Raigmore Graveyard

Letter in Inverness Courier, 29 August 1972 from Murdo Macaskill on 'Derivation of Raigmore':

"Sir, - Perhaps, among your readers there is an antiquarian or archaeologist who might be interested in what follows. The place name Raigmore was taken to Inverness by the Mackintosh family of the small Raigmore estate in Strathdearn. To-day we stilll have a hamlet and school called Raigbeg, but no place known as Raigmore. The old Mackintosh home is called Press. The late James Dunbar, Edinchat, a native Gaelic speaker, well versed in local tradition, told me that Raigmore meant the 'big circle of death' and Raigbeg the 'little circle of death'. A persistant local tradition has it that there is an old cemetery on a knoll on the farm of Drumbain, half-a-mile east of Press. On this koll there is a circular wall of earth and stone enclosing a space ten yards in diameter.

... Recently I saw a six inch ordnance map on which the circle on Drumbain, or at least the knoll, was marked Raigmore. Some days later while working near Tombeg I suddenly remembered that a big heather fire on the south face of that hill in 1955 had exposed to view a large ragged circle of boulders about one hundred yards in diameter. To see it properly one had to go up to the top of the Drumbain ridge and look across the little glen of the Alt Cosack through which the railway and main road pass. In the seventeen years that have passed since that fire the heather has again hidden the upper part of this circle but two segments of the lower half can be plainly seen....One line of the proposed new Perth road passes just underneath this big circle but straight through the prehistoric settlement further on."

Information from the ARCH Community Timelines Course, 2010