One of the things I love about travelling is visiting sites that provide a glimpse into how people used to live.
I think the oldest site I’ve ever visited is Skara Brae, a neolithic settlement (3180-2500 BC) on Scotland’s Orkney Isles. But more recently I visited Grimspound, a late bronze-age village (~1300 BC) on Dartmoor in Devon, England.
And this shot of one of my travelling cohort INSIDE the remains of one of Grimspound’s 24 huts seems perfect for this week’s WordPress weekly photo challenge (for which the theme is, er, ‘inside’).
The remains of this little stone hut reminds me a lot of the far more famous Skara Brae. For one thing, they’re very similar in size — being spectacularly tiny. Can you imagine living inside here?
In the distance you can see the remains of the wall that ringed this village located high on Dartmoor. (And, yes, I have featured a few pictures from Grimspound on this blog over the past several months… I was rather taken with it.)
Grimspound is fairly well known in the area, although we didn’t see any signposts and had to ask for directions (and even then it was tricky to find). But afterwards we found another similar (but less intact) settlement right by the side of the road. We sat INSIDE that as the day faded and the near full moon rose over the moor.
A rare and magical experience, one to save and fold away inside my memory so I can channel it into a fantasy story one day…
What’s the oldest archeological site you’ve ever visited? Were you able to get INSIDE it??
E V Gregory 
I love that you could go INSIDE the ruins like that. It makes seeing and experiencing a site so much more interactive. There’s something so cool about getting to touch and walk on ancient stones just like the people who lived so long ago.
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Yes – especially a site like this one, which is not fenced in or even signposted. It was just us and the wind…
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