Midtown Of Pitglassie

NJ74SW 12 7022 4352.

(NJ 702 435) A round cairn in Wood of Pitglassie was excavated by Mr Fenton in 1952 who found a broken cinerary urn lying on a rough floor of cobbles "with stones heaped above it". The urn had a rim about 1in deep and was decorated with incised lines.

At a slightly higher level, there were several pieces of pottery of a different, undecorated type. One piece was the shoulder of a vessel and had a knob on it. There were some tiny fragments of bone nearby. Higher still, and near the outside of the mound, there was a fine flint scraper of Buchan flint. An unidentified hollow iron object near the top may be intrusive, but it is noteworthy that a short piece of iron about 1in long occurred close to two or three fragments of pottery amidst a heap of what was evidently human ashes.

Information contained in letter from A Fenton, Pitglassie, Turiff 24 September 1952.

Neolithic and Early Bronze Age pottery, and a trimmed flint flake from the cairn were donated to the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland [NMAS] by A Fenton.

Proc Soc Antiq Scot 1971.

A turf-covered cairn at NJ 7022 4352, measuring about 10.5m in diameter and 0.5m high. The centre and W arc show evidence of Fenton's excavation.

Surveyed at 1:2500.

Visited by OS (AA) 17 January 1973.

(NJ 7022 4352) Cairn (NR)

OS 25" map, (1981)

This mound was excavated in September - October 1978 in advance of land clearance.

Removal of the top soil and the extant mound material, a mixture of small rounded stones and natural gravelly soil, revealed a primary monument comprising two, possibly three concentric rings of mostly small water-rolled boulders. The inner ring had a diameter of about 4.0m; it was most clearly detectable in the W quadrant and was only one stone deep in places (although these were more substantial blocks rather than stones). The second ring was the most substantial representing the remains of a circular bank, in one segment well-constructed in three courses. The diameter of the bank circle was about 6.0m; it stood to 0.2m high and was roughly 0.5m broad. For part of its length the stone construction appears to have given way to turf banking. The possible third outer ring comprised a rougher, more scattered circle, possibly slippage from the inner stone bank; it was about 10.0m in diameter. Throughout the main stone bank were scattered numerous sherds of a well-fired, highly burnished, rilled ware of distinctive Neolithic type, similar to that from Easterton of Roseisle. Charcoal flecks were scattered amongst the mound material and cremated bone and charcoal also appeared within the area of the bank although in some places evidence of animal burrowing suggested displacement from original position. Removal of the stone bank revealed two actual cremation pits as well as cremation scatter; one pit contained further Neolithic sherds. In addition, removal of a large stone on the inner edge of the circle revealed a further cremation pit and a fine leaf-shaped arrowhead of red flint.

The stone bank and circles had been covered over with scraped up natural material from round about; no quarry ditch could be traced, only a shallow, barely perceptible dip of the natural level off the edge of the mound. It was not possible to ascertain whether the original mound had been of a hemispherical form, flat-topped or possibly doughnut-shaped since a combination of the 1952 central trench and an earlier pit had destroyed the stratigraphy of the centre of the site. No land surface was preserved beneath the area of the stone rings, the mound material or what remained of the central area; it had presumably been stripped for turf. The surface of the natural was white and hardened over much of the central area indicating subjection to heat. This together with charcoal remnants suggested some sort of cremation activity prior to construction of the stone bank and mound.

The pit which had disturbed much of the central area was 2.3m in diameter and 1.3m deep, filled with large rounded stones and three rectangular slabs (approximately 0.6 by 0.4 by 0.15m thick); two similar-sized rectangular slabs lay in a further area of disturbance, adjacent to the stone-filled pit, which had destroyed evidence for all but the basal part of the stone bank in the NE. It is feasible that a small cist, possibly intrusive to the original Neolithic monument and possibly covered by a small cairn, had itself been disturbed in antiquity or the more recent past. As some of the upper stratigraphy had been destroyed by the 1952 trenching it was impossible to determine from what original level the stone-filled pit had been cut. Apart from a few redeposited sherds no pottery of the Bronze Age type referred to from the 1952 trench was recovered.

At the edge of the mound, preserved in the E and W arcs, were six small pits (about 0.35m in diameter and 0.15m deep) of which four were packed with four or five stones similar to those of the bank, the other two simply filled with a greyish loamy material that had covered the lower slopes of the mound. The scoops were spaced at roughly 2.5m intervals. Evidence of ploughing up to the bottom of the mound in the S quadrant has possibly destroyed remains of pits in that area; the quadrant was not excavated as this was badly disturbed in 1952. These features did not seem large enough to have been stone holes, although they could have provided footings for some kind of upright; their regular spacing and size suggests that their existence is not the result of chance.

The proposed land clearance has not taken place, and remains of this monument still exist.

A Shepherd 1978; Information from Excavation Report 1979 (A Shepherd) (see archive MS/313); Information from I Shepherd, Dept of Physical Planning, Grampian Regional Council 5 October 1982.

(Location cited as NJ 7023 4352: nominated as Site of Regional Significance).

Situated on ridge at altitude of 150m OD. Incomplete.

[Air photographic imagery and bibliography listed].

NMRS, MS/712/35, visited 27 October 1978.