by Jonathan Wordsworth
The following is an addendum to the previous Carn Glas blog post of July 2023.
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).
His processing of a false colour image of the site (below) is particularly striking in outlining the two narrow parallel walls that link the three cairns together to make this the longest Neolithic cairn in the north of Scotland. It also shows the extensive robbing that seems to have taken place, including the emptying out of chambers in each of the individual mounds, as well as a possible forecourt entrance at the south end (though this topography may also only be the result of more recent stone robbing). If there had been a similar forecourt at the north end, this is not now visible and could only be confirmed by geophysical survey or more plausibly excavation. It is not NOSAS’s intention to seek scheduled monument consent to do this at present and instead we remain happy that our work has made this a more prominent feature of the heritage landscape above Inverness.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the many NOSAS members and others who have enabled this site to be cleared of gorse (at least for the time being!) including Susan Bain, John Cheadle, John Duncan, Andy Hickie, Bob & Rosemary Jones, Elspeth Kennedy, Liz Long, James McComas, Steve North, Michael Pereira, Daniel Rhodes, Roland Spencer-Jones, Andrew Trevett, Bob Will & Bruce Wilson. Thanks are also due to Derek Mackenzie for permission to do the work and access to the site and to Historic Environment Scotland for funding travel and contractor’s costs for shredding some of the cut scrub.
NOSAS Archaeology Blog 