You would have used most of your time fishing, hunting and gathering resources in the outfield areas.

Corn harvest

However, if you lived here at Børstadlunden 1800 years later, in the Viking Age, then you would have spent a lot of time growing and harvesting corn.

Larger open areas were cleared by moving stones and making clearance cairns, and the earth was worked with an ard. This way of arable farming changed very little for the next 1000 years, until the plough replaced the ard in the 1600s to 1800s.

Small and low cairns

The clearance cairns you see here are small and low, and lie spread out over the fields. These clearance cairns are therefore from the Iron Age or the Middle Ages.

We can tell this because cairns across a field are a hindrance for the modern plough, but the older ard could easily be lifted over the low cairns.

Many small fields

Pre-modern farming consisted of many small fields that could stretch over many square kilometres.

In the course of the 1600s and until the first half of the 1900s, the majority of these old fields were cleared for stones to make room for the plough. Fields attached to crofts are often small, but in contrast to the older clearance cairns, the cairns there lie at the edges of the fields and tend to be a bit larger.

Clearance cairns can be dated with help from radiocarbon dating (¹⁴C dating).

This can be done by an archaeologist digging through the cairn and under the stones that lie deepest. Here one can find remains from the time when the field was cleared and the cairn made.

Fields were often cleared by burning trees and stumps; the charcoal from this lies preserved and can be used for radiocarbon dating.