"A Bronze Age burial cairn above Machrie Bay, where fifteen red and grey stones hold watch over the western sea"
Auchagallon Curved Cairn
Machrie, North Ayrshire, United Kingdom
On the west coast of the Isle of Arran, on a shelf of hillside above Machrie Bay, fifteen upright stones form a circle around the remains of a Bronze Age burial cairn. Most are red sandstone. Two are grey granite. No one knows why the builders chose to mix the materials. The stones are graded in height, the tallest on the downhill side facing the sea, the shortest on the uphill side, as though the monument was designed to present a uniform profile when seen from the bay below. Inside, a cist was found in the 19th century. What it contained, beyond a stone box in the earth, is lost to poor record-keeping. Auchagallon has never been properly excavated. It remains an enigma on a hillside, looking west across the Kilbrannan Sound toward Kintyre.
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Quick Facts
Location
Machrie, North Ayrshire, United Kingdom
Tradition
Site Type
Coordinates
55.5598, -5.3428
Last Updated
Feb 5, 2026
A Bronze Age kerbed burial cairn on the Isle of Arran, part of a broader prehistoric landscape that includes the Machrie Moor stone circles. Built approximately 2000 BC. Never properly excavated.
Origin Story
Around 2000 BC, a community on the western coast of the Isle of Arran selected a shelf of hillside above Machrie Bay as the burial place for a person of significance. They dug a cist, a box of stone slabs, into the earth, placed the body inside with whatever grave goods custom demanded, and sealed it. Over the cist they heaped a cairn of stones. Around the cairn they set fifteen upright slabs as a kerb, grading the heights so that the tallest stones faced the sea and the shortest faced the hill. Thirteen stones were red sandstone, the local rock. Two were grey granite, sourced separately, deliberately different. The result was a monument visible from the bay below, its profile even against the sky, marking the place where the dead rested above the living world. The cairn stood for centuries, then millennia. The heaped stones were eventually lost. The kerb stones endured. In the 19th century, diggers opened the centre and found the cist. What else they found, they did not record. The monument passed into state care. It stands now as it has stood for four thousand years: fifteen stones on a hillside, looking west.
Key Figures
Unknown 19th-century antiquarians
Spiritual Lineage
Auchagallon belongs to the tradition of kerbed cairns found across western Scotland and Ireland during the Early Bronze Age. It is part of the broader prehistoric landscape of western Arran, which includes the Machrie Moor stone circles (six circles dating from Neolithic to Bronze Age), Tormore, and other ceremonial and funerary sites. This concentration of monuments indicates that the western coast of Arran was a significant ritual landscape for at least two thousand years.
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