What Was a Broch? The Scottish Stone Tower That Refused To Fall for 2,000 Years

Get our medieval cookbooks & home guides here: https://bakery.medievalway.store/ In the summer of 1153, a Norse earl besieged a tower. His name was Harald Maddadsson, and he ruled Orkney and Shetland. Inside sat a man named Erlend, who had run off with the earl's own mother. The tower stood on a bare little island called Mousa, and Harald had it surrounded. By every rule of medieval warfare, the people inside never stood a chance. Except the siege failed. The saga's verdict sounds almost embarrassed. Mousa was an unhandy place to attack. This tower was not a castle. It had no moat, no garrison, and no lord. It was already more than a thousand years old, and nobody alive knew who had built it. Tonight we take that tower apart, stone by stone. What a broch is, how you raise one out of loose stone with no mortar and no crane, what the diggers found on its floors, and how it beat a medieval army with nobody defending it but a runaway couple.