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Inside the Old Roundhouse |
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Reconstructed
in 1981, the Old Roundhouse is the longest standing archaeological
experiment in Iron Age roundhouse construction in Britain. The roundhouse
is divided into a number of rooms by an internal ring of posts.
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There is a clay bread oven by a cooking area with drying herbs hanging from the roof and plenty of wooden bowls, platters and spoons. A large cauldron hangs from a chain over the central hearth and a fire sends spirals of smoke up into the roof. Joints of meat are suspended from the ring beam in the smoke to keep the meat free from flies and to season it. An upright, warp weighted loom stands in the light by the door. The atmosphere of the Old Roundhouse is just like that of a bustling family house with lots going on and an aromatic dinner stew bubbling in the cauldron above the fire. The fire would have been of charcoal because the thatched roof of this house is tightly packed and the smoke from a log fire would not escape easily. This Roundhouse is 9 meters in diameter and 5 meters in height. The walls are of stake construction with hazel wattle woven round them. Two large post-holes indicated the position of the doorway to the Old House and their size suggested that the door may have been large enough to have had to take some of the weight of the roof. The roof is built around upper and lower ring beams. This means that only a few of the oak roof rafters need to reach from the top of the wall to the apex of the roof. Shorter rafters could be used alternately to stretch from wall top to lower ring beam and then from the lower to the upper ring beam. It can be hard to find long, straight and thin oak trees and Iron Age people must have practised woodland management such as coppicing to provide timber for buildings like those at Castell Henllys. When the site was excavated a series of post-holes were discovered which formed an internal ring inside the roundhouse (read Dr H Mytum's interim report). Because of this it was originally thought that the lower ring beam in the roof had been supported by internal posts. We now know that the ring beams in the reconstructed houses at Castell Henllys do not need to be supported. Instead we have used the internal posts to form divisions within the roundhouse and construct a platform to act as a storage loft or second floor. |
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 Leave the Old Roundhouse |
The
posts support a platform for storing goods such as baskets, leather,
rope and twine, candles and beeswax, Soay fleeces, spindle whorls
and woollen yarn all for the use of the people of the fort.