Archaeology Notes
Date - 1972
Event ID 658057
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Archaeology Notes
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/658057
NG20SE 5 centred 2829 0415
Four cairns seemingly linked by a drystone wall (NG 2823 0909) and two isolated cairns (NG 2806 0919) occur on the S side of Sanday, almost due S of Canna pier, at Ant-Oban overlooking Camas Danabhaig. They are roughly oval and vary in length from 10-23ft, and in breadth from 8-17ft, the major axis usually being NE and SW (RCAHMS 1928).
One of the isolated cairns was excavated in 1924. Finds included coarse potsherds of a class found in kitchen-middens and brochs in the W of Scotland; flint chips, including a thumb-scraper,; a limpet-hammer; pumice and minute fragments of burnt bone not certainly human (T C Lethbridge 1925).
T C Lethbridge 1925; RCAHMS 1928; Private 6" map, annotated by T C Lethbridge, 1953.
Centred at NG 2827 0415 on a NW-facing slope below a low crag are four turf-covered stony mounds, each about 15.0m apart, three of them linked by the remnants of a wall. The dimensions are generally as described by the RCAHMS.
Lethbridge's excavation is still plainly visible in the mound directly under the crag and not in one of the 'isolated cairns'. These are not cairns they are almost certainly the ruins of old bothies.
The 'two isolated cairns' noted by the RCAHMS are at NG 2851 0409.
Surveyed at 1/10,000.
Visited by OS (I S S) 30 May 1972.
