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A little way east of Inverness are three circular chambered cairns of an unusual type, each surrounded by a stone kerb and a ring of standing stones. While the passages of most chambered tombs in Scotland face approximately east or south-east, those at Clava face south-west towards the mid-winter sunset, an alignment which may have had symbolic significance.

Although archaeological evidence dates them back to the third millennium BCE, tradition connects the tombs with a later period. They have been said to mark the burial place of the family of the sixth-century Pictish king Brude, and Otta Swire suggests in The Highlands And Their Legends (1963) that this theory may have been inspired by the digging up of a gold rod during drainage operations near the site. She does not mention when this discovery was made, but in any case the area had pre-existing associations with King Brude, whose castle is said to have been at nearby Craig Phadrig. Brude himself was one of St. Columbas‘ most important converts to Christianity, and was reburied on Iona, sacred to the saint.

The Lore Of Scotland – a Guide To Scottish Legends

Westwood & Kingshill

A short way south-west of Dundreggan, before the A997 bends and crosses the River Moriston, there is a cairn said to have been built by visiting pilgrims who added to it stone by stone. They came to honour the memory of the itinerant Presbyterian preacher Findlay Munro, who was preaching here in 1827. His text was Amos 4:12, which catalogues the punishments visited on Israel for oppression and idolatry and threatens worse to come: ‘Therefore thus will I do unto thee, O Israel: and because I will do this prepare to meet they God, O Israel.’ In Munro’s sermon, ‘Israel’ could easily be understood to stand for the Episcopalians in Scotland, and behind them the English government.

Some local boys, possibly Catholics, challenged his words and called him a liar, to which he answered, ‘As proof that I am telling the truth, my footprints will forever bear witness on this very ground on which I stand on.’ Just as he said, on the spot where he had stood his footprints were left indelibly in the ground. It became custom for visitors to stand in the marks, and people claimed that the hair stood up on the back of your neck when you did so. Janet Ford, in Footprints in Stone (2004), reports that the prints were vandalised in the 1990s, but her latest information was that they were becoming visible again.

The Lore Of Scotland – A Guide To Scottish Legends

Westwood & Kingshill

Some ancient forts, mostly from the Iron Age, had ramparts constructed from a double wall of stone with layers of wood and rubble sandwiched between. If the timber were set on fire as it might during an enemy attack, certain types of stone melted and fused other stones together. The great lumps of of heated, cooled, and solidified rock have patches that glitter like glass, giving rise to the term ‘vitrified’ forts.

Folklorists used to speculate that these were the origin of the glass castles of tradition. David MacRitchie, in 1891, wrote:

when one hears some wild story of a dreaded giant or ogre living in a castle surrounded with glass‘,

one knows, that such a castle could not have existed, but that the real glass castles may have been vitrified forts. He cites the example of a famous glass castle said to stand on Tor Inis or Tory Island off the north coast of Ireland, but as castles of glass often appear in fairy tales in places where no vitrified forts exist, this seems no longer a workable proposition, however tempting such a rationalisation may appear.

Craig Phadrig, a wooded hill west of Inverness, is crowned by a vitrified fort. Radio-carbon dating suggests that its ramparts were originally built in the fifth or fourth century BCE, although they may have been strengthened around 500-600CE. It has been proposed that Bridei or Brude, King Of Picts (c.555-84), lived here, as it is recorded that he had a royal palace near the River Ness. There is a King Brude Road on the way here from Inverness.

Brude was visited by St. Columba, who wanted permission to continue his work of Christian conversion, but the saint and his companions were refused entry. Then says Columba’s biographer Adomnan (627-704), Columba made the sign of the cross on the great doors, knocked and laid his hands on them and immediately the bolts shot back of their own accord. Brude is supposed to have been converted by this miracle, and he and his retinue in the fort were all baptised.

A local tradition said that this baptism took place at the foot of a fir tree growing at the centre of the fort. In 1963, Otta Swire noted:

This tree was still growing, one of the finest and largest Scotch firs that I ever saw, when Craig Phadrig was sold to the Forestry Commission in the 1920’s and much strong feeling was aroused by their decision to fell it as part of a clearance scheme.

The Lore Of Scotland – A Guide To Scottish Legends

Westwood and Kingshill

T.M. Murchison was minister of Glenelg in the 1930s, and his mother’s people had been shepherds in the area for many generations. His parish history was compiled partly from oral tradition gleaned from older relatives and older parishioners. ‘The most famous antiquities in Glenelg’ he records, ‘are the two brochs or “Pictish towers” in Glenbeg.’ At one time apparently there at least two more, but of these only ‘a heap of jumbled boulders and stones’ remained by this time. Dun Telve and Dun Troddan, however, still stand. It is said when the brochs were being built, stones were handed from the quarry along a chain of men.

A broch or ‘brugh’ is an archaeological term for the late prehistoric round towers found chiefly in the Orkney and Shetland islands and the Western Isles and on the adjacent Scottish mainland. They are round stone-built towers, and are often popularly supposed to have been built by the Picts or Pechts. Here, however, the brochs are associated with Fionn mac Cumhaill or Fingal and his followers the Fianna, said to have lived in these brochs and resorted to Skye for their hunting. The women of the band, says Murchison, never took food in the presence of their menfolk, but nevertheless remained healthy and beautiful, and the men wondered how the women managed to live on so little nourishment. One day, therefore, while the other men went to Skye, a warrior named Gairidh (pronounced Gary) pretended to be ill and was left lying on his bed, intending to watch the women.

He fell asleep, however, and the women promptly took strong wooden pegs and fastened Gairidh’s seven locks to the bottom of the bed, to keep him out of the way, and they proceed to feast on the finest food that glen or river could produce. Gairidh suddenly awoke, was irritated to find he was fastened to the bed, leapt to his feet with a mighty effort, and in doing so left every lock of his hair and the skin of his skull on the bed. mad with pain, Gairidh rushed out, gathered brushwood which he placed around the locked door, and set fire to the dwelling with the women inside, so that none escaped.

Over in Skye, Fionn and the hunters saw the smoke rising and knew that some terrible disaster taken place. They hurried back, vaulting on their spears over the narrow channel to the mainland. One of them named Reithe did not leap far enough and was drowned, and the name of the place from which he jumped, Kylerhea, is said to be derived from

Caol Reithe, ‘the Narrows of Reithe’.

Fionn and his men found their women dead and Gairidh missing, but at last he was discovered skulking in a cave and was punished.

An almost identical tradition was reported of Knockfarrel by Hugh Miller in 1835, and used by him to account for the name of Glen Garry, said to be where the murderer was torn to pieces. The tale is a better fir for Glenelg, much nearer to Glen Garry, and Murchison adds further local details: at Kylerhea, he says, you can see the marks made by the warriors’ feet as they jumped the water, and at Bernera nearby is a site called Iomair nam Fear More (’the Ridge of the Big Men’), pointed out as the burial place of the ‘Fingalians’ (the Fianna or Fenians).

It is said that once upon a time a bold man began ploughing up the place, in defiance of local warnings. He turned up a human skull, which was so big that it easily fitted over the biggest man present(alleged to be the Rev. Colin MacIver, minister of Glenelg from 1782 to 1829). Just at that point, however, a terrible storm of thunder and lightning arose, and the ploughing speedily ceased and the skull of ‘Gairidh’ or some other Fingalian was promptly buried again.

The Fianna were commonly said to be of giant size, so the finding of an unusually large skull may have helped to associate them with the site.

The Lore Of Scotland – A Guide To Scottish Legends

Westwood and Kingshill