Archaeology Notes

Event ID 645061

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Archaeology Notes

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/645061

HY42NW 1 4048 2795.

(HY 4046 2795) Brough (NR) (Site of)

"Knowe of Yarso", an Orkney-Cromarty stalled cairn situated on the very edge of a 50yd wide shelf which drops in a cliff to the terrace below. Before excavtions, in 1934, it was a low grass-grown mound from which some slabs protruded.

The cairn is more or less rectangular in plan, with rounded corners, the major axis lying NW by W and SE by E and measures 50' by 25' 6" with a maximum height of 6'. There is an outer and inner wall face encircling the cairn, the inner 2' 4" behind the outer. The roughly paved passage, 13' 2" long, enters the chamber from the SE. The chamber, 24' 1" long and 5' 5" to 6' wide, is divided into three compartments by upright transverse slabs. The cairn contained the bones of at least twenty-nine individuals as well as those of at least thirty-six reindeer, sheep and a dog. Finds included fragments of food-vessel and beaker pottery, four arrowheads and more than sixty other flint implements and five bone tools, which were donated to the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland (NMAS) in 1934 by Walter A Grant.

A S Henshall 1963; J G Callander and W G Grant 1935; RCAHMS 1946.

'Knowe of Yarso' as described and planned by Henshall and now restored and preserved by DOE.

Surveyed at 1/2500.

Visited by OS(ISS) 9 October 1972.