Clava Cairns

Twenty years after moving north from the Borders, and after many visits to Culloden battlefield only a couple of miles away, I finally came here. Mrs Oons knew it from childhood.

There are three Bronze Age burial cairns. As with all cairns of a similar age, the entrance passage is aligned so the sun lights up the interior at sunset on the winter solstice. If the early months of the year are known even now as the hungry months, imagine what it was like for Bronze Age people. So the start of longer days was something to celebrate. And however primitive we might like to think Bronze Age people were, they sure knew a lot about solstices.

In common with so many other sites in the 19th century, it was damaged by not-archaeologists. The first cairn was ripped open by a party of family and friends on a picnic.