Wideford Hill Chambered Cairn View all content for Wideford Hill

"Orkney Today" and "The Orcadian" of June 4th 2009 reported the discovery by tractor wheel of an otherwise undetectable potential tomb at Heathfield, beehive shaped and built straight into the bedrock,with a lintelled space opposite the corbelled cell. The farmer is leaving the field unused for any purpose until funds can be obtained for it to be investigated further - geology means geophysics has produced little result [if I had been the farmer I'd put a fence round an area the size of the known tomb and cultivate the rest - as long as he leaves it alone they will procrastinate unless he does a Ronnie. Passed by what looks to be the site today, a piece of rough land, along a line of telegraph-type poles in what is now a field of low pasture. Not what you could call a hillcrest but rather a small plateau. This is an area often well-drenched (one reason the new route is such a pain as the tourist doesn't find out until the top of the new bit) and more like somewhere to find a souterrain like Rennibister. The top is level with ground level and even if there had been something above this isn't much of site to look onto things or be looked up to, kind of the minimum required for positioning a chambered tomb. The farm drains where an earlier subterranean structure was found, so we could be looking at an area of these similar to Hatston (2 each at Grain and the aerodrome runway). So to me a likely example of the old 'gallery grave' earthhouse class.

Posted by wideford 25th June 2009ce

Comments (1)
if I have indeed seen the site then the location is HY415118	Posted by wideford 26th June 2009ce
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