Culdoich - Antiquarian Illustrations

James Fraser

Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 18, p.340, 1884.

Fraser's plan of Culdoich, his depiction of the ingress of the gravel mining activities into the
cairn itself is frightening. We presume the loose stones shown in the pit are displaced outer
kerb stones. It is suspicious that the hemisphere cleared of cairn fill is also on the same side
as the mining operation.

S.Piggott

Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 88, p.191, 1956.

Piggott's plan of Culdoich is excellent and detailed, even showing the original fill material of the central space.
In the sections he even shows the precarious lean of the one remaining circle stone. Sadly this tall monolith now
lies fallen since 1982.

Piggott's photograph of the internal space at Culdoich excavated back to the Old Ground surface. It is sobering to look at the height of the inner kerb stones, they stand up1.5m tall
here, and on our visit, barely 40cm protruded above the soil. It was not the practise of the Clava builders to embed these stones deeply, so cairn fill was probably heaped some way
up these outer faces to avoid the weight of the main cairn fill pushing them over.
We did try to match the profiles of the upper sections of these stones with those in our modern photographs, but could not find any correlation.
Piggott found nearly 2kg of cremated bone fragments here, when analysed the were found to come from two individuals, one male and one female, with at least one being
of middle age.

As usual, our sincere thanks to the Society for allowing use of material from its most excellent Proceedings.

[ Home ] [ Up ] [ What's New ] [ Scotland ] [ England ] [ Ireland ] [ Wales ] [ Europe ] [ Methods ] [ Us ]