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Drumsturdy / Laws

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Woah there pardners...I only said it looked like a sheep pen..coz it does. I am in total agreement with the pants batallion. The point I failed to make clear is that this was a round underground chamber of considerable dimensions, built by souterraneans...Something which you could expect them to have had a crack at given the obvious skills they had and the small scale models at places like grange of conon. Surely one day thay would have fancied a crack a building a whopper ?

But back to the plot.....as you walk onto the top of the Law your socks are fair whipped off your feet..every where you look there are twists and turns of souterrains. Go give it your eye Martin and give us a shout as I may be in the vicinity.

Also the main tunnel really is impressive..very wide.
The reason I went for a look was really because there are/ were loads of souterrains in that area and the Laws hill seems to look over them..and what a suprise I got.

Two other threads here....

What do you reckon to the peculiar habit of carrying boulders up a hill which is made of easily available volcanic rock...are other hill forts made with boulders al a souterrain..?

and number two...what is this stupid word souterrain all about..I vote for Weem (Scots) and its Gaelic relative Uaim.

Yours for a greater underground

Woodhouse.

Just had a look at your pics there.....not the same thing....at the laws the "sheep pen" is a single perimeter wall not a tunnel hence a big circular space made available using the same number of stones and work...or to put it another way...how about if you built a souterrain as a big circular curve then realised you could scrape out all the inner walls and earth and just leave the outside perimeter wall...if these dudes were smart enaough to build a souterrain with corbelled walls then a big dome had to have come up in conversation.

As to roofing ...one souterrain is probably intact with roof slabs..but entierly un exposed...( watch where the bunnies run to)...there are no obvious slabs from the big tunnel...but these could have been swiped for use in the other structures...even so a 12 foot span is pushing it..each slab would have weighed over a ton.

Yours for Weems

Woodhouse

I think the horrid word of souterrain was one probably adopted by victorian archaeologists (read rapers of culture) who wanted a word other than tunnel. The fad of speaking and writing in French (later superceded by wanting to speak German because of Albert) probably gave rise to this.

I must look up the Irish and start using that term. Good point, well made.