Note

Date 4 November 2014 - 23 May 2016

Event ID 1044357

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Note

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1044357

Atlas of Hillforts of Britain and Ireland

This fort occupies a spectacular position on the promontory that projects beyond the precinct wall of the Barra Head lighthouse, perched some 190m above the sea. Its defences comprise a galleried wall up to 4.6m in thickness and about 25m in length, drawn in a gentle arc from the sheer cliff-edge on the N to where the ground falls away in a series of ledges on the S. Though apparently standing 3.2m in height at a squared terminal around the entrance at its N end, with a steeply battered outer face of neatly-pinned masonry, much of this is probably rebuilt, including the lintels of the entrance passage, though its N wall appears to retain a bar-hole and a door-check set 1.1m back from threshold stone on the line of the outer face. The inner end of the S wall of the passage is possibly original and the neatly built angle it preserves may be the E jamb of a doorway into a lower gallery that was still visible with some of its lintels in place in 1915, along with the E face of an upper gallery above it (RCAHMS 1928, 132-3, no.450); no more than a groove now remains to mark the gallery's course through the rubble, as the wall thins to a about 3.7m in thickness and peters out in a mound of stones on the S. The triangular interior measures about 40m from ENE to WSW by a maximum of 15m transversely (0.03ha), but its sunken character is almost certainly the result of quarrying in 1830-33 to provide stone for the lighthouse, which is perhaps also the source of so much of the reconstruction and restoration.

Information from An Atlas of Hillforts of Great Britain and Ireland – 23 May 2016. Atlas of Hillforts SC2482