Monument record 1741 - ALLT CHRISAL, BARRA

NG69NW 7.3 6415 9765.

This site had the appearance before excavation of a hut-platform terraced into the hill-side. the NE quadrant of the 'platform', 3 x 2.5m was excavated.
Beneath a 0.1m deposit of hillwash from upslope, a roughly-built revetment wall about 0.5m wide with further stones piled up against its rear (upslope) face ran E to W across the trench. It was built of angular, sub-angular and sub-rounded gneiss clasts varying from 0.2 to 0.3m up to 0.5 to 0.6m across. In places three layers of stone survived, to height of around 0.4m although the wall was not properly coursed. At the E end of the trench a roughly-built buttress of similar stones was built against the main revetment wall. Tumbled stone and hillwash downslope from the revetment overlay dark-brown, humified peat with little plant debris and few small clasts and pebbles. The wall had been built into this blanket peat, but there was no suggestion of a soil or land-surface developing on the peat downslope from the wall before the wall fell into disrepair and hillwash swept over it. About 0.06m below the surface of the blanket peat, and just S of the revetment wall a rough hearth of stones was found, about 0.4m in diameter, with remains of burnt turf (?) on it. No other features were found in or below the peat, which had accumulated on a gleyed podsol.
No artefacts were found at any level in the excavation. The revetment wall and buttress presumably belong with the late 17th-18th ccentury AD cultivation of this hill-slope. The brief episode of the hearth is clearly earlier but undated.
Branigan 1989d; K Branigan and P Foster 1995; NMRS 595/3

K Branigan, 1989d, Discovery and Excavation, Scotland, 68 (Bibliographic reference). SWE10411.

K. Brannigan & P. Foster, 1995, Barra: archaeological research on Ben Tangaval from the end of the Ice Age to the Crofting Commissio, 35, 163 (Bibliographic reference). SWE33223.