This chambered cairn is easy to visit as it is right next to the Ring of Bookan Henge.
We parked in a passing place and I hopped over the locked metal field gate and walked straight up the track to the top of the hill – 5 minute walk.
The cairn is well mangled and stands approx 1.5 metres high x 10 metres across.
There are lots of stones sticking out of the grass.
There are great views from the cairn overlooking the Ring of Brodgar, Ness of Brodgar etc.
On the ground the cairn is easy to approach a wide track going straight up from a barred metal gate by the roadside.
The ditch around the site, is shallow but fairly easy to see. Inside almost looks like a spoil heap and on the seaward side outside the ditch there is a standing stone that might once have been part of a fence. Before I left I saw the top of a slab that might have been part of a stall or a radial compartment and right next to this was a piece of black plastic(?) webbing held firm by the ground so I think there is a possibility further excavation may one day take place. According to CANMORE the 2002 excavation showed this Late Neolithic chambered tomb to be rather different from other sites of this type in size and aspects of its architecture. If you wish to look at the mounds further up wellingtons are advisable.
RCAHMS NMRS record no. HY21SE 10 has been explored three times, the first time an unknown or unknowns dug into the upper section. Petrie excavated in 1861 what he decribed a bowl-barrow some 44'D and 6' high overlaying a circular building. A central cist 7'1" x4' x2'8", in which he found only a flint lance/spearhead and fragments of three or more small clay vessels, was connected to the outside wall by a 6¼' passage 1¾' in cross-section to the encircling wall eleven feet from the cairn's base. This cist had four cists about it, all on the order of 4'8" x2'9" x2'8", one each to the north and east and two on the west side with three of these containing the remains of robust skeletons. Excavations ending in 2002, which managed to recover more such in one of what are now seen as side-chambers, found that Petrie's circular building was later (either after natural erosion or deliberate damage) surrounded by a ~16m cairn itself bounded by three revetments. We cannot know in what condition the original digger found it but only the other day I read that Shennar Howe not that far away consists of a flat-topped mound on which there is placed a smaller one, both of similar heights and totalling roughly six foot high.
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Posted by wideford
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