Kinerras
Cup Marked Stone (Neolithic) - (Bronze Age)
Site Name Kinerras
Classification Cup Marked Stone (Neolithic) - (Bronze Age)
Canmore ID 12395
Site Number NH44SE 7
NGR NH 46770 40069
Datum OSGB36 - NGR
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/site/12395
- Council Highland
- Parish Kiltarlity And Convinth
- Former Region Highland
- Former District Inverness
- Former County Inverness-shire
NH44SE 7 4677 4007.
There is a cup-marked stone a little to the south of the farm of Kineras. The stone is a slab of tough grey gneiss containing mica, with a rounded surface, lying flat on the ground and partly imbedded. It contains 43 distinct cups, three pairs of which are connected by grooves.
W Jolly 1882
This cup marked stone is at NH 46774007. It measures 1.5metres long by 1.1. metres broad and is as described by Jolly. The cup marks vary in size from 3" in diameter by 2" deep, to 1 1/2" in diameter by 3/4" deep, but there is now no trace of any pairs joined by grooves.
Surveyed at 1/2500.
Visited by OS (R D) 18 December 1964
Note (1979)
Kinerras NH 467 400 NH44SE 7
There are about forty-three cup-markings on this boulder which lies 240m SW of Kinerras farmsteading.
RCAHMS 1979
(Jolly 1882, 348-9)
Note (28 March 2019)
Date Fieldwork Started: 28/03/2019
Compiled by: NOSAS
Location Notes: Approx 4kms SW of the centre of Kiltarlity a broad ridge, a druim, runs in a SW direction between the line of the Beauly River and Strathglass to the NW and the smaller Allt an Loin to the SE. This ridge is extensively farmed as the crofting community of Kinerras, mostly as pasture. There are areas of woodland amongst the fields.
Access to the field in which this stone lies is from the E, from Kinerras Farm, in particular No.6 Kinerras. Across a field, through a gate, is a field of rough pasture the northern part of which has been fenced off and contains rank bracken. Two tumbled stone-and-turf dykes run parallel in a WSW-ENE direction, about 20m apart starting just within the gate, abutting the unfenced woodland. The stone was hidden in the bracken, lying about 5m north of the middle of the southern dyke.
There is another cup-marked stone, the Nine Hole Stone (Canmore ID 12327), in a field of close-cropped pasture, approx. 150m to the SW, across a deer fence. The crofting community of Culburnie with three Clava type cairns (Canmore ID's 12397, 12388, 12391) lies three kms to the NE. This is a landscape with many pre-historic archaeological features of settlement and agriculture.
Both cups were first recorded by William Jolly in an article in the Proceedings of the Scottish Archaeological Society in 1882 (PSAS, 1882, vol 16, pp 300-401)
Panel Notes: Lying flat on the ground, initially completely covered in bracken, this rounded hump-back stone is 1.6m NS by 1.1 EW. It rises to a height of 0.3m, just S of it's midpoint.
Initially, after removing the moist bracken, the surface of the stone appeared blacky-brown, which dulled as it dried out. The stone has the form of a rounded almost symmetrical humpack, with the main carved area in the centre of the panel. Although there is a band of cups EW across the middle of the stone, there is a fine rosette of cups on the E facing surface of the panel as it slopes down to the ground.
There are at least 43 cups on the surface of the rock, with three of the cups, labelled A, B & C on the sketch, seeming to be the centre of rosettes of other cups. These three also have prominent bossed edges or shoulders, and are deeper than the others, approx. 4-5cms. Cup A, on the E-facing aspect of the panel, is surrounded by 10 cups, in a non-symmetrical pattern. Cup B has the most prominent bossing, and has a line of 6 cups to the S. Cup C is surrounded by 10 cups in almost a circle.
William Jolly in 1882 identified dumb-bell links between some of the cups. These were not identified subsequently by the OS in 1964, nor on this visit.
