The chambered cairns in Assynt are uncharacteristically
high; surviving to heights of between 1.5 and 3
m. This implies that whilst some stone robbing clearly
took place, mainly in antiquity, the scale of destruction
observable elsewhere in Scotland may not have been
replicated in the Assynt area. This may be related to
the absence of industrial-scale farming from the area.
The chambered cairn at Ardvreck is of the type designated
by Henshall as ‘Clyde Cairns’ and all of the
others are varieties of her Orkney-Cromarty class of
relatively simple passage graves. The term ‘passage
grave’ is used to describe one of the two fundamental
classes of megalithic structure and passage graves
are characterised by having distinct passages that lead
to the main chamber in the cairn.
In the Sutherland
cairns, the passage leads to an ante-chamber which,
in turn gives access to the main chamber. Structurally,
the weakest point in a passage grave lies at the intersection
of passage and corbelled chamber because
the great weight of the densely-built, corbelled core
cairn must be carried over the void of the passage.
In all of the Assynt group of chambered cairns in which
the evidence survives, it is clear that the core cairns
were corbelled. Indeed the high survival rate for corbels
is an index of how relatively well preserved these
monuments are.
In Sutherland and Caithness, the relieving
structures used to carry this weight of the corbelled
core-cairn over the passage have evolved into
the compact and very strongly constructed ante chamber.
For this reason they are particularly interesting for
studies in Neolithic engineering.
Chambered cairns
Monument name, HLP No, Henshall No.
Loch Borralan East 5, SUT 43
Loch Borralan West 12, SUT 44 Ledmore 17, SUT40
[Lyne] Ledbeg River 33, SUT 46
Knockan [West] 108, SUT 80
Knockan [East] 109, SUT 79
Allt Sgiathaig 117, SUT 8
Carrachan Dubh Inchnadamph 139, SUT 82
Ardvreck 146, SUT 9
[Loch Borralan South] Altnacealgach 2, SUT 81
The names or name elements in square brackets are the monument names used by Henshall & Ritchie (1995)
Extract from Assynt's Hidden Lives final report, page 13 onwards
http://www.aocarchaeology.com/assynt/PDF/HiddenLives_web.pdf
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