Ancient Celtic building techniques

The word Celtic was the term used by the Romans to categorize the various people who lived in the eastern part of Europe. They included people from modern-day Britain, France, and several countries to the east, but are most commonly associated with Britain and Ireland. It’s believed that people from Europe moved to Britain over the land bridge that connected modern-day France to England before it flooded around 6,100 BCE. After this time the Celts of Britain were isolated and created their own culture and way of doing things, including their own ancient Celtic building techniques.

Due to the age and level of technology available at the time, it’s no surprise they weren’t building huge castles or elaborate stone works, but they were able to build everything they needed to not only survive but flourish. Here are a few of the building techniques that the Celtic people of ancient Britain used to create their world.

The Roundhouse

By far the building most commonly associated with the Celts, the roundhouse was the most effective home they could have built. The central fire pit warms the interior space better than any fireplace would, and the smoke can escape through the waterproof thatching. The following are the five main sections of building a roundhouse:

1) Foundation posts
Wooden beams with flat tops would be placed every few feet in a circle at the same height as the walls intended to be. These would then have planks laid across them to form what looked like a circular fence with very thick posts. The goal of this would be to provide points for the roofing beams to lay on for maximum support.

2) Roofing poles
A number of long, straight poles would be tied together at the top and walked out from the center so that one could sit on top of each of the foundation posts. When the first few are in place, more will be added and tied together so there’s not too much space between posts.

3) Roofing support and thatch
Sticks will be woven through the roofing supports in a loose, wattle-style wall design. These will be the base that the thatching material is attached to, which would normally be either reeds or straw, depending on what they had available.

(Some of the larger homes would have an inner ring of support beams instead of relying on the walls alone)

4) The walls
A wattle and daub wall will be constructed to keep in the heat and make the walls airtight. A wattle wall is just a collection of sticks woven in such a way that there’s tension on the sticks keeping them firmly in place, so no string is needed. The tops and bottoms of the vertical support sticks in the wall will usually be popped into a hole cut out in the above planks or dug into the dirt beneath, and when the woven sticks are put in place it adds enough strength to hold the daub.

5) The interior
A fire pit and beds need to be built within the home, as well as a few smaller finishing touches on the outside, like digging a small trench around the outside of the wall to make sure all the water from heavy rainfall flows off in the right direction and not into the middle of your home.

Daub

This mixture has been used by ancient people for thousands of years, with everyone from the ancient Egyptians to the Native Americans using it for various purposes. In ancient Britain, it was used to seal up walls and stick stones together when building small walls. It is normally made by mixing equal parts of soil, clay, animal manure, and some kind of binding material like grass, horsehair, hay, reeds, or whatever they had on hand at the time.

(A wattle wall being covered in daub, the material easily sticks due to the huge amount of grip provided)

All the ingredients are put into a pile and then someone takes off their shoes and gets stamping, mixing the ingredients into a thick clay-like material that would then be smothered onto a wattle wall. Because of how the wall is formed, it offers a huge amount of grip for the daub to stick to, and would always be smeared onto both sides of the wall, making it at least 3 inches thick.

Burial monuments

The most common type of burial monument for ancient Britain was the Dolmen, a set of several standing stones supporting a rather large center stone. The stones used in the center have been known to weigh up to 15 tons, which raises the question of how they managed to do it in the first place. Unfortunately, the Ancient Celts weren’t great at recording their own history, so we will never know for sure, but the most likely method would involve a huge amount of digging and wet tree trunks.

(The Dolman is by far the most common type of burial mound, and was reserved for only the most important people)

At the building site of the monument, a set of holes would be dug for the support stones after they had been transported there. This would have been done by laying a path of logs on the ground and keeping them wet to help the stones slide along them better. The stone would be pulled by people and animals using ropes and would be dragged to the building site before being tipped into the pre-dug hole. After all the supports were in place, a mound of earth would be created around the support stones with one side turned into a long ramp. The center stone would be dragged up this ramp and put into place above the support stones, the mound would then be dug away to leave the center stone on top of the supports.

Stone walls

The creation of limestone-based mortar was still a long way off, and the Celts didn’t have anything they could use in place that would set hard enough. To get around this they had a method of building walls that allowed them to create very strong structures, as long as they didn’t build too high.

(An old fort on the Isle of Orkney in Scotland, originally built using stone stacked with clay in-between as a binder)

The walls were built by first digging a flat trench for a level surface before laying a line of stones with their flat side facing outwards along the outline of the wall. The internal space is then filled with clay or a daub-type mixture to fill in all the gaps and add strength. The next layer is then built the same way until the desired height is reached. The only problem with this is that the mixture is strong enough to build a home, but it’s far too brittle to build anything tall.

Defensive walls

The palisade wall has been used across many cultures and was the first reliable form of a defensive wall. It was built by digging a trench 3 or 4 feet deep before placing straight pine trunks into it. Stones and soil are packed around the beams to secure them before attaching them to each other for added strength. Because of how deep they are in the ground, they are very difficult to pull or push over, and with all the branches and bark removed are impossible to climb without equipment.

(The top of a palisade wall is attached together for extra strength. With the bottom firmly in the ground, they made a strong and difficult-to-climb defensive wall)

The other popular form of defense was to dig a series of ditches that would force the attackers to not only become exhausted but they would be exposed each time they had to cross one of the ditch peaks. Lining one or more of these ditch peaks with a palisade wall was the best form of defense possible for people with this level of technology.

Other building methods

Apart from these basic construction techniques, the Ancient Celts didn’t really build anything more notable than Stonehenge or large burial mounds, both of which were constructed using the methods above. People of this time were still very firmly in the Bronze Age and even things like a log cabin were a long way off due to the huge amount of sawing it would take, a task that weak metals like bronze were not suited for. Limestone mortar didn’t enter the country until the Roman invasion of 43 AD, a material that allowed for the construction of castles and strong stone walls, but as for the people known as the Celts, life was simple when it came to making things, and difficult when it came to staying alive.