Heel-shaped cairn
type of megalithic monument
The heel-shaped cairn, with its usually cruciform chamber, is a type of megalithic monument that is found in Scotland, especially in Caithness and Sutherland and in the Shetland Islands. In Orkney, the Isbister Cairn is the only site that is similar in shape. The name derives from the fact that its outline resembles the imprint of the heel of a boot".
The chambers usually lie in a round cairn made of broken rocks, which either contemporaneously or later were surrounded by the eponymous platform, up to 20 metres wide at the front and from 1.0 to 1.5 metres high, and were partly enclosed by large kerbstones. A gentle concave exedra is characteristic of the front face.
The often cruciform chambers, accessed via a short passage, have a large recess at the head and two smaller recesses to the side. They were covered with corbelled vaults, of which however usually only remnants survive. The best-known sites of this type in Shetland are:
Gillaburn, Hill of Caldback, Hill of Dale, Mangaster, Muckle Heog, Pettigarth's Field, Punds Water, Turdale Water, Vementry, Viville Loch, Ward of Silwicks and Wind Hamars. The special shape of Cairn o' Get (also Garrywhin) resembles a round cairn, which was covered by a “horned long cairn” with circular chamber, as otherwise occurs in Sutherland (Camster Round and Skelpick Long). At the monument of Vementry the round cairn, with the typical chamber of heel-shaped cairns, was built over in the heel-shaped form and given a roughly 10.6-metre-wide exedra.
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This entry incorporates text from “Heel-shaped cairn” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.