Barpa Langais

The imaginative & interesting interpretive panel at the site - part of the text reads:

"Earth, sky and ancestors.

The path before you leads uphill to the chambered cairn of Barpa Langais. Tombs like this were built all over the islands by Neolithic farming communities, but this is the best preserved example in the Outer hebrides. It has never been investigaed by modern archaeologists, but it belongs to a group of monuments built about 5000 years ago, thus it is one of the earliest standing buildings in Northern Europe. It is about 25 metres in diameter and, like the pyramids of Egypt, it contained a great mass of stone which would have dominated the surrounding landscape, with a relatively small burial chamber inside.
In contrast, however, it served perhaps as a communal tribal resting place, not just for a single leader. Many of these tombs have passages which face midwinter sunrise or sunset, but the entrance at Langais faces just south of east."

9 May 2011