This large grass covered mound is easily seen on the way to the Brough of Birsay.
It is behind a wall but can still be seen from the road as you approach from the east.
There are lots of stones sticking out of the grass mound.
Two ways to reach this, either an ovine catburglar-proof 'Orkney gate' into the field next door then through an opening by the building or the wire-looped metal gate to the site's field. Used the latter - a farmer has informed me that you climb over the hinged end of a gate if you find you have to do this anywhere. Managed to forget that this mound almost up against the roadside wall was the knowe itself so only took a hurried look (and I thought my digital camera wasn't focussing, some weird stuff because it wasdoing so). Enough to see what felt like a circular spread of large horizontal stones on the top, invisible from the road as is often the case with such features.
From Birsay village going to the Brough of Birsay this mound is difficult to miss on your right. Perhaps my time of the year again, because I could see no features in it. Then again, I couldn't gain ingress to the field unless I clambered over the wall and risked damage. The best of the Point of Buttquoy mounds is in the same field.
RCAHMS NMRS record no. HY22NW 11 at HY24482820 in 1960 was definitely a stalled long cairn 73'x80'x3'. Now it is equally definitely some kind of domestic structure. It is in a stone-walled field and an excavation ("Orkney Herald" 24/9/1930 "The Orcadian" 25/9/1930) found four courses of a "stone age" straight wall at the E and a single circular course of a chamber at the W, recovering peat ash and partly burnt bones from what was probably a roughly paved floor. What survives is a 23x13m mound on a 30x23m platform.
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Posted by wideford
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