Perhaps the best example of them is said to be Tap o'Noth, which is near the village of Rhynie
in North-eastern Scotland. The ruins are of a massive fort was built high on the summit of the Tap
o'Noth mountain at a height of 1,859 feet. At first glance it appears that the walls of the fortress
are made of a blackened, cindery rubble, but on a closer examination becomes strikingly evident
that they are actually made of melted and fused together rocks!
What were once individual stone blocks within the walls are now black, and glassy masses that
have been fused together by a heat that was in places, so intense that the remains of actual molten
rivulets of rock that once ran down the walls like melting wax can still be seen quite clearly.
One early theory proposed was that the forts are located on the remains of ancient volcanoes
and that the people used molten stone being ejected from the eruptions to build their settlements.
I’m not sure whose brainwave the idea actually was, but it seems somewhat fanciful at best.
That theory however, was soon replaced with the notion that the vitrification was in fact, done
on purpose, in order to strengthen the walls. This theory purported that the builders had perhaps
designed the forts in that fashion, surmising that fires had been lit so as to temper the stone in
order to produce walls strong enough to resist both the invading armies and possibly the
dampness of the local climate. It’s an interesting theory to say the least, but one that has a number
of serious problems. Firstly, there is no indication that such vitrification does actually strengthen
the walls in any way at all and secondly, there is every indication that the fire in fact weakens
them substantially. In many cases, the walls of the fortresses seem to have almost totally
collapsed because of the fires. Also, since the walls of many Scottish forts are only partially
vitrified, it does not seem to have been done purposely as walls that have only been partially
completed would hardly have been considered to have been an effective fortification.
It must be appreciated that some of these ruins are massive too, indicating that they were once
occupied by extremely large forces. In one section of the book ‘Mysterious Britain’ the authors
Janet and Collin Bord discuss the vastness of the ruins of ‘Maiden Castle’ in Scotland which
gives a good indication of the enormous size of some of these ancient fortresses:
“It covers an area of 120 acres, with an average width of 1,500 feet and length of 3,000 feet.
The inner circumference is about 11.2 miles round, and it has been estimated...that it would
require 250,000 men to defend it! It is hard, therefore, to believe that this construction was
intended to be a defensive position.”
Numerous vitrified remains can also be found in the western United States. One such site was
discovered in Death Valley by the American explorer Captain Ives William Walker in 1850.
Walker apparently discovered a city about a mile long with the lines of the streets and the
positions of the buildings still visible. At the centre of the site was a huge rock, between 20 to 30
feet high, with the remains of an enormous structure atop it. The southern side of both the rock
and the building was melted and vitrified. Walker assumed that a volcano had been responsible
for this phenomenon, but there is no volcano in the area. In addition, tectonic heat could not
possibly have caused such visible liquification on the surface of the rock.
More vitrified ruins can also be found in France, Turkey, India and some areas of the Middle
East. Some of the ancient ziggurats of Iran and Iraq also contain vitrified material. Some of the
vitrification on these ruins is thought by some archaeologists to have been caused by the very
ancient and very mysterious Greek fire.
The vitrified remains of the ziggurat at Birs Nimrod (Borsippa), south of Hillah that were once
thought to be the Tower of Babel, are also crowned by a large mass of vitrified stone brickwork
and actual baked clay bricks that have all been fused together by some type of truly intense heat.
The Shattered Desert
As exhibit B we present one of the strangest and more unusual mysteries of ancient Egypt in
the form of the great glass sheets that were discovered in the Libyan Desert by Patrick Clayton, a
surveyor for the Egyptian Geological Survey. Clayton was driving among the dunes what is a