Monument record 1942 - NASK, BARRA

NL69NE 6 6515 9809.

T66: This small robbed structure stands on a hillock of bedrock in a narrow N-facing defile. As discovered, the monument consisted of five standing orthostats and two fallen stones marking out an oblong cist.

Excavation encompassed the whole hillock and revealed that care had been taken to pack small boulders and stones into the natural clefts to provide a consolidated 'platform' on which this monument could be built. The cist would have originally consisted of nine or ten stones, and measured 1.6m by 1.0m. Nowhere in the vicinity was there any sign of a covering or capstone for the cist, and there was equally no trace of a covering cairn.

Beneath the turf and a thin layer of topsoil was a deposit of dark brown peaty soil up to 10cms thick. This sat directly on bedrock and ran up to the orthostats which appear to have been in place before this deposit accumulated. It follows, therefore, that the area enclosed by the cist was originally cleared down to bedrock. Because no artefact material of any kind was found during the excavation, the interpretation of this site is difficult. It has every appearance of a prehistoric cist, but the absence of a capstone and cairn, together with its position on a hillock of bedrock raise doubts about this interpretation. On the other hand, the delibarate infilling of small clefts in the bedrock suggests that the cist was regarded by its builders as of more than casual significance.
K Branigan 1989g; K Branigan and P Foster 1995; NMRS MS/595/3.

K Branigan, 1989g, Discovery and Excavation, Scotland, 69 (Bibliographic reference). SWE10414.

K. Brannigan & P. Foster, 1995, Barra: archaeological research on Ben Tangaval from the end of the Ice Age to the Crofting Commissio, 38, 165 plan: fig. 5.3 (Bibliographic reference). SWE33223.