EHG6194 - Excavation - The Ord North Chambered Cairn, Lairg

An excavation was undertaken by J X W P Corcoran (then a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Glasgow) in 1967 of a chambered tomb to the west of the village of Lairg in central Sutherland on the small hill known as the Ord for the Ministry of Public Building and Works. It consisted of a well-preserved bipartite tomb entering in the southeast of a large heart-shaped cairn surrounded by a low platform. Unfortunately, Dr Corcoran's prolonged illness and death meant that the excavation was never written up. Undoubtedly he had been working towards publication but this does not appear to have reached the stage of a written manuscript and the only information passed on was contained in the daybook and the site drawings which had nearly all been prepared to a publication standard. After his death the material from the excavation had been split up with the finds and samples going to Dr D V Clarke in the National Museum and the site notebooks and plans going to Mr A Gibb of the Geography Department, Glasgow University. Pressures of other work, however, meant that little work was done and all the material subsequently passed to N.M. Sharples. Unfortunately, during this period the soil samples from the tomb were lost in the National Museum; everything else, however, appeared to be present. The site was written up by N.M Sharples as an MA Dissertation submitted to the University of Glasgow in 1980 and then published in PSAS in 1981. The Neolithic levels remained undisturbed and finds from these included a small flint assemblage and a variety of potsherds representing a wide range of vessel shapes and fabrics, including an Unstan bowl. An intrusive, early Bronze Age, burial consisted of a cremation associated with a Food Vessel, and a small decorated bone mount. Radiocarbon dates were obtained for most of the important levels. <1>