Simply follow the directions to reach the Dunruchan monoliths ‘D’ and ‘E’ and then zigzag through the heather to their immediate south—from just a few dozen yards away, to up to 300 yards west. Keep your eyes peeled for the stoney little rises in the heather as you walk back and forth and you’ll see at least some of these cairns.
Archaeology & History
Not to be confused with the large cairn scatter on the grassy plain of Aodann Mhor a short distance north-west (whereon stands the magisterial Dunruchan A monolith), many of which which may be just field clearance cairns. This small group found a short distance east, south and west of Dunruchan stones ‘D’ and ‘E’ are more typical burial cairns. They each average between five and six yards across and none are more than three feet high. We first noticed them about ten years ago and on subsequent visits kept looking them over, but the deep heather ensured they were hard to see. But, after a recent heather-burning exercise on the moors, they are at thankfully visible—for a short time at least.
Cairn SE of Dunruchan ‘D’Cairn S of Dunruchan ‘D’
At the time of writing, probably the best one to see is found 40 yards south of Dunruchan D and 47 yards north-east of Dunruchan E and may have the astronomers amongst you running for the theodolites! It has that distinct look about it when you see it in context with the landscape and adjacent standing stones. The westernmost cairn that’s (presently) known here is 300 yards west of the Dunruchan E stone, just past the Dunruchan enclosure, at NN 7873 1676. It’s likely that there are other unrecorded prehistoric sites in this area.
Low line of ancient walling
Amidst this section of the moors is a line of very low walling that runs a short distance east-to-west, towards the Dunruchan ‘E’ stone. A lot of old walling exists hereby, mainly visible in the fields to the east, but this particular line is much smaller and of a different age by the look of things, presumably older. It has the appearance of walling more usually associated with prehistoric hut circles, but in this case runs in a straight line towards the standing stone. Curious…
Folklore
The standing stones on this plain and the cairns here are said to be the graves of fallen Roman soldiers, slain by our tribal Scots two thousand years ago. In all honesty though, these are likely to be much older than any of those Roman savages.
Standing Stone (lost): OS Grid Reference – NN 795 168
Archaeology & History
When Fred Coles (1911) visited the giant impressive Dunruchan standing stones, he told that “some distance to the east” of the Dunruchan E stone, “near the unnamed stream…my friend Mr James Simpson has seen another great Stone, but lying prostrate.” When he visited the area the weather beat him back (easily done up here!) and prevented him “from wandering far over the moor, and therefore this Stone was not observed.” It remains lost. (the grid-reference given for this site is an approximation)
Along the A85 road between Comrie and St Fillans, just over a mile out of Comrie, on the right-hand side (north) of the road is the small farm-track into the fields where the ruined stone circle of Tullybannocher lives. Walk up this track (known as Maam Road), past the stones, and keep going uphill for more than a mile (literally 1 mile up, another track turns sheer right, but ignore it) where the track eventually levels-out; keep walking for another 600 yards, slightly downhill, until you reach a distinct fork in the track where you need to veer right, uphill, and keep walking up the track for ⅔-mile (1km) where you’ll eventually see a cottage ahead of you. 150 yards before this, to your left, down the slight slope and just as it begins to slope back up again on the other side, there’s some olde walling with a coupla big stones in it. It’s there!
Archaeology & History
When James MacIntosh (1888) first visited this carving in the 19th century—which is close to the curious cairn of Druim na Cille just 75 yards to the west—he described there being a group of seven large stones forming, what he thought, might have been a large enclosure. I think he was right. Several of these stones can still be seen: each of them along some ancient walling that swerves in an arc to the east. One of these stones has a number of cup-marks on it.
Fred Coles’ 1991 sketchThe carving, from the track
The design isn’t too impressive when compared to others in this neck o’ the woods, but they’re very distinct. We visited the place on a truly dark grey day: conditions that don’t usually allow for good visibility regarding cup-marks; but thankfully the cups along this stone are quite deep and hard to miss. Running along one section of the stone are what Gow called, “eleven beautifully formed cups, varying from 2¼ to 4 inches in diameter and from half an inch to an inch in depth.” When Fred Coles (1911) came here he counted thirteen cup-marks. There may be fourteen.
The stone does possess some more recent groove marks made by a metal instrument, possibly a tractor or perhaps when local workmen stuck up a microwave tower close by. Thankfully it hasn’t directly affected the cups on the stone. Check it out when you visit the nearby ring cairn.
Along the A85 road between Comrie and St Fillans, just over a mile out of Comrie, on the right-hand side (north) of the road is the small farm-track into the fields where the ruined stone circle of Tullybannocher lives. Walk up this track (known as Maam Road), past the stones, and keep going uphill for more than a mile (literally 1 mile up, another track turns sheer right, but ignore it) where the track eventually levels-out; keep walking for another 600 yards, slightly downhill, until you reach a distinct fork in the track where you need to veer right, uphill, and keep walking up the track for ⅔-mile (1km) where you’ll see a cottage ahead of you. About 50 yards before the house, down the slope on your left, a large rounded mass covered in bracken is the site you’re after.
Archaeology & History
This is an odd site, in more ways than one. In the 18th and 19th century, local people told that it was “a very ancient churchyard, so old, indeed, that the grave-stones among the rank grass are scarcely discernible.” (Carment 1882) This lore was reinforced by the fact that, as James Gow (1888) put it,
“within living memory that a burial took place here, and the tradition is that people came to bury the “wee unchristened bairns” from long distances, such as Loch Tayside, Glendochart, Balquhidder, and Strathyre.”
Looking W, at the circleThe old mound, looking SE
That’s a lot of effort and a considerable distance for some people to travel! But the age and nature of this site is curious. It very name, Drum-na-kill derives from either “ridge of the burial ground” or the “hill of the chapel” (and variants thereof)—yet there are no records of any such early church or religious cell here. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there never was one. A wandering Culdee priest may have set up camp here more than a thousand years ago after doing his service with the fading druids of Dull, less than 20 miles to the north. Such things, never written down, will obviously have happened in these mountains and cannot be discounted merely due to a lack of scripts. But we simply don’t know. When Mr Gow described the place—as “a raised enclosure 25 to 30 feet in diameter, with, a turf-covered wall or rampart 3 or 4 feet high surrounding it”—he emphasized that “in former times (it) was used as a burying ground for unbaptised infants.” (large numbers of Highlanders weren’t in the slightest bit interested in the ways of the Church) So how far back in time did this tradition go…?
Well, Gow thought the place to be an early christian site. But when Fred Coles came here more than thirty years later, during his massive survey of the Perthshire stone circles, he deemed it to be a much earlier construction. A “cairn circle” no less—which would give it a more Bronze Age footprint. And this definition has stuck. Coles (1911) told that,
Coles’ 1911 diagramRaised ‘walling’ highlighted
“This Cairn-circle is about seventy yards east of the shepherd’s cottage, and it slightly resembles others already noticed in Perthshire. It measures from crest to crest of its circular ridge 44 feet 3 inches east and west by 37 feet 10 inches north and south. Several large blocks of stone lie exposed on the crest, and many others can be felt as one walks along it. The ridge is completely oval-circular, having no break or passage-way, and encloses a flattish, rather uneven space measuring about 34 feet in diameter. The height above the outside ground at the best-preserved portions is fully 4 feet.”
More than a century later, its not changed much—although if you were to believe the updated Trove website, “the cairn has been destroyed in the process of land improvement.” Which is untrue. As the albeit darkened photos here show (we visited it on a truly dark grey day), the raised cairn, despite being covered in a mass of deep bracken, is clearly in a condition similar to what Coles described. It looks like a typical example of this type of monument, of considerable size, with reasonably well-defined edges and comprising the usual scattered mass of stones in and around it. The large boulders that Coles described don’t seem to be in evidence, but these were apparently shifted a few decades back and added to the enclosure walling to the east. To honest, only the untrained eye would miss the place! Check it out when you’re looking at the cup-marked stone, less than a hundred yards to the east…
References:
Carment, Samuel, Scenes and Legends of Comrie, James P. Mathew: Dundee 1882.
From Blair Atholl village along the B8079 road, take the minor road signposted to the Bridge of Tilt and go all the way to the top, taking the same directions as if you’re visiting the large prehistoric cairn of Monzie. As you walk towards Monzie farmhouse, you need to look at the large end-facing wall and on the ground at the bottom-left corner you’ll see this old cup-marked stone, next to an old bullaun. It’s probably polite to knock and ask the farmer—who we found to be very helpful indeed. (huge thanks fella!)
Archaeology & History
This is an intriguing carving, inasmuch as its present habitat isn’t it original home. When we visited the old stone recently, the farmer was very helpful and told us what he knew of it, which was, he said, “not much.” In pointing out where it had originally come from, he pointed south, “past the fields – somewhere over there. My dad knew about it,” he told, and thought that he may have been the one who found it. Anyhow, it was his dad who brought it to the place where it now sits: right up against the edge of the house on its southeast corner.
“It looks like it might have come from a tomb,” I said, but he didn’t know about that. The giant cairn in the fields past his farmhouse certainly wasn’t where it had come from. Quite the opposite direction… And so it transpired when I looked at the very menial archaeological notes that have been written about it.
When archaeologist Margaret Stewart noted the carving in the 1960s, she told how the stone had reportedly been found in 1953 by the ruined lime-kiln (NN 9052 6672), just above the western shore of Loch Moraig. But what she didn’t know was that the lime-kiln was built at the edge of the prehistoric tomb that was known to local people as Carndeshal, or Cairn Deshal. The word deshal means sunwise, or the direction taken by the sun, clockwise, as in the word deosil. It is usually associated with a ceremonial procession. The cup-marked stone probably came from this cairn when it had been demolished and was thankfully saved by the farmer.
Altogether there are 24 or 25 mainly well-defined cup-marks on this thin slab, covering most of the surface. In a couple of places on the stone, two of the cups are conjoined. There are apparently no cup-marks on the other side of the stone.
Acknowledgements: To my awesome Naomi – for getting us up here.
Along the B8079 road in Blair Atholl village, take the minor road signposted to the Bridge of Tilt. After half-a-mile, where the road splits, keep to the right and head further uphill and, where the almost-track-like road splits again another quarter mile up, bear to the right again and just keep going uphill for nearly two miles until your reach the large car-park on the left. Park here and then take the dirt-track to the farm (truly friendly helpful folk) where, in the field to the rear of the buildings, a large unmissable mound rises up!
Archaeology & History
This is a bit of a beauty! Hiding away on the southern edges of the Cairngorms we find this huge archetypal burial mound, 35 yards across and all but covered nowadays in deep layers of soil. But it looks good. When you walk onto its crown, about twelve feet up, you see and feel beneath you the scattered mass of small rocks and stones that comprise the monument as a whole, from top to bottom. On its south-western side, the cairn is lower and elongated: this is due, on the whole, to where field clearance stones were pushed up against the monument many decades ago, making that side of it look bigger than it originally was.
Naomi on top for size!Monzie cairn, looking W
Curiously perhaps, no archaeological attention of any worth has been give to the site apart from the usual estimates of its size and a guesstimate of it being neolithic or Bronze Age in nature (an easy thing to suggest). On top, just beneath the grasses, is what may be the section of a small cist, but this may just be a fortuituous formation. Excavation is required! It’s one of a small number of old cairns and tombs in this locale, but this seems to be the biggest — unless, of course, the lost but legendary Carn Deshal, less than a mile to the south, stood larger…
Acknowledgements: To my awesome Naomi – for getting us up here.
First described in the Object Name Book* of 1867 as being “the remains of a cairn in which D MacMillan of Glenbarr says a cist was found”, this prehistoric tomb was subsequently going to be destroyed in the 1950s by the farmer when local researchers Mr & Mrs J.G. Scott (1958) took to checking the place out before its demise. And it was a damn good job they did! The cairn still remains to this day—albeit in a very dilapidated state. The assistant editor of The Prehistoric Society journal, Ian Longworth (1959), wrote an account of the findings, telling:
“A small mound, apparently the remains of a cairn, was excavated on the farm of Glencreggan by Mr and Mrs J.G. Scott. The mound was roughly oval in shape, about 20 feet by 14 feet in size, and about 2 feet in height, with its longer axis lying almost E-W. A large stone slab, about 8 by 3 feet in size, lay against its N corner.
“The cairn was found to consist of a small and fairly compact core of stones intermixed with sand and clay, surrounded by a rather ill-defined outer ring of boulders, the intervening space being largely filled with earth. Remains of a cremated burial were found beneath the centre core, but there was no trace of a cist, and the bones seemed to be scattered, giving the impression that the cairn might mark the spot where the cremation took place. Apart from a flint flake, the only finds were two small boulders, each bearing a single cup-mark, which were incorporated in the material of the centre core.”
Of the two cup-marked stones found beneath the cairn, they’re presently living in some box somewhere in the Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow, who are very approachable when it comes to viewing them if you make an appointment. I have to say though, one of them may be natural, as it has the distinct look of being the creation of molluscs, who live in profuse numbers just off the coast hereby. Nonetheless, they were left in the tomb as offerings to the ancestral spirits here.
References:
Bede, Cuthbert, Glencreggan – 2 volumes, Longman Green: London 1861.
Longworth, Ian, “Notes on Excavations in the British Isles, 1958,” in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, volume 25, 1959.
Royal Commission Ancient & Historical Monuments of Scotland, Argyll – volume 1: Kintyre, HMSO: Edinburgh 1971.
* The Object Name Book website recently got “upgraded”, to make it better, smilier, user-friendly, and the usual buzzwords we all hear when things are just gonna get worse. The website is now a real pain-in-the-arse to use since those halfwit management-types upgraded the site, making it much more hard work to find anything. Fucking idiots! Who pays these morons?!
You can walk up from Menston, up Moor Lane north-west towards the moor, then turning left when you hit the moorland road of Hillings Lane. Nearly 350 yards along, turn right up the track known as Occupation lane onto the moor. More than half-a-mile up, past the gate at the Bee Stone, where the track splits, keep to the left and head further uphill, roughly parallel with the fence on your left. Literally ¼-mile (0.4 km) up from the split, you’re looking almost straight down at the reservoir; but to your left, walk towards the fence. Zigzag about! You can also approach it from the Grubstones and Great Skirtful area, by following the Occupation Lane track eastwards down the slope until you’re roughly level with the same reservoir.
Archaeology & History
On this somewhat isolated stone on the northern sloping edge of Craven Hall Hill we find a small cluster of shallow cup-marks, first noted in the 1980s and eventually mentioned in a survey by Boughey & Vickerman (2003) where they described it as a,
“Low, medium striated rock lying in slope of hill. SE end carries possibly up to eleven cups, possibly two sets grouped in arcs running into natural striations of rock, one of which may have been artificially enhanced by pecking.”
Shallow cup-marks
The view from here is quite something: gazing east to the heathen hilltop of Otley Chevin (Beltane rites and rock art — albeit not much), north-east to the far uplands of the White Horse of Kilburn, then across the northern panoramas of Askwith and Denton Moors, and beyond. Some archaeologists have started to believe that such vistas may have had relevance with such carvings, sometimes. They’ve caught up at last! 🙂 Anyhow, the carving itself is pretty simplistic and probably only of interest to the real petroglyph nuts amongst you – although it’s mebbe worth checking out if you’re visiting the Great Skirtful giant cairn and its very impressive hengi-form neighbour.
References:
Boughey, Keith & Vickerman, E.A., Prehistoric Rock Art of the West Riding, WYAS: Wakefield 2003.
Boughey, Keith & Vickerman, E.A., Prehistoric Rock Art of the West Riding – Supplement, YAS 2018.
Acknowledgements: With thanks to Tom Cleland for help in relocating the site on a recent visit.
Numerous ways to get here: probably the easiest (direction wise) is if you’re coming from Dick Hudson’s public house on the southern road surrounding Rombalds Moor. From the pub, head left (east) along Otley Road (passing Weecher reservoir) for 1.9 miles (3.1km) until you reach Reva reservoir where a track leads you to the waters. A small parking spot is on the left-side of the road. From here, go through the gate and along the footpath across the field for nearly 300 yards to the next gate. Go through here and immediately follow the walling down to your left for about 135 yards to the edge of the rushes. It’s there!
Archaeology & History
Single cupmark nr the top
On a recent visit to the Fraggle Rock carving, Tom Cleland foraged about at the edge of what was, in centuries gone by, a good flowing stream below the west slope of Reva Hill. An old pathway cut across one section of it near where the walling now runs, covered these days in the mass of Juncus reeds, typical of mashy grounds. And here, just where folk would cross the waters, Tom found a good sized stone with a single deep cup-mark on its crown, calling through a feast of lichens to be seen once more. There may be a second cup-mark by its side, but the light wasn’t good when we were here, so that’ll be worked out some other day. Anyhow, this one’s probably only for the crazy petroglyph hunters out there. It’s the Fraggle Rock and its companios that you’re gonna be looking for, nearby….
Your best starting point is from the Great Skirtful of Stones giant cairn. From here follow the fencing that runs down the slope to your left (south-east) for roughly 160 yards (148m) – past the Great Skirtful Ring – until you reach the gate. Go through it and keep walking down the same fence-line for 300 yards then walk south onto the moorland proper (there are no paths here). You’ll pass over several undulations in the heather (some of these are the edges of ancient trackways) and 55-60 yards south from the fencing you’ll walk over and into this overgrown prehistoric ring. It’s very difficult to see when the vegetation is deep, so persevere!
Archaeology & History
Site shown on 1851 map
This is an interesting site. Marked on the 1851 Ordnance Survey map as a “barrow” (right), it is shown with trackways on either side of it to the north and south, and with an opening or entrance on its northwestern side. Yet since that date, very little archaeological attention has been given to it and the site remains unexcavated, despite its location being repeated on all subsequent maps since then. The designation of the site as a barrow or burial site, without being excavated, was educated guesswork at the time as the place seems to be what we today define as a ring cairn. And whilst this seems likely, there are some oddities here.
Measuring roughly 25 yards (SE – NW) by 21 yards (NE – SW), this overgrown oval ‘ring’ is a similar architectural structure to the more famous Roms Law circle more than half-a-mile northwest of here—but bigger! And, unlilke Roms Law, this overgrown circle seems to have been untouched for many centuries. The oval surrounding ‘ring’ itself is composed of thousands of small packing stones between, seemingly, a number of much larger upright stones, reaching a maximum height of more than three feet high at the northernmost edge. The ‘ring’ ostensibly looks like a wide surrounding wall which measures two yards across all round the structure.
Track running into the ringRaised line into the ring
Internally, there seems little evidence of a burial — although our recent visits here, as the photos indicate, took place when the moorland vegetation was deep and covered almost the entire site. The outline of the site is obviously visible, even in deep heather, but the smaller details remain hidden. But in addition to the main ring, another very distinct ingredient here is the existence of an extended length of man-made parallel walling, probably a trackway, that runs into the circle from the southeast all the way through the circle and out the other side and then continuing northwest heading roughly towards the Great Skirtful giant cairn on the horizon 500 yards to the northwest.
Stone at NE arc of walling
Due to the landscape being so overgrown, it’s difficult to ascertain where this ‘trackway’ begins and ends. Added to this, we find that there are additional ‘trackways’ that run roughly parallel to the one that runs through the circle—and these ‘trackways’ are very old indeed, some of them likely have their origins way back in prehistory. The one that runs through the middle of this ring cairn may be a ceremonial pathway along which, perhaps, our ancestors carried their dead. If we follow it out from here and keep walking along the track 300 yards to the southeast, we eventually run right to the edge of the Craven Hall (3) circle. Parallel to this is another ancient trackway that runs northwest to the edge of the Roms Law circle. It seems very much as if we have ceremonial trackways linking sites to each other: ancestral pathways, so to speak.
Have a gander at this when you’re next in the area. There are many other sites nearby that are off the archaeological radar. In recent years, a number of northern antiquarians wandering over this landscape are finding more and more ancient remains: walling, circles, cairns, trackways. It’s a superb arena—but sadly, most of it is hidden beneath deep moorland vegetation.
References:
Faull, M.L. & Moorhouse, S.A. (eds.), West Yorkshire: An Archaeological Guide to AD 1500– volume 1, WYMCC: Wakefield 1981.
Acknowledgements:Huge thanks for use of the Ordnance Survey map in this site profile, reproduced with the kind permission of the National Library of Scotland.
