By Gordon Sleight
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.
All but one of the Assynt chambered cairns are thought to be of the Orkney Cromarty type, which might suggest that the builders had connections further east. Only one of these has been excavated – Loch Borralan East (NC 2624 1118, MHG13048, NC21SE2) by Alexander Curle in the early years of the 20th century and again by Historic Assynt with AOC Archaeology in 2011. Its structure conforms to type, with a main chamber which may once have contained burials, surrounded by a core cairn and a series of rings of further cairn material, while access through the cairn to the chamber is via an antechamber fronted by a portal. The bulk of the cairn material was collected or quarried from the bright, crystalline, orange/pink Syenite of the hillside where it was built, but the portal stones are made of a contrasting creamy Moine Schist which might have been brought in deliberately. So, the cairn would have been a spectacular and colourful sight when first built, but was that colour contrast deliberate, an accident or was there another reason? Syenite is brittle and shatters relatively easily under pressure, whereas the portal stones are denser and so more suitable for load bearing! Aesthetics or engineering or both? Follow up work examining several other cairns in the area suggests that each was built with whichever rock types were most readily available, but does that preclude an appreciation of the qualities of different types of rock and some deliberate choices?
Loch Borralan East Cairn is sited on a ridge above Loch Borralan on a steep hillside. Almost directly below it on a low promontory jutting into the loch is Loch Borralan West and just along the hillside to the east is the Altnacealgach Cairn. This pattern of two or three cairns close together is mirrored at Elphin, Ledmore, Loch Awe, Lyne and in Benmore Forest and in several of those places the pattern of hillside sites and valley floor sites close together is also repeated. Another noticeable feature of the cairns around Lemore is intervisibility, but there are also a number of isolated cairns with no such intervisibility, and this is the norm for the cairns around Inchnadamph.
So are any of these apparent patterns significant?
At present the Ledmore area has very few trees but if there was more woodland in the neolithic, as is entirely possible, then intervisibility would be much reduced.
And what, if anything are we to make of little groupings of two or three cairns? Is this several generations of the same family building one cairn after another over several decades, related family groups building close to one another, rivals competing with one another or is it all entirely random?
And what of the crucial question of what chambered cairns were for? They certainly contained burials but was that their main or only purpose? As AOC Archaeology’s John Barber kept reminding us during the excavations at Borralan, lots of churches are full of burials but that’s not why most of them were built. Were chambered cairns some sort of family shrine? Were specially selected burials placed in them from time to time or does the very large number of cairns in Assynt suggest that whole populations might have been buried in them but that in most areas subsequent developments have destroyed the evidence?
As the delightful children’s book title has it Why are there more questions than answers Grandad?
