Cairnpapple Hill

The Cairnpapple Hill is home to a prehistoric monument. The plateau on the 312 m high hill south of Linlithgow, West Lothian in Scotland, was used between about 3000 and 1400 BC as a burial ground and place of worship. The excavations in the late 1940s provided the complete chronology of the elements on the hill.

The first activity on the hill was the establishment of three standing stones in the center of an arc of small pits where burned human bones were that were associated in two cases with bone needles. This cemetery was located within an approximately 3000 BC built oval Henge monument with ditch and rampart, where a circuit is built of 24 standing stones. Your former location is now marked by filled with gravel pits. A grave with a ceramic addition was found near one of the standing stones.

The chamber

View from the hill

Centuries later changed the type of usage and there were burials in a chamber grave instead, which was built in the western portion of the Henges and covered by a round hill. Under the small resolutions of boundary stones cairn was a funeral with a menhir at one end. The grave was the resting place of an important person whose face was covered with a kind of mask. Beside her lay a wooden club. At the head and foot of each was a drinking cup. The capstone of the chamber was replaced by a concrete dome to protect the graves and the chamber in which one goes from the top, make available to the public. The cairn was later enlarged to accommodate two urns.