Images

Image of Balnagrotchen (Chambered Cairn) by GLADMAN

What would appear to be the chamber...

Image credit: Robert Gladstone
Image of Balnagrotchen (Chambered Cairn) by GLADMAN

Possibly a little capstone of some description? Nice little stone, whatever.

Image credit: Robert Gladstone
Image of Balnagrotchen (Chambered Cairn) by GLADMAN

Awful weather – obviously – so images upon compact... looking across the farm to wind turbine crowned hills. Honestly.

Image credit: Robert Gladstone

Articles

Balnagrotchen

Yeah, as Greywether succinctly relates, this chambered cairn won’t blow the visitor away. Not set before the eponymous farm, an (thankfully) unseen dog howling away within said buiildings... and in close proximity to the wondrous Boath Short. Not to mention Long.

Nevertheless well worth a quick look – despite the pouring rain – since there’s clearly the remains of a chamber set upon a pretty extensive cairn here. A companion to the aforementioned Boath short cairn, in fact. According to Canmore:

‘A possibly short horned cairn with a polygonal chamber..... The cairn material has been largely removed so that a depth of only 2 or 3 feet remains....with a diameter of about 60 ft... There are various large boulders lying about the site but they do not seem to form part of the structure...In the centre there are a number of split slabs which have formed the main stones of a chamber entered from the E.... A S Henshall 1963; A A Woodham 1956’.

So there you are. It would be rude not to drop in when visiting the more impressive monuments across the road, wouldn’t it? Not when access is so easy.... and the rain has already done its worst.

Balnagrotchen

Not much to see here. A ruined Orkney-Cromarty cairn with only a couple of chamber orthostats visible in a cairn surrounded by a fence and topped with a telegraph pole.

Worth a visit though as part of a trip to the much more interesting Boath Long and Short.

Access. Across the road from the Boath cairns. Stiles into the field and over the cairn fence.

Visited 1 November 2004

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