Qualla: Balladoole https://qualla.com/balladoole en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:16 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/s/e/balladoole-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Balladoole https://qualla.com/balladoole Balladoole: Introduction https://qualla.com/balladoole/ Photo credit Andy Stephenson, CC BY-SA 2.0. They were digging with trowels because the armed guards would not let them have pickaxes. It was 1944, the war was not yet over, and the men working this small hilltop near Castletown were enemy aliens - German civilians interned on the Isle of Man because Britain was unsure what else to do with them. Their leader, Gerhard Bersu, was one of the finest archaeologists in Europe. He had expected to uncover an Iron Age hill fort. What he found instead was a Viking ship, eleven metres of clinker-built oak laid into the earth a thousand years earlier, and beside the chieftain who had been buried in it, the bones of what the original excavators interpreted as a sacrificed companion - an interpretation that later reassessment has contested.

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Image: Andy Stephenson | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/s/e/balladoole-wp/gcse-balladoole-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Balladoole: Eleven Thousand Years on One Hill https://qualla.com/balladoole/ Photo credit Basher Eyre, CC BY-SA 2.0. Chapel Hill is unremarkable in profile - a low rise on the south coast, looking out toward the Calf of Man. But people have been climbing it and burying their dead here since the Mesolithic, which on the Isle of Man means somewhere around nine thousand years ago. Layer beneath la...

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Image: Basher Eyre | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/s/e/balladoole-wp/gcse-balladoole-eleven-thousand-years-on-one-hill.mp3 0:06 2 full Balladoole: The Boat in the Earth https://qualla.com/balladoole/ Photo credit Chris Gunns, CC BY-SA 2.0. The man laid in the ship was someone important - a chieftain, a wealthy landowner, perhaps a Norse merchant working the Irish Sea trade routes. His clinker-built oak vessel, eleven metres long, was the kind of trading craft that moved between Dublin, the Hebrides and the Manx coa...

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Image: Chris Gunns | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/s/e/balladoole-wp/gcse-balladoole-the-boat-in-the-earth.mp3 0:06 3 full Balladoole: The Second Set of Bones https://qualla.com/balladoole/ Photo credit Andy Stephenson, CC BY-SA 2.0. The original excavators found evidence of a second burial beside the Viking warrior, which they interpreted as a sacrificed woman - a practice attested in other Norse burials of the period, where enslaved women, often Irish or Pictish captives taken in the long raiding history of...

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Image: Andy Stephenson | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/s/e/balladoole-wp/gcse-balladoole-the-second-set-of-bones.mp3 0:06 4 full Balladoole: Christians Beneath, Vikings Above https://qualla.com/balladoole/ Photo credit Tee Cee from Cheshire, UK, CC BY 2.0. The choice of site cannot have been accidental. By placing this elaborate pagan burial directly on top of an existing Christian cemetery, the Norse settlers may have been making a deliberate statement - a slighting of the older graves, a planting of the new religion's flag on the...

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Image: Tee Cee from Cheshire, UK | CC BY 2.0

]]> Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/s/e/balladoole-wp/gcse-balladoole-christians-beneath-vikings-above.mp3 0:06 5 full Balladoole: Excavated in Wartime https://qualla.com/balladoole/ Photo credit Krage52, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Bersu excavation is itself a strange piece of history. The Isle of Man was used during the Second World War to intern thousands of German and Austrian civilians, most of them refugees who had fled the Nazis. Bersu, one of the foremost prehistorians of his generation, was a Je...

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Image: Krage52 | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/s/e/balladoole-wp/gcse-balladoole-excavated-in-wartime.mp3 0:06 6 full