History

In this grand old part of the website you can learn a little bit about the history of Breckon and the Viking Settlement which can be seen above the dunes.

Over the last two hundred years there have been numerous archaeological investigations around Breckon Sands.

This gives us evidence that there have been people living in Breckon since prehistoric times. Some interesting finds are: human bones were found lying in a pile and they almost made a complete skeleton of an adult male with only the skull, mandible, humeri, and femora missing. These were radiocarbon dated and found to be from somewhere in the region of AD 120 - AD 400.

Pieces of rings and bracelets found were of interest because two of them re-worked after being broken, which gives more clues as to the people who lived here. It also raises the possibility that they could have been eroded out of someone’s grave and re-used.

In a lot of the fabric fragments that were found, it was discovered that the fabric contained sandy clay that had been tempered with small pieces of talc, with organic material such as grass being added. This is quite odd because there are no rocks here that have talc in them, but neighbouring isles such as Unst have a plentiful amount of it.

During 1923 the remnants of a cairn were excavated and something that was found is quite disturbing, a horned human skull, it was sent to Edinburgh for scan to learn about it but vanished on the way and was never seen again.

There were believed to be two cairn structures, one which has now been eroded with the cliff edge to the seabed and one which is believed to have been covered by the erosion and movement of the dunes. This shows us that history never stands still.

Two Roman coins have been found in Breckon: one of Hadrian, and one of Justinian the 1st, and this takes us to the 6th century.

Shetland was invaded by the Norsemen in the mid-8th century and they ruled the islands all the way through to the 15th century. The main language of the islands until the 18th century was Norn, derived from Old Norse. Some of our dialect words stem back to these times.

I have added a link to the Old Haa museum website as they also have good information about Yell and local history.

In more recent history there was the tragedy of the sunken Russian trawler, roughly about the mid-1950s. The Russian fishing boat was at the Cullivoe pier and then set off to the north. The captain made a risky move and went between a rock and the Ness of Breckon, but he didn't realise that the rocky seabed was raised high there and hit it heavily, all men aboard died. A few weeks later a body washed up at the Ness and the police were informed who contacted the Russian factory ship who sailed with that fleet. Someone who worked on a Russian factory ship had lost two brothers on the trawler and came to mourn. The Russian sailors put the body in a bag with weights and let him rest on the seabed in a traditional burial at sea.