Nether Largie Cairn Cemetery

Feb. 2000.
We walked up the valley and visited all the cairns.
When I was posting the photos, I couldn’t remember which cairn was what.
I do remember lying in a cist on the valley floor and thinking that this was the most comfy, warm place in the world, and that I could have stayed there all day.
I sense that it bothers some folk that the alignment is not precise. This non precise alignment suggests that it is not a lunar or solar monument.
It would have been too easy to set these places in a precise straight line in the neolithic and the valley is in pretty much a straightish line anyway.
Maybe the decisions were made to have the line slightly out of kilter, as a compromise, or a deliberate quirk of the precise – cos that is sometimes what does work.

17/12/01 -I was just thinking about the rough SSW-NNE alignment of the cairns, the river, the valley and the Dunaad footprint (Iwas just reading the Dunaad entry from Gyrus).
The geology and subsequently the rivers and lochs of the whole of the Dalriadic Kingdom and indeed the whole of North Western Scotland follows this alignment. The most important journeys would have been in this direction, by foot and boat along the great sea lochs, glens and freshwater lochs. Look at any map of Scotland and it’s there. These journeys in peace and war, would have been physical and spiritual journeys at the time they were made, and would have become the stuff of legend and ritual.
Everything would have been in that alignment, such is the almost inpenetrable and fjord like nature of the sides of these great valleys. Even the Gulf Stream, which today brings much of West Scotlands weather (and I assume has for thousands of years) would have roughly followed this alignment.
Most of the storms, thoughts, dreams, fears, plans and total conciousness, would have all been in this direction, here and in much of the North West highlands.

just a thought?!

South Cairn: The earliest of all the cairns in this linear cemetry, with a northern entrance to the burial chamber. Is this unusual in cairns, to have a northern entrance? At Callanish, when sat on the Cnoc an Tursa, you look down the N-S aligned southern avenue of stones, and this lines up with the burial cairn in the circke, a standing stone, and the recently discovered burial cairn near Margaret & Ron’s house. Margaret speculated about funeral procession going from the circle to the cairn in this north-south line.

I’ve been fascinated with the mythology of the north ever since becoming interested in myths about the Pole Star. Well, there was no Pole Star in the Bronze Age, but there was obviously still a concept of north – and the direction where the sun never shines from is an obvious place to locate the land of the dead, methinks. As is attested in numerous mythological and magickal systems, where the is a strong correlation between North and Death. Kilmartin Glen seems to be a grand testimony to this belief structure.