Grey Cairns of Camster Cairn(s) View all content for Grey Cairns of Camster

Moth had spotted this one in TMA but I had completely overlooked it. But we were so close we had to swing by. I had no expectations whatsoever. I thought maybe they were just another couple of unassuming cairns. But noooooo! These are Mighty Rock Monsters! And there are two of them. The main one is a long - really long!- cairn made of piles of stones and with rather neat edges that stretches on for about 50 metres I guessed, possibly even more. At the 'top' end it even has a horned forecourt effect. As I approached on the polite wooden walkways that take you over the boggy ground, I saw that the passage entrances to the long cairn (there are two entrances) had nasty iron gates on them. It didn't look promising. However, they were only shut rather than locked (presumably to keep animals out), so I bent over and shuffled in towards the huge interior chamber, built in the style typical of round these parts and on parts of Orkney, with neat flat stones, delicate corbelling and vertical stalls. A round cairn, build in the same way, of piles of grey stones stands about 500ms away and is equally as nice, but much smaller. Why isn't this fantastic place better-known?! I wanted to get off the paths and look for some standing stones marked on the map just to the south, but I had noticed that on virtually every tussock or bush was a large, fuzzy, brown caterpillar. Caterpillars freak me out, so I was unable to. In fact the more I looked, the more caterpillars I saw. I trod carefully back to the car.

Posted by Jane 9th July 2004ce

Comments (0)
You must be logged in to add a comment