Clava cairn

The Clava cairn is a class of Bronze Age circular chambered tomb, named from the group of three cairns at Balnuaran of Clava east of Inverness. Roughly fifty examples are known in the country around Inverness, and they divide into two sub-types. The first is a corbelled passage grave — a burial chamber roofed by overlapping stone courses and reached along a short stone corridor — holding a single chamber beneath a covering cairn of stones, with the entrance turned to the south-west and midwinter sunset. The second is an annular ring cairn, which encloses an area that appears never to have been roofed and has no formal way in from outside.

Both sub-types share the same outer arrangement: a stone circle set round the whole tomb, and frequently a kerb of stones running about the cairn itself. The standing stones are graded in height, the tallest placed to the south-west at the entrance and the shortest directly opposite. Where burial remains survived in Clava-type tombs, only one or two bodies seem to have been placed in each; and because the ring-cairn sub-type offers no access at all, the design suggests there was no intention of returning to the dead or of adding further burials over time, as had been the practice in Neolithic cairn tombs of the preceding farming centuries.

At Balnuaran of Clava itself three Bronze Age cairns lie close together on a line running north-east to south-west, and it is these that give the whole class its name and serve as its type site for the fifty or so comparable monuments around Inverness and the Moray Firth. The cairns at either end are passage graves; the middle one is a ring cairn, and it is the only known example with stone paths or causeways forming rays that run out from the platform, across the kerbs, to three of the standing stones.

Stones bearing cup and ring marks were built into the fabric, the carving done before they were set in place, so the builders were reusing worked stone rather than decorating a finished monument. The kerb stones were sorted for size and for colour as well: larger and redder towards the south-west, smaller and whiter towards the north-east. Nothing about the arrangement reads as piecemeal addition — the graded stones, the sorted kerb and the causeways appear to belong to a single operation, and to a design settled before building began. The Balnuaran group stands at grid reference NH757445.