The Stronghold - Mollie Hunter and the Walls of Charles Keeping
One of Charles Keeping's many fine walls graces the cover of the 1974 winner of the Carnegie Medal, Mollie Hunter's The Stronghold . The wall in question is the wall of a broch , and the invention and purpose of these still somewhat mysterious structures, which are found only in the highlands and islands of Scotland, is the subject of Mollie Hunter's novel. A broch is a tall, tapering tower, built using drystone walling techniques with galleries and staircases built into the massive walls. Any account you read of the opinions and suppositions of archaeologists about brochs is peppered with the words perhaps and possibly. Possibly there were hundreds of these structures and probably they were all built between 100BCE and 100CE. Anything Mollie Hunter could imagine could possibly be true, but in order to write her book she had to create a complete, complex society with its religion, its power-struggles an...