It's the ancient's on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes your host and in today's podcast

we are talking about one of the most remarkable set of ancient structures from Iron Age Britain.

We are talking about the rocks. These massive, these huge stone round structures, the remains

of which we see scattered across Scotland today, particularly in the Highlands and in the

islands of Orkney and Shetland. Now to tell me more about these rocks, what we know about these

ancient towers in the north, I was delighted to be joined by Ian McClein. Ian is a founding member

of the Caithness Brock Project, a brilliant charity dedicated to preserving and ensuring the legacy

of the archaeology of Caithness, that region in the north-eastern tip of the Scottish mainland,

and Brock's of course, play a key part in that archaeology. So it was great to get in on the show

to tell me more about the Brocks of Antiquity. Here is Ian McClein.

Ian, thanks so much for joining me today. Excellent, thanks very much for having me on the show.

Now the Brocks, these are iconic buildings that seem to cover the far north of the British Isles.

Yeah, that's right. The Brocks are Iron Age towers basically,

seen by someone to be the pinnacle of prehistoric architecture in the European sphere

or so we like to think ourselves at the Brock Project and you find them mostly across the

Atlantic Friends of Scotland, so then normally on the coastline. For the most part, because Scotland

has a lot of coastline, specifically in Orkney and Shetland, they are always found quite close to

the coast, but Caithness where I'm from, we have Brock's along the coast and in the interior as well

and in Sutherland, they follow the river valleys as well, so although they're viewed that way

because the majority of them are near the coast, a lot of them are actually inland as well.

And how many of these stunning structures survive to this day?

There's about 700 Brock's roughly, but not all them survive in a particularly good state of

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