Clava Cairns

Today we visited Clava Cairns, one of Scotland’s most evocative bronze age complexes, where we explored the burial cairns, cemetery passages, and standing stones, which date back over 4,000 years. From their website:

Clava Cairns or the Prehistoric Burial Cairns of Bulnuaran of Clava are a group of three Bronze Age cairns located near Inverness. A hugely significant and exceptionally well preserved prehistoric site, Clava Cairns is a fantastic example of the distant history of Highland Scotland, dating back about 4,000 years.

The cemetery was used in two periods. At around 2000 BC a row of large cairns was built, three of which can still be seen today. A thousand years later the cemetery was reused and new burials were placed in some of the existing cairns and three smaller monuments were built including a 'kerb cairn'. Traces of a smaller cemetery can also be seen at Milton of Clava, a short distance up the valley to the west. The cairns at Balnuaran of Clava extended along a gravel terrace raised above the River Nairn.

Excavations have found evidence for farming on the site before any of these monuments were built. The settlement was directly replaced by the cairns and it even seems possible that some of the material used to build them had been taken from demolished houses.

Image of Clava Cairns from VisitScotland

From Wikipedia:

The Clava cairn is a type of Bronze Age circular chamber tomb cairn, named after the group of three cairns at Balnuaran of Clava, to the east of Inverness in Scotland. There are about 50 cairns of this type in an area round about Inverness. They fall into two sub-types, one typically consisting of a corbelled passage grave with a single burial chamber linked to the entrance by a short passage and covered with a cairn of stones, with the entrances oriented south west towards midwinter sunset. In the other sub-type an annular ring cairn encloses an apparently unroofed area with no formal means of access from the outside. In both sub-types a stone circle surrounds the whole tomb and a kerb often runs around the cairn. The heights of the standing stones vary in height so that the tallest fringe the entrance (oriented south west) and the shortest are directly opposite it.

When Clava-type tombs still contained burial remains, only one or two bodies appear to have been buried in each, and the lack of access to the second sub-type suggests that there was no intention of re-visiting the dead or communally adding future burials.

A site of pilgrimage for fans of the Outlander books and TV series. In this saga, a Doctor called Clare (maybe not spelled that way) touches a standing stone at Clara Cairns and is transported back to the 1700s, in time for Culloden among other things. She can time travel, but she is not always in control of that!

In keeping with the spirit of adventure of our group, I duly offered to be a dead body in the Centre of the first cairn. I lay down in the foetal position, as I believe that was how they were buried at the time, and lay still for quite some time as photos were taken.

Suddenly an alarm rang out, and my watch vibrated. The Apple fall feature works. It detected I had dropped to the ground and was not moving. Rather than have the watch call my close relatives in Australia, at an ungodly hour, I quickly ended the alarm. Not a bad reaction, and comprehension time, when not wearing my glasses. No-one had noticed.

The cairns however, and their setting amongst ancient trees, were very special, as you can see. Truly there was a real sense of calm and peace there.

I need to find more archeological and pre-history information - maybe my Bains were living here 4000BC!