Gourlaw

Cairn, Gourlaw.

Not the slightest trace of this cairn survives. It lay on the northern edge of the field immediately to the south of the dwelling-house at Gourlaw, at an elevation of some 600 feet above sea-level. The highest point of the law, 629 feet, lies some 200 yards to the north-east. The remains of this cairn were removed in 1905 when two cinerary urns and three other deposits of incinerated bones were found. Amongst the burnt bones covered by the large urn was a perforated bone ornament. See Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., xxxix (1904-5), p. 411.

RCAHMS 1929, visited 27 August 1913.

OS map: xiv N.W. (unnoted).

Gourlaw NT 2804 6130 NT26SE 35

This cairn, which stood immediately S of Gourlaw farmyard, was revealed by ploughing in 1904, but no trace of it survived by 1913. Excavation by Coles showed that the cairn probably measured at least 7m in diameter by 1m in height, but its survival beneath the surface of a cultivated field suggests that it may have been no more than the core of a much larger earthen mound. Five cremation deposits were found beneath the cairn, two of them in inverted urns. The larger urn (RMS, EA 164), a Collard Urn of Longworth's primary series (form 1A), also contained a small perforated bone plaque (RMS, EA 166); the other (RMS, EA 165) belongs to Longworth's secondary series (form 1) and was covered by a flat stone. Of the other burials one was accompanied by sherds of a probable third vessel, and another was covered by a flat stone. A fragment of a whetstone was also recovered from beneath a stone on the S side of the cairn.

RCAHMS 1988

(Coles 1905; RCAHMS 1929, 116-17, no. 147; Longworth 1984, 307, nos. 1926-7)