Carn Glas Chambered Cairns, Inverness: An Update

by Jonathan Wordsworth

The following is an addendum to the previous Carn Glas blog post of July 2023.

Drone image of Carn Glas after clearance of gorse looking north to Inverness and Moray Firth ©AHickie

It took two more days of work in August to clear the remaining gorse scrub off the cairn to reveal the monument in its glory.  With funding from Historic Environment Scotland we were able to get contractors to shred much of the cut waste, though a substantial amount of gorse remains outside the cairn on the east side.

We were fortunate to get Andy Hickie to fly his drone over the cleaned monument and as the photo above shows, this highlights the prominent position of the cairn overlooking the Moray Firth and with views to the hills north of the Great Glen and south to the Monadhliaths. This view is largely obscured by modern conifer plantations today but it now shows the significance of the monument’s siting in Neolithic times. No new details on the construction of cairns were visible on the ground in addition to that previously recorded by Henshall and Ritchie, but skilled processing of his aerial images by Andy Hickie has revealed the profile of this monument. (See also the recent Current Archaeology article on Carn Glas, featuring Jonathan’s text and Andy’s images. A transcription of the text from Henshall & Ritchie can be downloaded here).

Inked screenshot looking north with a profile of the topography on the southernmost cairn ©Andy Hickie

Crannogs: The Search Continues

by Richard Guest

Investigating a possible crannog at Loch Morie, June 2023

Almost three years has passed since the inception of the NOSAS Crannogs project, one sunny post-lockdown afternoon sitting around my patio maintaining a 2-metre separation, unable to meet inside but mightily pleased to be chatting face to face instead of by zoom.  Who had even heard of zoom before lockdown?  We hatched a cunning plan – to search satellite images for islands which might prove to be unrecorded crannogs.  Surely there must be lots of them, secreted away in remote glens where archaeologists rarely tread?  Well, no, actually.

Movement was still restricted so there was no shortage of volunteers, happy to have something different to do at home, and we soon had plenty of islands to look at in the field.  Some were explored in 2022 but by the start of 2023 we had a shortlist of very promising looking targets which certainly looked like crannogs from the shore.  They would need snorkelling or diving around to check out their underwater credentials to be sure whether they really were artificial constructions.  There was also the Loch Achilty crannog, which had been dived and surveyed in 2022 and where timbers had been found which could potentially be radiocarbon dated (see previous blog posts here and here).

Aside from crannogs, but continuing the underwater theme, I had spent two weeks in 2022 diving HMS Natal in the Cromarty Firth as part of a Nautical Archaeology Society project.  So it was that Claire Hallybone from NAS came up to present the findings of the Natal project at a NOSAS “MAD” evening (that’s Monthly Archaeological Discussion for the uninitiated) and also to dive some real and potential crannogs with me.

It was early March and whilst the weather was conducive to a jolly evening chatting in Strathpeffer Hall, for diving – not so much.  Nevertheless, we braved a chilly Loch Achilty and were successful in obtaining a timber sample from the shallower of two embedded timbers.  It was surprisingly hard work.  I made two parallel sawcuts in the edge of the wood and then tried to chisel out the bit in between with my knife but the wood was so hard I broke the tip off my knife. Eventually the sample was obtained but it took about 40 minutes, by which time we were shivering with cold and both agreed one dive was enough for the day and the second, deeper timber would have to wait for another time.

Loch Achilty crannog: This timber was radio carbon dated to c. 1359 AD, and another to c. 1060 AD (Duncan Ross)

Cairns in Clusters: Chambered Cairns in Assynt

By Gordon Sleight

Carrachan Dubh chambered cairn near Inchdnadamph

Over the last twenty years I have thoroughly enjoyed tramping around Assynt, sometimes on my own and sometimes with groups of friends.  That sense of enjoyment is often enhanced by surprises.  It might be disturbing a mountain hare and seeing it race away at speed or watching an overhead confrontation between golden and white-tailed eagles, but those events have been rare. More frequently the surprises have been coming across all sorts of unrecorded archaeological sites. A classic example happened about 10 years ago when a small group of NOSAS and Historic Assynt members set out to look for rock art in Assynt and after several days of searching, completely failed to find so much as a single cup mark!  But the effort was rewarded with several surprises – an iron working site, a roundhouse, a chambered cairn and at least one smaller cairn with signs of a cist in the centre, none of which had been recorded.

Assynt has a relatively dense cluster of cairns concentrated in and around the valley that links Ledmore Junction and Inchnadamph.  Many of them were recorded long ago and described in detail in Henshall (1963, 1972) and Henshall and Ritchie (1995). However, in recent years finding ‘new’ cairns in the same area has become almost normal, but no less exciting! Overall numbers have now almost doubled to at least 30 chambered cairns and 14 smaller round cairns.  The Assynt cluster is now one of the largest concentrations known anywhere in Scotland and the numbers continue to increase.  The best preserved are now all scheduled and the scheduling highlights the fact that these are all part of a significant cluster. This high survival rate, which applies to other archaeological sites in Assynt, is most probably because the area has always been sparsely populated with little intensive farming or other forms of large-scale development.

Bad na Cleithe chambered cairn

Recently discovered chambered cairn, 500m from Bad na Cleithe Cairn