Publication Account
Date 1995
Event ID 1016784
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1016784
There is a remarkable series of prehistoric and later monuments 111 the area, including several chambered cairns and an iron-age fort. The path to the Cairn of Get is marked by black and white poles; from the cairn one can walk to other monuments.
The Cairn of Get lies just over the first low ridge. It is a short horned chambered cairn excavated in 1866, when the bones of seven or more people were found in the antechamber, and a deposit of wood ash, burnt and unburnt human and animal bone, flint arrowheads and fragments of pottery in the main chamber. The chamber, which is divided by upright stones, has lost its roof and lies open to view. The two leaning slabs at the back of the chamber were set that way deliberately; above them heavy corbel stones project over the chamber as the start of the roof. The walls facing the sides of the horns can be seen in places.
Some 30m back from the Cairn of Get, in the heather on the inside of a bend in the path approaching it, is a small cairn some 10m in diameter with a cist grave exposed in it. It is uncertain if this is a bronze-age cairn, or nore unusually a Pictish grave of the 1st millennium AD. Beyond the Cairn of Get is a fine stone dam, retaining a now silted loch. This was probably built in the 19th century as part of the works to provide a head of water for Whaligoe Mill (see no. 14). The dam points conveniently to the Fort of Garrywhin (NO 312413) immediately to the north and occupying the top of a broad flat hill some 150m long, with steep sides. A single stone rampart, now much tumbled, runs right round the hill with an entrance at each end. At the north end the rampart was doubled in width and faced with very large upright slabs, of which three survive and give an idea of the original height of the rampart. The interior is now covered with peat and heather, but near the south end are the remains of a stone structure, possibly a later hut circle, while further north is the remains of a small stone cairn, perhaps bronze age.
On the slopes south of the fort, between it and the loch, are a line of three rather dilapidated hut circles, best distinguished by the bracken growing on them. About 150m east from the south end of the fort, and across a fence, is a denuded early bronze-age cairn on a small knoll; it was excavated in 1865, and a burial with beaker pottery found in a central cist. Radiating down the slope from it to the south are 7 or 8 lines of small grey stones, with at least 11 stones in the most complete row. Only 30 stones remain today, but originally there must have been around 80. Some other very ruinous stone rows exist nearby, one gtoUp 220m ESE of the Cairn of Get, and another 200m SSW, the latter also aligned on a cairn, but both hard to see now. On a ridge some 400m east of the Cairn of Get, looking down on Loch Watenan, are the grassgrown remains of a broch within an outer defensive work (NO 317411) and there is another broch further north on the same ridge (ND 318414). Cairn Hanach, or Kenny's Cairn (NO 310408) is built on the edge of higher moorland and shows up on the skyline from Cairn of Get, from which it lies some 450 m southwest. Traces of crofting settlements can be found on the low ground between Cairn Hanach and Groat's Loch.
Information from ‘Exploring Scotland’s Heritage: The Highlands’, (1995).
