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Vitrified Forts? (Scottish Hill Forts; Inca Structures, Etc.)

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dreeness

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What's the current state of knowledge on vitrified hill forts?
Has the method ever been duplicated in modern times, or is it a lost art?
 
I dunno about recreation - the Health And Safety Executive might have a thing to say about a mammoth "firing" but the theory is sound. Best example I saw was on a hill in Cornwall, near Chaucester.
 
dreeness said:
What's the current state of knowledge on vitrified hill forts?
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Do you mean the Brochs (sp) in what is now Scotland?.
 
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Bullseye said:
dreeness said:
What's the current state of knowledge on vitrified hill forts?
Click to expand...

Do you mean the Brochs (sp) in what is now Scotland?.
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No. Brochs are enormous circular, drystone towers that must have looked a bit like power station cooling towers with their broad supporting bases. They were often surrounded by a huddle of huts covered over with turf. Vitrified forts were larger structures, walled enclosures where the mix of stonework and timber was either fired on purpose, or by accident, or by attackers, leading to temperatures inside the walls so hot as to partially melt the stonework holding it together.

Vitrified forts range from Central Europe through to Scotland and the Celtic fringes. Like Brochs, they seem to be a feature of the Iron Age Celtic culture.

Vitrified means turned to glass.
 
I think there are some brochs that have been vitrified, (enormous ?well, I would'nt go that far ! big,well some where, yes but....)thanks for clearing up what vitrified means!. (for some reason I always assume that ftmb'ers have a slightly better understanding of knowledge in general than the average Sun reader ! ) 8)
 
melf said:
i think they did a "reconstruction" for arthur c clarkes "mysterious world" tv series
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I saw that, IIRC they didn't manage to do it (melt the rocks), they either couldn't get the fire hot enough, or they ran out of wood ...
 
Bullseye said:
I think there are some brochs that have been vitrified, (enormous ?well, I would'nt go that far ! big,well some where, yes but....)thanks for clearing up what vitrified means!. (for some reason I always assume that ftmb'ers have a slightly better understanding of knowledge in general than the average Sun reader ! ) 8)
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Some broch's may have been vitrified, I'm not sure about that. I believe some dun's were. These were slightly bigger enclosures, often backing onto the sea.

The Broch of Mousa on Shetland is still standing to a height of 14+ meters. That's fairly enormous for a free standing construction built using drystone walling techniques, I can assure you.

I mentioned the fact that vitrified means turned to glass, because I still think it's also pretty impressive that it got so hot in there that the stones themselves started to fuse and melt. Beared repeating.

Broch of Mousa
 
As far as I know it's still classed as pretty impossible, yes it's possible to vitrify stone and they have recreated this small scale with great effort but think on this:

Now take a vitrified fort near Aberdeen, on top of fairly steep hill. It's quite big, so think of the wood needed to surround the structure's walls. Then set it on fire, keep that fire fueled for a damn long time, weeks at least I think, at a sufficient level to keep generating the heat needed to do it, assuming of course that it's possible to keep that sustained heat going think of the manpower that would be needed to keep the fire fueled. The hill was probably already completely deforested by the time it happened, for local firewood and crafts, being as they probably lived there for a good while before that fort was vitrified and it's more secure to do so where enemy cannot sneak up on you, they would have had to build it after all as well which woudl take a good while. They would have had to drag all that fuel from at best a short distance away, and then UP that fairly steep hill. Thats at least say, 200 people I would think, doing nothing but keeping the fire fueled, day and night, which assumes many times that number doing their work and feeding them etc. If we assume they had some unknown method to make vitrifying easier we definately dont know it.
If we tried to vitrify a whole stone fort as they did we would fail miserably.

And then there is the WHY of it. Why do it? It makes your walls weaker than they were before so its not for security. Why go to all that effort to vitrify a stone fort if it actually weakens it? It is hideously expensive, both in time, materials and manpower and is very labour-intensive. I believe some vitrified forts seem to be vitrified from ABOVE as well, though I cant verify that with my own eyes.


All in all its a bit of a puzzler.
 
Ok a couple of observations

Firstly what evidence is there for the fuel? A powerful fire like that would have left several feet of ash

Secondly, has anyone factored in the wind as a contributary factor for increasing the amount of oxygen available for the fire. This can have a large effect, for example at St Agnes Beacon the remains of Roman(?) period glass furnaces have been found designed to face into the prevailing wind and in Sri Lanka Iron and steel were made by furnaces using the Monsoon winds
 
And then there is the little point that we are talking about SCOTLAND here. Try and keep a fire going for that long without it raining at least a few times, and more likely a fair bit. Scotland is a wet country, lol, this would tend to also help to diminish the "build a big fire" theory.
 
Ancient flame-thowers anyone?

Neolithic World Today said:
"Dangerous Greek Fire in Building Industry Scandal!"
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These whacky ancients, hey? They come up with incendiary building methods and we, younger people, go and forget everything! Perhaps the resultant ash was shipped off to use as the land bridge between Atlantis and Skegness.
 
That is very probable- after all, the Atlanteans would have wanted somewhere pretty special to go on holiday.
 
Atlanteans up north!

They also came to Huddersfield for a day trip...


Not too far from me is Castle Hill (also known as 'Almondbury Hill Fort'). It looks just like a Yorkshire version of Glastonbury Tor, from a distance!

The interesting thing is; according to several researchers, sometime around 430 B.C. the timbers in the walls of the fort spontaneously combusted :shock: resulting in the formation of one of England's few vitrified hill-forts.


What causes timbers to spontaneously combust?
 
A very big Boy Scout rubbing them together.

I also understand that wood, when compressed in huge piles, can generate enough heat to start a smoulder like on coal tips.
 
Has anybody got a good look at some of these vitrified forts and the fused stones, or even some clear photos? I haven't had a chance to see any of these forts, so any good descriptions would be very interesting.
 
A friend once told me about spontaneously-combusting haystacks. Apparently some chemical process would happen on the inside if the hay was damp when the stack was made, causing them to smoulder, and they'd have to shave off the outside to get at the smouldering inside, which would burst into flames once it hit the outside air.

Perhaps there's something similar with the timbers?

Also, thinking about fuel (Many Angled One's post), peat burns pretty well. Was it used in the construction at all? To pad the walls, say.
 
I have visited many hillforts...never a vitrified one, sad to say.

What about a ritual aspect? A way of `killing` a captured fort?
 
Names of several vitrified forts
Tap O'Noth
Craig Phadrig
Bute-Dunagoil

...In two famous experiments in the 1930s, the great archaeologist Gordon Childe and his colleague Wallace Thorneycroft showed that forts could have been set on fire by invaders piling brushwood against the walls, and, more importantly, that the fires started in this manner could generate enough heat for the stones to vitrify.
In March 1934, a model murus Gallicus, 12ft (3.66m) long, 6ft (1.8m) wide and 6ft (1.8m) high, was built for them at Plean Colliery in Stirlingshire, They used old fireclay bricks for the faces, pit props as timber, and filled the cavity between the walls with small cubes of basalt rubble. Finally they covered the top with turf. Then they piled about four tons of scrap timber and brushwood against the walls and set fire to them. Despite a snowstorm the wood caught fire, and, three hours later, the wall began to collapse. This exposed the inner core which, fanned by a strong wind, grew hotter and hotter.
When Childe and Thorneycroft went through the remains of the wall next day, they found they had successfully reproduced the kind of vitrification they had seen in ancient forts. And they did it again in June 1937, when they fired another wall actually on the site of a vitrified fort at Rahoy in Argyllshire, using the rocks found there...
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source
Arthur C. Clark's Mysterious World
Simon Welfare & John Fairley
 
Homo Aves said:
I have visited many hillforts...never a vitrified one, sad to say.

What about a ritual aspect? A way of `killing` a captured fort?
Click to expand...


Yeah, like 'torch the fort', we'll show 'em!


Off on a tangent slightly, when I was a kid, growing up in urban West Yorkshire, my mother used to warn me off playing on the 'slag heaps'. She said they were on fire below ground, I'm sure I remember them smoking. There were stories circulating (UL's?) about kids being swallowed by the slag heaps and being incinerated! :shock:
 
Androman said
The Broch of Mousa on Shetland is still standing to a height of 14+ meters. That's fairly enormous for a free standing construction built using drystone walling techniques, I can assure you.
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The broch on Mousa has just been surveyed. They reckon it'll stand for another couple of thousand years without much trouble. Not bad.

[/quote]Names of several vitrified forts
Tap O'Noth
Craig Phadrig
Bute-Dunagoil
[/quote]

Knockfarrel, near Strathpeffer
Another one on Conval, near Ben Rinnes, Dufftown.
 
AndroMan said:
Has anybody got a good look at some of these vitrified forts and the fused stones, or even some clear photos? I haven't had a chance to see any of these forts, so any good descriptions would be very interesting.
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I was up at Knockfarrel at the weekend. It's not far so I'll be back soon no doubt.
There's not much to see truth be told. I'd have to take the experts word for it that it was a vitrification process that scarred the rocks. The ones that you can see just look kind of pock marked.
I suppose once you see the same rock markings at a few different sites you get an idea of what was going on, but if you just visited the one site then you would probably miss the significance of these marks.
 
Ancient Scots had Weapons of Mass Destruction

When Arthur C Clarke was interviewed by the Guardian in 2004 he was asked what he thought was the biggest mystery that he had encountered. He replied: "The oddest thing is these vitrified forts in Scotland. I just thought, how the hell? After all, lasers were not common in the Stone Age."

There are around 100 vitrified forts around the world, with over half in Scotland. They were built on strategic locations, and the stones were heated to such high temperatures that they fused together.

When Clarke’s team tried to recreate the vitrification process they concluded that the amount of heat needed to vitrify rocks was equivalent to an atomic bomb.

The ancient Indian epic, The Mahabharata, gives very precise details of "flying machines" that were used by the Indians thousands of years ago. They travelled great distances, and tellingly, these flying machines were said to possess incredibly powerful firearms.

The epic explains a hideous war that took place between the Indians and the Atlanteans, possessors of flying machines. They both used weapons of destruction, The Mahabharata notes: "[the weapon was] a single projectile charged with all the power of the universe. An iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death."

In other words, they had firearms with the power of an atomic bomb. Enough to vitrify stones. Is it possibly that the vitrified forts of Scotland are the remnants of some cataclysmic war between the Indians and the Atlanteans, a war that wiped out all traces except for the remains of the forts?

scotsman.com rating
9/10 - That’s it, we’re converts! It all makes sense! We believe in the forts - if Arthur C Clarke says it's amazing, we believe it - so by extension we also buy Atlantis/Scotland. We believe in it all!
 
I was watching the Tap O'Noth episode (ep. 3) of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World the other night and it was the most interesting part. Does anyone know of any new theories as to how the fort became vitrified? They only manage to melt about three rocks in their experiment, in spite of all the heat.

Good pics here:
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/sit ... _noth.html
 
When were these forts made? Were they used before being vitrified? Is the vitrification all over, on the outside or the inside?

Depending on a number of factors, rocks start to melt between 625-1200 degrees celsius, temperatures much higher than this are acheived in glass production.

I have never seen any of these vitrified forts and so I am wondering if they had been used as some sort of kiln for metal smelting or pottery on a massive scale.

They remind me of the folk/fairy tales about glass towers and mountains that the hero has to climb to rescue the princess.
 
See here for more info:
http://www.rcahms.gov.uk/pls/portal/new ... link=17169

Link is dead. No archived version available at the Wayback Machine.

I'm not sure what could be made in kiln that size, unless they made tanks in the Iron Age. The walls are meant to keep someone out, but the purpose of vitrfying them is unknown, as is how they ended up that way. It's very strange.
 
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It's more likely that the 'forts' contained some sort of internal wooden framework and that they were set on fire by assailants.

Air drafting in through the dry stone work, might have been enough to raise the fire's temperature to something that could partially melt the stone's surface.

Perhaps, some sort of turf, or peat, roofing might have been involved, too?
 
Archaeologists probe Abbey Craig secrets
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-t ... l-14945291

The fort is on the site of the Wallace Monument in Stirling

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Anniversary of Wallace Monument
Wallace Monument to get upgrade

Archaeologists are leading volunteers in a four-day dig to uncover the hidden history beneath one of Scotland's most famous landmarks.

Experts are hoping to discover more about a tribe that lived in the fort below Abbey Craig in Stirling, on the site of the National Wallace monument.

The fort was destroyed in 780 AD, more than 500 years before William Wallace watched the English army approach.

The dig is one of a series of events to mark Scottish archaeology month.

Archaeologists first discovered the 1,300-year-old fort 10 years ago and concluded it was engulfed by a ferocious fire that fused together - or vitrified - the stone walls during a siege.

'Warlike past'
The stronghold is thought to have been called Iudeu.

Stirling Council archaeologist Murray Cook said the fort was occupied at a time when mainland Scotland was ruled by the ancient tribes of Picts, Celts, Britons, and Angles.

"Scotland has more known vitrified forts than anywhere else in Europe and here in Stirling we have our own that reflects our warlike past," he said.

"Despite a wealth of information known about the area there is relatively little known about this fort, however.

"The flames which lit up the sky would have been visible for miles around."

The dig will end on Monday.
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I've wondered about the forts for some time. Perhaps the vitrification was caused by massive electrical discharges? Perhaps associated with some kind of charging of our atmosphere from the sun? Otherwise, aliens are as good a guess as any.
 
Incan vitrification

Bizarre evidence of ceramic glaze vitrification by the Incas:
http://blog.world-mysteries.com/science ... s-of-peru/

The European examples are much less precise.
The question is how the heat was produced..

Lasers would fit the bill perfectly:
http://www.google.com/#q=laser+vitrification

Some of the snaky surface vitrification looks to me like what woul happen if a laser was moved across the surface. Even used to cut the blocks out. But where are the lasers? Were they a borrowed technology? I am not fond of the ancient alien theory, but grasp at thin air a to how these things were achieved.
 
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