Little Miracles: Balnuaran of Clava

The next day brought lots of clouds and rain. We started out in Inverness. There had been a zip-up jacket I had seen on our first outing that I hadn't bought and really wanted. So, we found the store, I got the jacket, we did a little more shopping, and we stopped in for lunch at an "American" diner to celebrate 4th of July.

The Scottish idea of a good ol' American burger was one that I consider a heart-attack waiting to happen, so I went with a chicken wrap instead. In fact, not one in our little group was willing to give the heart-attack burger a try. They had some purple coleslaw which came with my wrap that was heavenly, and this is coming from someone who doesn't like coleslaw.

After lunch we were going to go to the Battlefield of Culloden, but one of the locals had mentioned some tombs near the battlefield. We decided to check it out. It wasn't tombs in what I had thought, but it was well worth the visit.

The local who told us about the tomb warned us not to climb on it--because many had been destroyed from people climbing on them. There were also signs which asked us to be respectful, and yet, when we got there, there was a kid about eight or so who was climbing. So irritating, the lack of respect, and the fact that the parents allowed it. Grrr.

While we were there, it started raining.

Here's a little history:

A prehistoric cemetery

On a gravel terrace above the River Nairn is one of Scotland’s most evocative sacred prehistoric sites. The Clava Cairns are dominated by a line of three exceptionally well-preserved burial cairns, each enclosed by stone circles. We know little about who the cairn builders were, for they left no written record. The actual remains of those buried within the cairns no longer survive because of overzealous archaeological digging in the early 20th century. However, recent excavations have shed new light on the cairns.

A regional tradition

The burial cairns at Clava are around 4,000 years old. They are not quite like those elsewhere in northern Britain. Other burial monuments generally incorporate massive standing stones – either in the facade as at Cairnholy in Galloway, or supporting the chamber as at Maeshowe in Orkney. In contrast, at Clava the circles of standing stones are separate elements from the tombs.

The three well-preserved cairns each have a central chamber. But while the two outer cairns have entrance passages, the chamber of the central one is completely enclosed. The outer kerb of each cairn is well defined by large boulders, and each is surrounded by a ring of standing stones.

Sun worshippers

The three cairns form a line running NE to SW. The passages of the two cairns are also similarly aligned, suggesting that the builders had their eyes on the midwinter sunset, just like their contemporaries who built Maeshowe. The standing stones around the cairns also acknowledge the midwinter sunset, for they are graded in height – the tallest facing the setting sun in the SW down to the lowest on the opposite side. Even the colour and texture of the stones seems to have been carefully selected to emphasise the veneration of the sunset on the shortest day of the year.

Tombs of the chiefs?

The burial chambers in each tomb were cleared out long ago. However, in the 1950s a few crumbs of cremated bone were found within the central cairn. Evidence from other similar ‘Clava-type’ cairns (such as Corrimony, inland from Urquhart Castle) suggests that while many hands were needed to create the tombs, only one or two bodies were buried inside them. They seem therefore to have been built to house the privileged few among the local farming community, perhaps tribal chiefs.

From the limited evidence available, it seems that the Clava cairns were not burial places for communities, but for selected individuals, both male and female. Professor Alexander Thom discovered that the two entrance passages align exactly and that the alignment passes through two of the stones surrounding the central non-aligned cairn. The significance of this is that the passage graves were probably constructed in Neolithic times, and the stone circles later, during the Bronze Age. The alignment points to the midwinter sun's setting position, indicating that at some time the site perhaps had an astronomical function.

Cairns like those at Clava are found mainly in the area around Inverness and the Black Isle, and the Spey Valley. Their distribution coincides largely with areas of good farmland, and often the smallest stones of the mounds have been almost totally removed for the construction of dykes and farm buildings.