Freswick and the last great Viking

Freswick Bay is quiet enough today that it takes a little effort to picture the settlement that once occupied the links. Beneath the grass and shifting sand, archaeologists have found houses, working areas and deep accumulations of household waste, with combs, pottery, metalwork and animal bones bringing the people who lived here into view. Among all that material, it is the sheer quantity of fish bones that begins to explain the scale of the place. Fish was clearly a major part of the diet, and the remains suggest that some of the catch may also have been processed for trade, connecting this Caithness shore with customers farther away.

That busy settlement belongs to the world we encounter in the Orkneyinga Saga, where Sweyn Asleifsson makes a living from a rather more dangerous relationship with the sea. He is a landowner as well as a raider, and the saga describes how carefully he fits one occupation around the other at his home on Gairsay in Orkney. In spring he helps sow the fields before taking his ships away to plunder, returning after midsummer to remain at home until the crops have been harvested. With the grain safely gathered, he sets off again on his autumn expedition. Whatever else is happening in Sweyn’s life, the farming still has to get done.

Freswick’s archaeology helps us understand the work that sustained communities in which men like Sweyn operated. Ships and armed followers needed provisions, while the people ashore had their own households to feed, equipment to repair and catches to process. We cannot assign the excavated settlement to Sweyn personally, but its houses and fish-rich middens give substance to a Norse world that the saga usually shows us through the exploits of its most troublesome inhabitants. The consequences of those exploits catch up with him at Lambaborg, a coastal stronghold in the Freswick district whose precise location remains disputed.

According to the saga, Earl Rognvald besieges Sweyn there after violence in Caithness, demanding that he surrender his companion Margad. The stronghold stands on sea cliffs behind a defensive wall, so the earl cuts off its supplies and waits for hunger to do what an assault cannot. Eventually Sweyn has to choose between starving alongside his men and finding a way out, but the cliffs that have kept the attackers away also offer an escape. During the night, ropes are tied together and Sweyn and Margad are lowered into the sea, from where they swim along the cliffs until they can get ashore. It is quite a departure from the quiet work of processing fish, yet both belong to the same coastal world. Freswick gives us the people who kept it fed as well as the stories of those who made it dangerous.

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