Archaeological Sites on the Black Isle

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My introduction to the article

For this review I have turned to the work of the amateur archaeologist, Dr Anthony Woodham, who lived in Dingwall and studied the area in considerable detail in the 1950s. Three of his papers in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland form the basis of this article. Link. As you read further, you will find that Woodham visited all the archaeological sites that were known at the time, and additionally visited locations identified on old 6-inch maps as containing cairns, piles of stones, henges or enclosures etc. Woodham was able to dismiss as irrelevant a number of the features portrayed on the 6-inch maps, but which he included in his site lists. For this article, I have taken Woodham’s listing but only include those he wrote positively about. This reduces his list from 61 sites to 48 worth a visit.

Unashamedly I have simplified and edited, for this article, the text of the scientific papers Woodham wrote. Link Woodham’s paper from 1953 starts with an Introduction to the area, which is followed by the Inventory of Sites, and is rounded off with a Discussion. I have kept this structure for my article. I have omitted from the Inventory the associated catalogue of finds which are now in collections elsewhere, thereby focussing solely on the sites where Woodham found the terrain to be of significant interest.

In editing Woodham’s text, I have retained his Grid References and his use of miles, yards, feet and inches. I have kept his Site Inventory Numbers. I also include Woodham’s map of the Black Isle with the sites identified, and his line drawings and site plans from the 1953 paper. A numbered site on the map that does not include an entry in this article reflects that it is not important.

Finally, as a spur to visiting the sites, I am credited with discovering an unrecognised Black Isle Burial Cairn. In fact my achievement was to get archaeologists interested in it, and to get it registered on the Highland Historic Environment Record. I organised a visit to it during the Highland Archaeology Festival in 2023. Before then, strangers on different occasions had approached me while out walking on the Black Isle to ask if I knew where more information on the cairn could be found - and so I then made my own personal discovery of it. The Auchterflow Burial Cairn is my only addition to Woodham’s lists from the 1950s.

I am publishing this article as an Article in Progress because a number of sites have yet to be visited and photographed for Geograph. Of my selected 48 sites, so far (December 2024) just 28 have been visited. This is a personal project, but I would welcome any help from others to complete it. I will also slim down the text further and correct errors in the weeks ahead.

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