‘Rare’ ancient chariot wheel found at golf course in Scotland. ‘Jaws dropped’
Digging into the sandy soil of northern Scotland, archaeologists unearthed a rusty metal object unlike anything they’d seen before. The item turned out to be a “rare” ancient chariot wheel and a first-of-its-kind find.
Archaeologists started excavating the site of a future golf course, Cabot Highlands, near Inverness a couple years ago and “uncovered a range of historical evidence dating back thousands of years,” Avon Archaeology Highland said in a news release shared with McClatchy News via email on April 23.
But one artifact “appears to have eclipsed all the other important finds,” the project’s lead archaeologist Andy Young told McClatchy News via email.
The team unearthed an ancient burial with “a small amount of coarse pottery,” animal bones and part of a “chariot wheel tyre,” Young said. A photo shows the “rare” chariot wheel, of which about half remains.
Archaeologists are waiting on the results of radiocarbon dating to determine the exact age of the wheel but expect it to date to the Iron Age, a period from 500 B.C. to 500 A.D., Young said. A “200 B.C. date ((or) 2,200 years old) would not be a surprise.”
The ancient wheel is probably part of a burial offering, Young said. Because such wheels “would have been extremely expensive to make … it seems likely that the person buried was pretty important.”
The metal ring “would have been made by a highly skilled blacksmith who forge-welded many separate strips of smelted iron together on an anvil to make the tyre and subsequently fit it over the wooden wheel by heating it up and rapidly cooling (it) to shrink-fit,” Young said. “It would have gone around the outside of the wooden wheel.”
“There were originally probably two chariot wheels, one of which has probably been lost to modern ploughing,” he said.
“To be honest we didn’t recognise what it was at first (this is the first confirmed example found in Highland Scotland and none of our team, including me, had excavated one before!) - once we realised jaws dropped!” Young said.
Excavations at the future golf course also uncovered dozens of “prehistoric wooden buildings,” stone tools, a “prehistoric ceremonial circle” and ditches left from a medieval settlement, archaeologists said. Photos show a few of these ruins.
“This has been a remarkable journey from pre-historic times to the present, right here on our doorstep,” Stuart McColm, Cabot’s vice president of golf development, said in the release.
Inverness is in the Scottish Highlands, near the iconic Loch Ness, and a roughly 160-mile drive northwest of Edinburgh.
This story was originally published April 23, 2025 at 2:29 PM with the headline "‘Rare’ ancient chariot wheel found at golf course in Scotland. ‘Jaws dropped’."
