Bronze Age Axe Head
Ullapool Museum

Axes like this were everyday tools during the Bronze Age and essential for survival. They were used for lots of tasks like butchering meat and scraping animal hides, but mostly for chopping down wood.

Wood was an important fuel source for light and heat. However, it was also used when making dwellings, boats, furniture, and other tools. Axes were also used to clear trees to open up space and create fields for farming and raising livestock. Wood was in huge demand and environmental evidence shows that the Bronze Age was a period of large-scale deforestation in the Highlands.

Wood was also needed to make the charcoal that was vital to Bronze Age technology. Only a charcoal fire could achieve a high enough temperature of over 1,100℃ to smelt the metal ores and then melt the resulting metal to cast bronze.

This axe head was discovered in the garden of a house in Rhue, near Ullapool. It would originally have been attached to a wooden handle.

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