Liddle Burnt Mound
Liddle Burnt Mound is located on South Ronaldsay , an island of Orkney , north of Scotland . The oval hill halfway between the local farm and small private museum of Ronald Simison and the Isbister Cairn is one of the 200 so-called ancient cooking places on Orkney, but it is unique of its kind and was excavated by John W. Hedges.
Liddle Burnt Mound is the largest mound in a complex of monuments that originally included at least one other Burnt Mound and a group of small burial mounds , but these are leveled.
The complex consists of two parts:
- a relatively good preserved area of stone buildings
- the rest of a large hill that encloses it on three sides.
The building
The structure resembles in many respects complexes that are particularly known from the Shetland Islands . It is oval and has thick walls with some box-like compartments in front of it. The large stove is in the south, in an alcove in the wall. For Hedges, an indication of the former height of the masonry comes from a 1.54 m long stone that was found on the tiled floor. The center is dominated by a large, peculiar trough made of stone slabs. A similar structure occurs on the north wall. The trough is waterproof because it is embedded in the clay underground. It has a capacity of almost one cubic meter. When it was found, it was half filled with broken fire-reddened stones. The tiles surround the trough on three sides and continue in a connecting passage that leads through the wall in the north to a shaft in the peat deposit. In winter this area is filled with water, in summer it would act as a drain.
JW Hedges thinks it's a house. The four horizontal stones opposite the fireplace could be the remains of an original seating area. On the other hand, there is no space for sleeping.
The fire mound
The hill has a volume of 200 m³ and is still up to a height of two meters. The excavation showed that it was created by successively filling in thousands of separate deposits of reddened stones and different colored ashes. It was clearly a very unusual rubbish heap.
The finds
The few objects found were hardly significant. There were many stones, including club heads, some might have been slingshot stones, some came from a plow, some broken that could have served as a lid, and shards of crockery. They were undecorated remnants of simple pail-shaped vessels. Organic remains found mainly at the bottom of the trough consisted of grasses, nettles, heather, crowberries and possibly oak branches.
See also
literature
- John W. Hedges: A guide to Isbister chambered tomb + Liddle Burnt Mound South Ronalsday, Orkney . Isbister & Liddle Trust, p. L. 1985, ISBN 0-9510554-0-2 .
Coordinates: 58 ° 44 '28.9 " N , 2 ° 55' 35.9" W.