Scotland's Largest Pictish Fort 'Reconstructed' in New Images | Hacker News Reader

Scotland's Largest Pictish Fort 'Reconstructed' in New Images

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72 pointsThevet15 comments

Those are some impressive ramparts.

Looking at them though, I wonder if they also had parapets and some sort of ladders or stairs to reach the top of them from the inside. It wouldn't at all be surprising, I think, for the archaeological evidence of the ramparts to survive much longer than some wooden parapets.

It's just... while those ramparts are very impressive, if you're trapped on the inside and can't even get up on top of them, the siegers can build ramps or ladders at their leisure. At the very least you'd want to be able to shoot some arrows or throw some javelins down at them to discourage that sort of thing.

The Picts are an often overlooked people. Aside from Senua's Sacrifice, I can't think of a single piece of media dedicated to them.

You have clearly missed Asterix and the Picts!

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/21/asterix-picts-...

https://www.asterix.com/en/the-collection/albums/asterix-and...

While not exactly dedicated to the Picts, the 2010 movie Centurion [1] at least involves them. It tells the story from a Roman perspective, at a time when Hadrian‘s Wall was about to be abandoned because the Romans couldn‘t take it any longer and gave up in frustration.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020558/

Whenever another longer lasting civ writes a lot of negative things about another dead civ I get more interested in the dead civ.

Another great example of this is the Phonecians, or Carthage. They likely had trade outposts in Cornwall generations before the Romans over extended themselves.

There was an episode of In Our Time on the Picts. Unusually, this one was recorded in front of a live audience, and featured a Q&A. When the question came up, "what actually happened to them at the end?" The reply was "Nothing. Except writers changed from calling them Picts to calling them Scots."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09cvx7b

This is a fantastic resource, great to see someone reconstructing a hill fort, even virtually, that's north of the border.

I'd love to see something about the vitrified forts (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrified_fort) the Picts were known to build. These basically hardened glass walls would have been more resistant to attack, but why they over-engineered these walls is a bit of a mystery.

Is it me or the sea level has gone done between the time of the Picts and now ? (looking at the picture on the article)

Scotland’s ground level has risen due to isostatic rebound, upto about 10cm/century over time, but about half that currently.

Current sea level rise due to climate change is higher than that, on the order of 20cm/year

Do you mean sea levels are currently rising 20cm per century? I think that’s maybe why you got some downvotes

Didn't downvote, but I do know Scotland's land has been rising for quite a long time, and I believe the sea level rising is a relatively recent thing, so it is possible the land has been rising by more than the sea for a while, even if it isn't any longer. Actually, according to https://www.nature.scot/landforms-and-geology/scotlands-rock... "[land] uplift rates are now modest – no more than 0.6mm per year. At the same time, coastal waters around the UK are rising at rates of up to 2mm per year."

The thing they do mention in the video is that the site and especially some of the spots being excavated is quite close (1m) from a constantly eroding cliff. Under such circumstances, rising sea levels are probably a minor (or at least only one of a number of) contributor(s); other factors are the increasing energy that more frequent and more violent storms bring in (also related to climate change), and of course that parts of the land that are already underwater now do little to protect the parts that are still above sea level (unrelated to climate change). Parts of the German North Sea coast have been experiencing losses of 1m of shoreline per year for many decades, maybe centuries; this means I personally used to know entire dune ridges and valleys that are, mere decades later, somewhere out there in the sea when you stand at the shore. On the bright side, other parts of the littoral are experiencing a relatively expansive ongrowth of new flat sand plains; in some places those are wide enough to harbor their own ephemeral ponds, incipient carpets of vegetation and maybe the beginnings of new dune ridges. What the future will bring we do not know, but for the part of the coast between Belgium and Denmark the outlook is not rosy as the land has been slowly sinking for millennia; IOW it's complicated. Not all that far from Burghead the sea level equation is rise of sea plus sinking of land, whereas in Scotland it's more like rise of sea minus rise of land.

Doh yes per century, recoil figures from memory from a long time ago, thanks for updated ones

The UK is a giant seesaw. The ice age ice pushed the Scottish end down and now released it is slowly rising up while the London end sinks.The Roman boat docks in London are now several feet below the water level!

Another thing to bear in mind is the large tide around the UK, which has some of the biggest difference between low and hide tide (https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/627ww6/map_of_glob...). In the image most of the flat area without grass is tidal.

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