Blethering Skite

The village of Burghead stands on a narrow promontory of land projecting north-west into the outer Moray Firth a little over seven miles north-west of Elgin. The tip of the promontory remains largely undeveloped, and it is here that you can still see some traces of a fortress that was occupied for around five hundred years and was quite possibly one of the most important centres of power in what later became Scotland.

The fortress, more properly called a promontory fort, at Burghead was large, covering an area of three hectares or 7.5 acres. This made it three times the size of any other centre of power in Early Historic Scotland. The fort seems to have been occupied from the late 300s and continued as a major centre until the late 800s. In 884 Torridun, as it was known at the time, was captured by Sigurd the Mighty, the Norse Earl of Orkney. The indications are that Sigurd rebuilt the fortress and it then became a centre of Norse power in Moray until their defeat by the Scots in 1010. Under the Norse the fortress became known by the Danish name Burghe, which much later became Burghe-head.