Digging up ancient finds down on Balvicar Farm
Archaeologists have discovered what could be remains of prehistoric and Bronze Age cairns on farmland at Seil.
Balvicar Farm owners Ewen and Flo Macaskill are fascinated by the ancient significance of stones heaped on a hilly ridge behind their home.
It was reading a historical guide published by Luing History Group that started it all off.
The couple contacted its author Mary Braithwaite and she put them in touch with Dugald Macinnes from archaeology-for-all charity Association of Certificated Field Archaeologists (ACFA), who had already led a major archaeological sweep of Luing.
Ewen said: “Ancient Luing was a top book and it got us thinking more about what could be on our own land. We knew we had a number of long house-looking sites but we particularly wanted someone to come and look at the hilltop. I felt there was a story up there. We got in touch with Mary and she put us in touch with Dugald. It’s amazing to think we’ve been plodding about the land all these years and how suddenly you get some information that makes you see it in a completely different light and you think ‘ah...yes.’ It’s fascinating to think about it.”
“We are still waiting to get the full low-down on the cairns they found up there and we’re looking forward to that. They’ve also promised us some ink drawings which will definitely be going up on the wall,” added Ewen.
In April, a 17-strong group of volunteers, led by Mr Macinnes and including three members of Luing History Group, spent several days walking over the farm land, looking for evidence of past structures and activities.
Some old farmsteads and crofts were easy to spot, marked out on old 19th-century maps of the area and with their walls and foundations still standing.
Signs of cultivation rigs and lazy beds, even right up on the top of ridges, also revealed how every area of the land had been used for arable or growing other crops in the past - but more was to come.
“What no one had anticipated was the discovery of evidence of Balvicar’s prehistoric past, given the extensive cultivation of virtually every bit of land in the more recent past, but on the top of a ridge close to the current farmstead are the remains of two structures, one still substantial, the other much less so,” said Mary, who was part of the group.
Stones to build a drystone wall have been removed from the substantial ruin that was once a long cairn with a forecourt and façade, possibly built during the Neolithic period (c.4000 BC– c.2500 BC). The drystone wall runs along the ridge and right over the cairn.
Not far from that cairn are the lesser remains of a possible round cairn, perhaps a Bronze
Age kerb cairn, (c.2500 BC to c.700 BC), also on top of the ridge.
But so much stone has been “robbed” from it, that now all that is visible is a small central mound with what could be a coffin-like box and a slight enclosing bank.
“How it survived the digging of lazy beds and construction of the dry-stone wall is a miracle,” Mary told The Oban Times.
Though trees now block the view, these cairns would have looked out southwards to Degnish and Shuna.
At the south end of Shuna are the remains of one Neolithic chambered cairn and three Bronze Age cairns.
Shuna is also where three bronze Bronze Age swords were found in a peat ditch in 1875. They were close together with their tips facing downward, suggesting they had been purposefully put there as a kind of offering rather than casually lost.