Wideford Hill chambered cairn

Wideford Hill chambered cairn stands on a steep west-facing slope near Kirkwall on the Orkney Mainland, facing the Bays of Firth and Kirkwall. It is similar in design to Maeshowe and was scheduled by Historic Environment Scotland in 1994. Maeshowe-type cairns are the most architecturally ambitious tombs in the islands, and this is a small one of the class.

The visible masonry shows how it was built. Three concentric walls stand on an earthen platform, one inside the next, and the different construction stages can be read directly off the exposed stonework. Three walls inside one another is unusual and suggests the cairn was enlarged rather than built at once. That stepped appearance is not original. The cairn now has a stepped facade because of what excavation exposed; the intended shape was probably rounded or conical, with the stonework covered over in clay and turf. What a visitor sees is therefore partly the work of the excavators.

Building on a steep slope forced particular solutions. The entrance is on the west side, and the outer third of the passage is low, narrow and noticeably curved, before the inner section runs straight into the hill. Building into a slope saves material and creates its own problems with drainage and access.

That inner passage is cut into the hillside itself and roofed with lintel slabs. It leads to a rectangular stone-lined chamber with three side chambers opening off it, each of them corbelled — stone courses stepped inward to close the roof. Corbelled cells of that kind are what distinguishes this class of tomb from the stalled cairns of Rousay.

Access today is not through the original passage. A reconstructed concrete roof was added in the twentieth century and visitors enter from above, which preserves the passage but changes the experience of arriving in the chamber entirely. Concrete roofs are the standard modern solution across Orkney and they always change how a tomb is approached.