No rain to fill this. Must have been a heavy dew....
Image credit: Howburn Digger's Arran Archive
Sites in Arran
Images
Last light at the end of our Arran week.
Image credit: A. Brookes (14.9.2018)
Coire Lan below Goatfell.
Image credit: A. Brookes (12.9.2018)
Arran is seemingly omnipresent for travellers upon the western coast of Bute.... perhaps it is therefore no coincidence that all the five chambered cairns I visited (tree cover at Carnbaan excepted) possessed views of the isle. Viewpoint is Scarrel Point, a little SE of Glecknabae.
Image credit: Robert Gladstone
From the North Goatfell Ridge across North Arran peaks, Kilbrannan Sound, Kintyre, Argyll and the distant Paps of Jura.
Image credit: Howburn Digger
Contemporary RA Goatfell.
Contemporary RA Goatfell.
A Raven on the summit of Goatfell with Cir Mhor beyond. Out to the West rise the distant Paps of Jura.
Image credit: Howburn Digger
The view North from the Lamlash Stones, halfway between Brodick and Lamlash.
Image credit: Howburn Digger
Island of Arran from the summit of Brown Carrick, Ayrshire. October 24 2010.
Image credit: Howburn Digger
Articles
Archaeologists have been excavating the recently-discovered 1.1km long cursus on the island of Arran. The article in The Scotsman shows the Lidar scans that alerted them to the parallel mounds (now merely 30cm high). Few examples are known from the west coast of Scotland.
The spectacular feature in the landscape is likely to have drawn people from all over a Scottish island around 5,000 years ago for ritual and ceremony.
More info :
A cist burial spotted hanging from a cliff on the edge of Scotland came from the ceremony of a Bronze Age adult cremated swiftly after their death, say archaeologists investigating the bones of a body whose skull carried a tumour.
Cracks and warping of the remains, which belonged to someone of indeterminate gender, suggest the body was still fleshed when it was cremated in a service accompanied by a tonne of burning wood.
The bones were secured in a daring rescue mission on the eroding face of a sand cliff at Sannox, on the Isle of Arran, where experts used a mechanical cherry picker and balanced on harnesses to remove two cists.
“All the bone was uniformly white and in a similar condition, which is evidence for a hot cremation pyre reaching temperatures in the order of 650 to 950 degrees,” says Iraia Arabaolaza, who led the team responsible for the excavation.
“It is likely that the cremation occurred soon after death.
“The smaller average weight of the bones in this cist, as well as the absence of axial [head and trunk] bones, is a common trait in some Bronze Age cremations.
“The lack of remains such as substantial amounts of charcoal associated with a pyre also reinforces the idea of a selected burial.”
Some of the bones may have been kept back or lost to erosion on the cliff.
Arabaolaza says a mysterious green stain, examined once the team had moved the remains to Glasgow, could be copper – demonstrating poor preservation conditions.
A food vessel and a sharp knife, made with Yorkshire flint and found with the body, served both as tools and grave goods.
“Although the burial customs of the Scottish early Bronze Age varied greatly, across the period as well as from region to region, scale-flaked and plano-convex knives clearly represent an important tool,” says Torben Bjarke Ballin, a lithic expert from the University of Bradford.
“Flint knives frequently formed part of the period’s burial goods.
“The Scottish scale-flaked and plano-convex knives are most likely to also be sickles, and they probably carried out the same work as the crescent-shaped sickles of southern Britain.
“Although the piece from Sannox Quarry does not have any gloss, small flat chips were detached along its edge, indicating that it had been used prior to deposition in the cist.”
Beverley Ballin Smith, an archaeology researcher who works with National Museums Scotland, says the water-damaged vessel is unusual.
“In the suite of Bronze Age funeral ceramics, food vessels are not as common as beakers and urns and are less well known,” she explains.
“In mainland Scotland, they are frequently associated with cists with cremations.
“Although the Sannox pot follows some of the decorative motifs of Scottish food vessels, such as its bevelled rim and the slightly uncommon herring bone design, its decoration is in character comparable to those from the east coast.”
This symbolism from the other side of the land may prove that the objects were used in material exchanges.
“The paired and single incised half-circle motives can be mirrored in many places – not least York, Northumberland, Angus, Fife, and Kinross,” says Ballin Smith.
“In spite of its cracks, the pot is intact but there are significant areas of damage. These are mainly around the base, the body of the vessel just above it, and the bottom of the pot internally.
“The damage is partly due to a loss of surface caused by spalling and erosion of the fabric, partly because the vessel may have lain on the floor of the cist, and possibly because of how it was used and fired.
“The appearance of the vessel suggests that it may have stood in a hot fire. There is no sooting from flames, but the base of the pot indicates heat erosion.
“One interpretation could be that the vessel was positioned on the edge of the funeral pyre, perhaps in order to fire it during the cremation of the body.
“In doing so, it received damage as it was not protected from direct flames or very hot ashes.”
One of the bones from the burial – radiocarbon dated to between 2154 and 2026 B – was rounded into a button shape, suggesting an osteoma benign tumour which may not have caused its bearer “distress or symptoms” during their life.
At a time when wood was a scarce resource in Scotland, the size of the pyre shows the importance given to funerals by Bronze Age society. A “good ceremony” could have enhanced the status of the individual or their community.
Read the full report (opens in PDF).
In Arran, the belief in fairies still lingers in the minds of the older inhabitants, and many curious stories are told of the pilfering habits and cunning tricks of the wee-folks, who held their midnight meetings within the stone circles and old forts of the Island.
Many of the minor relics of the stone period have been found beneath the moss and heath of the Arran glens and hills, but few of them have been deemed worthy of preservation. Arrow-heads of stone and flint are frequently picked up by the natives whilst digging peat in the moors [..] They are called elf-shots by the Islanders, and are supposed to have been used by the fairies long ago.
[..] As we find the little flint arrow-head associated with Scottish folk-lore as the elfin’s-bolt, so the stone hammer of the same period was adapted to the creed of the Middle Ages. The name by which it was popularly known in Scotland, almost to the close of the last century, was that of the Purgatory Hammer [.. so the inhabitant of the burial cist could] with it thunder at the gates of purgatory..
McArthur also talks of the highly polished stone balls found in cists and the “Baul Muluy” (the stone globe of Saint Monlingus): a goose-egg sized stone of jasper, which could cure diseases. People swore solemn oaths on it, and “even during the present generation it has been consulted by the credulous Islanders”. Curiously it could remove ‘stitches from the sides of sick persons’ and if it didn’t cure you and you died, “it moved out of bed of its own accord.”
St Molingus was said to have been chaplain to the McDonalds, and they carried the ball with them into battle for good luck. It was next held by the MacIntosh family as a hereditary privelege, but “this curious relic was lost a few years ago by a gentleman to whom it was entrusted, who partook too much of the scepticism of the present age to appreciate its value.”
A final bit of related folklore: “The perforated pebbles of the British barrows [..] are still known in the Scottish Highlands by the name of Clach Bhuai , or the powerful stones, on account of the inherent virtues they are believed to possess.”
From p68-71 of ‘The antiquities of Arran’ by John McArthur (1861).
The traditions.. which float around this class of the Arran grave mounds [chambered cairns] are associated with the fierce raids and clanish feuds of early times; and it is said that the ghosts of the buried dead were wont to rise from their graves and renew the combat in the shadowy folds of the evening mists.
From p22 of ‘The Antiquities of Arran’ by John McArthur (1861).
The Book of Arran by J A Balfour (1910). Contains lots of diagrams and photos of sites and finds from the island – chambers, stones, cup and rings, urns, allsorts. The back page is a rather interesting map with all the locations marked.