Description

The monument comprises five round houses, a four-poster stone circle, a small kerb cairn, some twenty barrows and some nineteen small cairns. The houses include two simple embanked round houses each 9m across, two platforms with banks on their outer lips, one of them with an angular northward extension of the platform into the hillside, and a platform with a bank round it. To their N on the summit of the ridge is a group of at least twenty barrows up to 6m in diameter and up to 0.3m high, while further to the N, on a broad terrace on the side of Brankam Hill is a group of some nineteen small cairns up to 4m in diameter. About 50m above the easternmost houses is a small kerb cairn and some 30m further N is a small four-poster stone circle.

Source: Historic Environment Scotland

Statement of Scheduling

The houses are of national importance as examples of 2 two different types in close proximity. The group of small barrows is of exceptional importance since the type is now rare but is likely to have been common; exploration could give considerable insight into the reasons behind the apparent paucity of late Bronze Age and Iron Age burials. The four-poster is of particular interest because it reinforces a local cluster including Baldovie Hill and because it belongs in a period when domestic monuments are common but funerary and ritual monuments are rare. The barrows, 4-poster and kerb cairn and the small cairns which latter, judging by their siting, are inappropriate for agriculture, form a ritual and funerary complex of national importance because it contains a variety of small vulnerable types probably once common but now rarely preserved. The monument is of national importance to the study of prehistoric houses, to the theme of the relationship of houses and ritual and funerary monuments in the late second and early first millenia BC, and to studies of the differences and similarities between clearance cairns and small funerary cairns.

Source: Historic Environment Scotland

Sources

Bibliography

RCAHMS record the site as NO25NE 21.

Source: Historic Environment Scotland