Ardnamurchan, Cul Na Croise

NM66NW 2 centred 622 698

Sherds of beaker pottery, leaf-shaped and barbed-and- tanged arrowheads, minute round scrapers, and many small pointed narrow blades, and a few microliths were found in the sand dunes behind Cul na Croise (NM 622 698) by Lethbridge in 1924.

Lacaille (1954) also notes that large quantities of flints found in the sand dunes of Drynan Bay indicate the presence of a flint-knapping site there. The finds included Obanian flakes, blades and scrapers, pick-like tools and other artifacts of a Larnian type, and some flints retouched in a characteristic Bronze Age way, while other blades had been worked by micro-burins in the Tardonensian manner. Lacaille concludes that these finds, which cannot pre-date the Bronze Age, indicate a survival of mesolithic traditions into that period, by a coming together of descendants of the Obanians and those of a later stage of development.

T C Lethbridge 1925; A D Lacaille 1954.

Drynan Bay is the local name for Cul na Croise (NM 622 698) and the bays to the SW as far as Camas an Lighe (NM 623 690) an area of shifting sands; otherwise no further information.

Visited by OS (R L) 28 May 1970.

The material from Drynan Bay is predominantly of quartz, but contains a variety of flint implements including parallel-sided and leaf-shaped blades, scrapers, pebble- choppers and several microlithic blades and cores.

Artifacts from here, including fragments of All-Over-Corded Beaker and later pottery, are in the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Cambridge (Acc No: 51.1047); the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow (Accession no: B.1951, 258-83); and the National Museum of Antiquties of Scotland (NMAS - Accession nos: ACA 29-40, 309-11).

Proc Soc Antiq Scot 1963; J N G Ritchie 1973; Proc Soc Antiq Scot 1978; RCAHMS 1980.