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 Archaeologyarticle on Carn Glas, featuring Jonathan’s text and Andy’s images. A transcription of the text from Henshall & Ritchie can be downloaded here).
The gorse covered mounds of Carn Glas on the skyline looking south west with a ploughed out roundhouse site in the foreground.
Background
In early march NOSAS members helped clear part of the gorse scrub encroaching onto the major Neolithic Cairn Carn Glas (Grey Cairn NH 6493 3830) sited on Essich Farm in Stratherrick above Inverness. Sitting on a shallow saddle-shaped ridge on Essich Moor and overlooking the Moray Firth to east, the three interlinked cairns that form this monument make this, at 116 metres, the longest in the Highlands. Though now obscured by a modern forestry plantation, it is in a commanding position looking down the Moray Firth. For comparison the better known and partially reconstructed Camster Long Cairn in Caithness, itself comprising two round cairns, measures just under 70 metres in length. This relative scale of the two cairns can be seen in the plans below drawn for Audrey Henshall’s Chambered Cairns of Scotland, where Camster is the second and Carn Glas the fourth image.
History of the site
The cairn lies on farm of Essich, one of the major tacks or holdings of the Mackintosh family with references to the land at least back to the 16th century.
The cairns at Carn Glas have been heavily robbed and the chambers emptied, probably as a source for stone dykes and other agricultural improvements dating to the late 18th and early 19th centuries. V Gordon Childe in 1943 suggested stones may have been taken from here to build the section of the Military Road (built from 1725) that lies to the west and runs towards Loch Ashie.
The first known mention of the cairn itself is on a sketch plan of the farm by an unknown surveyor dating to 1834. Forming part of the muniments of the Mackintosh of Mackintosh family, it is stored with other documents dealing with Essich in the National Archives in Edinburgh.
Crown copyright. Papers of the Family of Mackintosh of Mackintosh, National Records of Scotland, RHP2187
The surveyor has probably (the text and image here are a little obscure) described the site as:
Glaischcairnmore so-called
a collection of stones on the summit of three hillocks
He has also shown three separate cairns, the easternmost and still most prominent today, is labelled Cairn. There is a suggestion of four stones ringing the middle cairn but other details are obscure. However it does seem the site had already been heavily robbed by this time. The wider plan shows the boundary of the farm defined by a row of boundary stones some of which still survive today and date to 1794 suggesting this was a time of major works on the farm when stones for dykes and buildings might be needed.
NOSAS Archaeology Blog 