by Jonathan Wordsworth
As part of the cataloguing the JSBone aerial photographs (see earlier blog post) donated to North of Scotland Archaeological Society, a team of NoSAS members have been identifying the sites revealed on these images. Occasionally some intriguing queries arise. One such site came up recently and was from a photograph taken near Braelangwell on the Black Isle. Here on an image from 2012, a series of small circular mounds were revealed. Initial thoughts were that these might be the remains of an unknown barrow cemetery similar to that excavated at Tarradale. While the density and similar size of the circles did cause some scepticism on their origin, searching on earlier Google Earth satellite views showed similar features were visible at least as far back as 2004.
JSBone P100014 Centred at NH68652 64114 and taken on the 14th January 2012. The low mounds highlighted by the winter sunlight are glacial moraines but in the field below are an intriguing set of circular and possibly square barrows.
Andy Hickie of Avoch Heritage was sufficiently intrigued by these, as he had previously identified a site of interest nearby the year before, that he agreed to fly his drone over these features, before processing to enhance the images through RTF software. His results can be seen below.
Images processed by Andy Hickie from his drone photographs and which he describes as ‘photogrammerty-derived false colour images’.
NOSAS Archaeology Blog 