The monument is just visible to the right of the gorse upon the right hand bank of Loch Caladail. The loch completely entranced me – maybe it was the light flooding the transparent shallows, the tiny, yet perfectly formed beach, or the dry stone wall ignoring such a trifling matter as a lake. Class. No wonder they built a kerbed cairn here.
A Citizen Cairn’d’s kinda monument
Exquisite location...... pity not more stones survived, but those that do appear selected for their differing attributes, yet complementary aesthetics.
The OS map simply states ‘Cairn’... but at first I thought here we have another chambered cairn; however no sign of a chamber, the ‘groove’ running the circumference of the mound suggesting the stones in situ are the remnants of a very substantial kerb similar to that seen upon Cnoc na Moine.
The kerbed cairn sits overlooking Loch Caladail... a land-locked body of water with a perfectly sized one man/woman – OK, two at a push – beach. Sensational on a day like this.
Canmore has this to say about this unexpectedly captivating kerbed cairn, set near the beguiling Loch Caladail:
“On a rise, a cairn 10.7m overall diameter and 0.8m high, partly robbed but not deep enough to expose a cist. Six boulders (two displaced) of the kerb survive in the SE arc. The rest of the kerb has been removed, leaving a trench 0.7m wide by 0.3m deep in which the boulders were embedded.” [OS (W D J) 5/4/60 and (I S S) 22/7/71]
The monument can be seen from the summit stone grouping of Cnoc na Moine...
