Camster Cairns - The Long Cairn

Camster Long is a Neolithic long horned cairn of the Orkney-Cromarty type, among the best preserved in Britain. It was built in multiple phases, incorporating two earlier round cairns into a single sixty-metre monument. Excavation revealed communal burials with animal bones, pottery, and stone tools.

The story of Camster Long begins not with the long cairn but with two smaller, independent monuments. At some point during the Neolithic, communities built two round cairns on the Caithness moorland, each containing a burial chamber, each encircled by its own stone wall. These round cairns were complete in themselves, functional tombs where the dead were placed alongside the bones of animals and the products of fire.

Then something changed. The community decided to enclose both round cairns within a single elongated structure, extending the monument to sixty metres and adding horned forecourts at each end. The reasons for this transformation cannot be known, but the scale of the undertaking argues for its importance. This was not maintenance or repair. It was a reimagining of the monument's purpose, a decision that two separate houses for the dead should become one.

The resulting long cairn, with its tapering form, its double-faced outer wall, and its two chambers set fifteen metres apart within the body of the monument, is one of the most architecturally accomplished Neolithic structures in northern Scotland. It shares typological features with cairns in Orkney, suggesting cultural connections across the sea.