Unstan Chambered Cairn

Unstan is a particularly well preserved and somewhat unusual example of an Orkney-Cromarty chambered cairn. Tombs of this type are often called stalled cairns, because a central passageway is flanked by paired transverse stones dividing the side spaces into compartments that reminded early investigators of horse stalls.

The earliest tombs of this kind are found in Caithness and typically have no more than four stalled compartments. In Orkney the form became increasingly elaborate, reaching a maximum of fourteen compartments at the Knowe of Ramsay on Rousay. Unstan is a more modest example, with five chambers flanking a passageway 6.4 metres long.

Unstan departs from the standard form in three ways. Its covering barrow is circular, 13 metres across, rather than the usual oblong or rectangular shape; the tomb contains a side chamber, which is a feature more common in Maeshowe-type tombs; and the main chamber opens along one long side of the passage rather than at its end, which again is characteristic of Maeshowe rather than of stalled cairns. The barrow is built of two or three concentric rows of stonework. Evidence from nearby tombs suggests that Unstan and its neighbours were built at some point between 3400 and 2800 BC.

The original roof is gone, as it is from most Orkney tombs, and has been replaced by a concrete dome dating to the 1930s that protects the site. The remaining walls stand almost 2 metres high and are built chiefly of thin stacked slabs of local flagstone from the Devonian Old Red Sandstone. The first discovery of a distinctive style of pottery was made here in 1884, and the vessels are the type examples of what is now called Unstan ware. It typically consists of elegant shallow bowls with a band of grooved patterning below the rim, made using a technique known as stab-and-drag, alongside a plainer version of undecorated round-bottomed bowls.

Some of the bowls had fragments of volcanic rock worked into the clay to strengthen them, and after firing their surfaces were burnished with bone tools to make them shiny and impermeable. Parts of twenty to thirty bowls were found in the tomb, many of them Unstan ware. Most of the vessels were shattered or incomplete, which is common in chambered cairns and suggests they were deliberately broken to be placed with the dead. They were not made for the purpose either — they had clearly seen prior use, and one sherd carried the impression of barley grains.

A number of fragments were found in a shallow hollow in the clay floor, a pattern seen in other tombs. Several of the reconstructed vessels are now in the National Museum of Scotland. Human remains were found in the tomb — two crouched skeletons in the side cell, several more in the main compartment, and scattered bones throughout the rest, along with animal bones and charcoal. An arrowhead characteristic of the Beaker People suggests use continuing well into the second millennium BC, and crouched burial was not a Neolithic practice.