For me, it would be the Ness of Brodgar in Orkney. I visited in the Summer of 2024 when the excavations were coming to an end (although the Time Team are about to open a new trench in the Spring to investigate a new and exciting discovery).

I would love to see what exactly what was going on there when it was in full use. Was it significant or simply a collection of houses? Who knows.

by BurnsyWurnsy

31 comments

  1. Honestly as much as the old Neolithic ruins would be class, seeing Stirling or Edinburgh castle as actual functioning strongholds full of people would be very cool. Maybe that’s a boring answer…

  2. Studio 24 in Edinburgh in the late 90s/early 00s when I was 18 again and had the energy to stay up all night.

  3. Inverness Castle. Not the current one, the medieval one that got blown up.

  8. Dunadd Fort.

    I know it would just be a bunch of roundhouses on a hill, but it just moves me somehow.

  9. There’s that Hill mound (?) that used to be a Pictish fort on top of a hill. I would really wonder what that looked like back in the day, how the defenses were and how all the buildings were divided and placed. Especially because so much is unknown about them and their lifestyle.

  10. For me it would be a typical family home in a small town. We have castles, grand houses and city centre buildings but I’d love if just one normal medieval house from 1300s was available to see.

  11. Iona Abbey.

    Just to see what life was *actually* like.

    Imo it was either sex party island or autism island.

  12. Suppose my first choice isn’t really a site, but It’d be amazing to go thousands of years into the past to see how the country used to look before we decimated the landscape and cut down all the old growth rain forests, really fucking sad when you look out over the barren landscape and remember that the country shouldn’t look like this.

    Secondly, any of the old castles, but the more ‘boring’ non toursity ones in particular, there’s quite a few ruins of old, smaller castles in the area which I wonder about seemingly in the middle of nowhere, makes me curious to think about how their day to day lives were, we’re so far removed from that time now It’s hard to comprehend how normal it was for them.

  13. For me, I would love to see the Caterthuns when they were in use. They are very local to me (my old cottage looked right at the white one) and when I go I hope my ashes are spread there.

  15. I’d just love to see the Caledonian Forest as it is supposed to look stretched all over where it’s supposed to be. Rather than our current ‘beautiful’ highland scenery.

  17. Dunfermline Abbey back when it was a monastery then Royal Palace. In summer though please. Fife in winter is misery.

  21. Dundee at its height in late victorian period would be amazing.

  23. University of St Andrews in its early years.

    Elgin Cathedral.

  24. I grew up in the Irvine Valley and there used to be a trainline going right through it. It’s not going back far at all really, and the embankments have only recently been levelled for development projects. I’ve always found it fascinating that all the infrastructure that used to support a busy network of transport for the lace industry, was essentially removed over the course of one generation. Those small towns used to have trains running past the end of the street I grew up on, and now there’s barely a bus service!

  27. Linlithgow Palace…. In its prime, fully decorated and filled with people, intrigue, power and colour. If you stand on the balcony in the great hall and really really try….. You can maybe see the vast tapestries draped down the walls, the whispered plotting in the hallways, the grand entrance of an obscenely powerful noble….. Horses draw up to the flag bedecked entrance and on the lake there is a medieval flute and viol band entertaining a multi coloured throng of party goers …. And now all we hear is lost echos…. We have a better fairer world but we cannot deny past glory and downfall……

  28. I was at the Ness in 2024 as well, and looking forward to the new big discovery.

    I would love to sit at Achnabreac while whoever is busy creating the cup and ring carvings and be able to simply understand why they are being carved.

  29. There are lots and LOTS of (iron age?) hill forts dotted around the Borders. I try to visit as many as I can when I’m trail running. Most don’t even have names, they’re just there. With obvious embankments and they all have a very eerie feeling when you stand in the middle of them. Like a feeling of “shit happened here”.

    But the one’s I’d love to see in their hayday would be the ‘vitrified hill forts’ which were the inspiration for ‘Harrenhal’ in Game Of Thrones. The rock on the outer walls are literally melted together. No-one knows how, or why. I’ve been to a few and it’s weird. Like volcanic rock but at the top of hills which were never volcanically active.

    One theory was that they would gather all the brachen and peat from the surrounding hills (tonnes of it) and ‘fire’ the walls. But it’s debatable whether this could ever reach the temperatures high enough to melt rock.

    Personally, I think it was obviously dragons haha

  30. The great Caledonian forest. Not really people centric, though people undoubtedly lived in it. But it would have been an immense area of what today would probably have been called an ancient forest… Or even a primeval forest, which to me is more interesting in many ways than any number of ancient villages/towns/castles/etc.

  31. New Lanark’s Institute of the Formation of Character; 1818AD. First infant school in the world; contemporary accounts were all positive but from the paternalistic outsiders perspective. What the parents thought… what we as modern viewers would think… it would be fascinating to imagine the modern Ofsted report

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