Small Isles. Rum, Eigg, Muck, Canna, Coll and Tiree онлайн

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Peat core samples from Kinloch revealed soil erosion and a decline in tree pollen, suggesting that woodland clearance for cultivation occured during the Neolithic (New Stone Age), from around 2700BC. Bronze Age traces on Rum are limited to hut circle sites and finds of barbed and tanged bloodstone arrow heads. Like many marginal Bronze Age settlements, Rum may have been abandoned during a period of harsh climatic conditions prevailing in northern Europe after the eruption of the Icelandic volcano, Hekla, about 1150.

Iron-working skills and characteristic structures including brochs, duns, wheelhouses, crannogs and souterrains were introduced to Scotland around the middle of the first millenium BC by Celtic people migrating from continental Europe. Rum possesses only a few crude promontory fort sites at Kilmory, Papadil and Shellesder. Decorated pottery sherds are the only other Iron Age artefacts retrieved on the island.

The first written references to the early Caledonian people come from the Romans, following Agricola’s expedition north in AD81. References to the ‘Picti’ first appeared in Roman accounts around AD300, though it is probable that the Picts were an assortment of racial and cultural groups – including the aboriginal Bronze Age peoples – bound together by the threat of the Romans. It is likely that the population of Rum at this time was Pictish in origin.