Cat Cairn

Nearest town:
Aberdeen (3km NW)
OS reference:
NJ951031
OS sheet:
38
Latitude:
57° 7' 7.82 N
Longitude:
2° 4' 51.34 W
Added to TMA by

Images

Image of Cat Cairn (Cairn) by drewbhoy

The wonderful Cat Cairn from the path near Cat Cairn 2.

Image credit: drew/sud
drewbhoy
drewbhoy Aug 29, 2012

Articles

Cat Cairn

drewbhoy
drewbhoy Jul 14, 2010

Like Fitz I worked in and around Aberdeen for various oil companies. But today was finally the day for the Tullos Hill stravaig.

Moving onto Hareness Road at the roundabout on the A956 I parked near the caravan site on Altens Farm Road. Immediately north of the caravans is a path. Ten minutes later and site can be seen. Basically it is still the same as Fitz describes. I will wax lyrical, since I come from here. There are fantastic views all around. Just a shame some of it is industrial.

Plus I’m going to add a new site. Something very good happened on the way to the Baron’s cairn.

Visited 13/07/2010.

Cat Cairn

fitzcoraldo
fitzcoraldo May 9, 2009

I have seen Cat Cairn many times on my visits to Aberdeen. The cairn sits on a high point on Tullos Hill overlooking the Altens industrial estate. I have often looked down Crawpeel Road and noticed the cairn sitting atop the furze-covered hill but have never taken time to visit it because whenever I’m in the area it’s work related and all I want to do is leave and head for home. Anyway, I was staying in Altens for a few days and had time to kill so decided to walk up to the cairn.

The hill is part of the Loriston Country Park and can be accessed from the car park on Hareness Road. Unfortunately you can’t park in the car park as the area was recently occupied by travellers. The travellers were evicted and then prevented from returning by blocking the entrance with huge boulders, however, parking alongside the road is not a problem unless you are driving a white transit van and towing a caravan.

It takes five to ten minutes to walk from the road to the cairn. The cairn is pretty much what you’d expect, a large round cairn of stones, If you look at the amount of stones in the field walls that lead up to and from the cairn it’s easy to imagine this cairn being two or three times as large, with stones being robbed for walling. Another thing about the walls is that they use this and the nearby Baron’s Cairn as boundaries, whether this reflects prehistoric boundaries is a matter for debate. It could also be argued that the walls start and terminate at the cairns because they were a good source of materials for the walls. Who knows?

What I really want to say about the cairn concerns the views and it is something that you can’t really appreciate unless you visit the site. The view here is spectacular, this small hilltop commands views across the sea, the coast, the Dee river mouth, the city of Aberdeen, the hills beyond the city and on a clear day I would imagine you could get a glimpse of the Cairngorms from this point. It is probably the perfect location for a monument and if you are in area I would definitely recommend a visit.

At this point I was going to wax lyrically about a Bronze Age monument overlooking the Oil Age city but that all sounded a bit cheesy so I won’t bother.

Sites within 20km of Cat Cairn

Like all websites everywhere, we use cookies.