Ardnadam Farm

A cromlech stands in the farmland at Ardnadam, on the Cowal shore a little north of Dunoon: upright slabs with a capstone across them, the Neolithic way of building a burial chamber and the earliest kind of monument anywhere in this landscape. Canmore lists it as Adam’s Grave, and that name is the whole of the story the place is usually told through.

Local tradition made the chamber a royal tomb, holding a king named for Adam, and the farm’s own name is said to have followed from it. Whether the name produced the legend or the legend the name is no longer recoverable; the two have grown into each other. A second reading arrived in the nineteenth century, when antiquarians took the exposed slabs for fragments of a Druidical altar — a description that says a good deal about how megalithic remains were understood at the time and nothing at all about who built the chamber. Neither reading survives in modern archaeological description, but one of them survives in the street plan: Cromlech Road, in neighbouring Sandbank, runs between Ferry Road and the A885 and carries the monument’s name into an ordinary residential address.

The cromlech is not the only ancient thing at Ardnadam, and it is far from the best understood. A separate site a short distance off, recorded by the West of Scotland Archaeology Service, was excavated by E. B. Rennie between 1975 and 1982 and produced a sequence running from a Neolithic hearth radiocarbon-dated to 4740 BP, through an Iron Age roundhouse some nine metres across set within a pentagonal earthen enclosure, to a drystone chapel roughly 5.5 by 3.5 metres with about forty shallow graves around it — several marked by stones incised with crosses — and on into medieval structures including a bloomery hearth. Set against that, the cromlech in the field is the one part of Ardnadam’s long occupation that has never been dug, and the only part still explained mainly by a story.