Jarlshof

The name

People

• 

  Walter Scott

  Coined the name 'Jarlshof' after visiting in 1814 and used it in his 1821 novel The Pirate

• A

  Alexander (Alex) Curle

  Archaeologist whose 1930s excavations found the first confirmed Norse longhouse in the British Isles

• R

  Robert Stewart, 1st Earl of Orkney

  Converted the medieval farmhouse into a 16th-century fortified house ('New Hall')

• P

  Patrick Stewart, 2nd Earl of Orkney

  Modernised the manor in the early 17th century, renaming it the 'Old House of Sumburgh'

Cultural influences

• The Bronze Age oval houses show similarity to Skara Brae in Orkney but are smaller and later; broken moulds from the smithy indicate the smith was trained in the Irish style of metalworking.

• The wheelhouse complex post-dates the main 1st-century-BC to 2nd-century-AD flourishing of these structures in the Western Isles by several centuries; unlike many Scottish wheelhouses built into the earth, the Jarlshof examples were built from ground level upwards.

• Continuity and overlap between cultures is visible: Pictish-style drawings appear in the Viking levels, Viking-style loom weights and vessels were found alongside Pictish-design objects, and the basement courses of the rounded Pictish and rectangular Norse buildings are constructed in the same way.

Connections

• O

  Old Scatness

  Broch and settlement of similar longevity just a mile (1.5 km) away, discovered in 1975

• 

  Broch of Mousa

  Grouped with Jarlshof in the 'Zenith of Iron Age Shetland' tentative World Heritage proposal

• S

  Skara Brae, Orkney

  Comparison for the Bronze Age oval houses, which resemble it on a smaller, later scale

• 

  Shetland Museum

  Holds many of the artefacts excavated from the Norse period, including an 8th–9th-century Irish-made bronze-gilt harness mount

Discovery & excavation

In culture

• Walter Scott set part of his 1821 novel The Pirate in the Old House of Sumburgh, which he named Jarlshof — the coinage that gave the whole site its enduring name.

• Described as 'one of the most remarkable archaeological sites ever excavated in the British Isles' and widely regarded as the best-known prehistoric site in Shetland, containing the most extensive Viking-Age remains visible anywhere in Britain.

What to look for

• The Iron Age broch — part lost to coastal erosion and now protected by sea defences — which probably once stood 13 m (40 ft) or more high.

• The complex of Pictish wheelhouses, two of which are among the best examples of their type; the best-preserved retains much of its stone roof and a series of corbelled bays.

• The Viking longhouse settlement — seven Norse-era houses (no more than two in use at a time), the largest a 20-by-5-metre hall with central hearth and timber benches.

• The walls of the Scottish-period fortified manor (the Old House of Sumburgh / Jarlshof House), the most visible structures on the site.

• The Bronze Age oval houses and smithy, including a whale vertebra set into a wall, thought to have served as a tethering post.

Standing there

• The site sits low on a treeless coastal headland at the southern tip of Shetland Mainland, overlooking the West Voe of Sumburgh — wind, the cry of seabirds and the smell of salt and turf dominate, and the same storm-driven sea that buried the buildings in sand also tore them open again in the late 19th century.
• Walking the site you step physically through thousands of years: from Bronze Age oval houses and a smithy, past the Iron Age broch stump and the corbelled stone bays of the Pictish wheelhouses, into the Norse longhouses, and out at the tall walls of the 16th-century laird's manor — the layers stacked and overlapping in one compact ground.
• You can duck into the best-preserved wheelhouse, which still keeps much of its stone roof and a ring of corbelled bays, and stand inside the largest Norse hall — a 20-by-5-metre rectangular room that once had timber benches along each long wall and a hearth burning in the centre.
• In the Norse centuries this was a smoky, working farmstead under ridged timber-and-turf roofs — the air carrying peat-smoke and the wet-wool smell of the wool trade behind 150 surviving loom weights, with cod, saithe and ling drying from deep-water fishing and sheep, cattle, pigs and ponies kept close by.
• The Bronze Age corner brings the work of the place close: a smithy whose moulds show axes, knives, swords and pins being cast in the Irish style, the ring of metalwork and the heat of the forge, and a whale vertebra set into a wall thought to have served as a tethering post for cattle.