Surviving piece of Iron Age fabric buried in Loch Tay for 2,500 years goes on display

This surviving piece of Iron Age fabric, which lay buried in the bottom of Loch Tay in Perthshire for nearly 2,500 years, is going on display for the first time. 

Believed to be one of the oldest of its kind in Britain and dating back to the early to middle part of the Iron Age, it was found in 1979 when an Iron Age loch dwelling house, known as the Oakbank Crannog, was excavated on Loch Tay. 

Now, the public will be able to see this ancient textile, which was naturally preserved by the silty bed of the loch, when it goes on show for the first time at The Scottish Crannog Centre on 23 April.  

Previously thought too fragile to go on display, the textile will become a permanent exhibit at the Centre. Thanks to a painstaking stabilisation and conservation process, funded by Museums Galleries Scotland, it will be housed safely in a climate-controlled cabinet.

The ‘Oakbank Textile,’ has been analysed by archaeologists at the University of Glasgow who have radiocarbon dated the material to between 480 – 390BC.

The piece of woven fabric which lay buried in the bottom of Loch Tay in Perthshire for nearly 2,500 years. Credit Martin Shields

‘The exciting thing is that there’s nowhere else in Scotland, and very few places in the rest of the UK, that has a textile of this size and age,’ said Maureen Kerr, an experimental archaeologist and volunteer at the Centre.

‘The weave on this fine textile is called a 2/1 twill which is really unusual for the time in southern Britain and northern Europe as most twill weaves were 2/2. This sheds considerable light on the technologies society had in the Iron Age.

‘Twill weaves, which this textile is part of, is a dense, flexible fabric, very similar in appearance to our modern denim weave. It has been made, we think, on a two-beam loom, or a warp-weighted loom.

‘This, combined with the fact that there are the remnants of a possible hem indicating that it could have been part of a piece of clothing, makes it a rare and special discovery.’

Dr Susanna Harris, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, carefully examined the textile on behalf of the Centre.  

Scottish Crannog Centre. Credit Martin Shields

‘There are very few early textiles of this date and we think this is the first one of this type, of 2/1 twill, in Scotland. Wool was such an important material in Scotland it’s been exciting to analyse this piece,’ she said. 

‘It’s great that the Scottish Crannog Centre has taken this step. It’s really important finds like this go on display. It may be a small piece of textile but it tells us a lot about the heritage of Scottish textiles.’

Crannogs were dwelling houses built on stilts or stone over water and usually had a bridge connecting them to the shore. Very few exist outside of Scotland and Ireland. The first crannogs in Scotland were built on lochs from Neolithic times.

In 2021 the Scottish Crannog Centre was dealt a devastating blow in 2021 when a fire burned down the site’s reconstructed crannog, built by archaeologists in 1997. 

The Centre opened to visitors on its new and enlarged site near Kenmore last year and the build team is well on the way to completing a new crannog using sustainable and historical construction methods.

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