27. The Vikings Are Here! Brough of Birsay, Orkney.
Neil Oliver: News, Comment, History
Fat Belly Films
4.7 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2020
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week Neil takes us with him to a place of stunning beauty with a dark and brutal past.
For years the Vikings well-deserved reputation for violence and brutality left a bloody stain right across the British Isles. They were masters of devastating ‘hit-and-run’ attacks, then at the end of the ninth century things took a turn…. for the worse! Vikings arrived on the Brough of Birsay in Orkney, driving off, or in an act of systematic genocide slaughtering the local Pictish men. But what was different this time was the Vikings hadn’t just come to pillage and plunder……they’d come to stay!
Piecing together the archaeology and history Neil tells a compelling story of an island trampled beneath Viking feet…… and he reveals what his DNA says about his own ancestors!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The 15 million pound Lotto Super Saturday jackpot must be won this Saturday. |
| 0:04.5 | Or thousands of you will win a share of the prize. |
| 0:06.7 | But who will it be? |
| 0:07.7 | Maybe Raj, watching the racewalk and thinking I could do that. |
| 0:10.6 | Well speed walk down the shop and get yourself a ticket. |
| 0:13.1 | Lotto will you be next play in store or on app the national lottery account terms |
| 0:17.6 | rules and procedures apply players must be 18 or over. They're not going home anymore. When they make the crossing, this time they've come to stay. |
| 0:35.0 | In this podcast we're coming ashore with one of the first shock waves of a brutal new invader. |
| 0:44.0 | Specialists in smash and grab raids across the British Isles. |
| 0:49.0 | The Vikings had a bloody reputation for plundering and pillaging. |
| 0:55.8 | In the ninth century, things took a turn for the worst. |
| 1:01.2 | They landed, but this time they had come to stay, to colonise and lay claim to the land, |
| 1:10.0 | bringing with them their gods of thunder and war. |
| 1:14.0 | These Viking warriors became part of the British Isles forever. |
| 1:19.0 | I'm stepping out across Britain to discover 100 remarkable places that have shaped you, me, and the whole world. |
| 1:30.0 | I'm Neil Oliver and this is my love letter to the British Isles. |
| 1:35.0 | Hi Neil, last week you took us to Lindisfarne, an island where the first bloody fingerprints |
| 1:48.7 | of the Vikings are to be found. A place some people think is King Arthur's Avalon. Aver's |
| 1:55.0 | where are we this week? |
| 1:57.0 | Well, we're quite a long way away from Avalon and indeed Lindesfarn. |
| 2:02.0 | We've travelled to a place that, well, once again, breathtaking beauty, really heart-stopping |
| 2:08.1 | beauty, but with a dark brutal past sitting off Orkney Mainland right up there on the northeast tip of Scotland |
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