Cairn of Get

Cairn of Get represents the burial traditions of Neolithic farming communities who inhabited Caithness between roughly 3750 and 2500 BCE. These were among Britain's first agriculturalists, people who transitioned from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled farming and began constructing permanent monuments. For these communities, the dead were not forgotten but honoured with structures designed to endure. The cairn belongs to the Orkney-Cromarty tradition of chambered tombs, an architectural form found throughout northeast Scotland and the Northern Isles.

The Neolithic communities who built Cairn of Get left no origin narratives, no founding texts. What we know comes entirely from what they constructed and left behind. Beginning sometime around 3750 BCE, they began building chambered cairns throughout Caithness, part of a broader tradition spanning Orkney and the Scottish mainland. These monuments required substantial labour: sourcing and transporting stone slabs, engineering corbelled roofs, constructing passages and chambers to precise specifications. The investment indicates profound importance, though the specific beliefs motivating such effort remain genuinely lost. Archaeological understanding suggests ancestor veneration was central. In Neolithic society, the dead were not removed from community life but remained present as honoured figures, possibly consulted for wisdom, possibly believed to influence the fertility of land and livestock. The cairns were not merely graves but houses for the dead, places where the boundary between living and departed could be crossed.