Black Hill (South Lanarkshire)

The cairn on the Black Hill may have been built to point at another cairn. It has been suggested that it lies in line with the larger summit cairn on Tinto, and that the alignment served as a means of deciding the date of the winter solstice — one monument used to sight another, and the pair together used to fix a date in the year.

Whether or not that reading holds, this hill has been valued as a strategic viewpoint for over four thousand years, and the reason is obvious from the top. At 290 metres it looks down on the Clyde valley at Kirkfieldbank, three kilometres east of Blackwood, and the view reaches Goat Fell on Arran, the Cobbler, Ben Lomond and parts of the Southern Highlands. Very little of the west of Scotland is hidden from it.

Two periods of use are visible on the ground at once. The Bronze Age burial cairn sits on the summit, and around it the outline of an Iron Age fort and its settlement enclosure can be clearly traced. People buried their dead here, and later people fortified the same ground and lived on it — and the record suggests the site may have carried spiritual significance for both.

There is a third layer, and it makes the same point about the hill’s usefulness. An ordnance survey triangulation point now stands on top of the Bronze Age cairn. Surveyors choosing where to put their trig points were looking for the same thing everyone before them had looked for: the place from which the most could be seen.

The Black Hill is owned by the National Trust for Scotland and was designated a scheduled monument in 1969.