Quoyness
Coordinates: 59 ° 13'32 " N , 2 ° 34'5" W.
The Cairn of Quoyness is a megalithic of Maeshowe type . The around 2900 BC The Neolithic complex, built in BC, is located on the peninsula called Elsness on the island of Sanday in the Scottish Orkney .
At the time the system was built, Elsness was probably separated from the rest of Sanday by a shallow water zone. Washed up sand had already filled the area up to the turn of the century. A wall into which eleven Bronze Age burial mounds are integrated surrounds Quoyness. The existence of these eleven and another 26 hills on the Ness suggests that Elsness had ritual or sacred significance for the residents of Sandy for more than 2000 years. The coastal cairn is only slightly above the high water mark. The reason for the choice of the location are the building materials that are almost ready for installation due to coastal erosion .
Similar to Maes Howe , a wide, round stone platform surrounds the cairn, which has long lay beneath a grassy hill. Today's appearance is misleading as the front was reconstructed with the intention of showing the sequence of steps in which the cairn was erected, rather than its final shape. As a result of the restoration, there is a nine-meter-long, open at the top, only 3.5 meters long at the end, and only 0.6 meters high, corresponding to the original. The inside of the chamber is about four meters high, but the roof has been reconstructed. The walls and floor of the four meter long and two meter wide chamber are original. There is a shallow pit and a short trench with an unknown function in the clay soil. In contrast to Maes Howe (3), there are six side niches starting from the chamber. Two on each long side and one on the narrow sides. The retracted access points are laterally or centrally.
During the exploration of the facility in 1867, the chamber, which had already been filled in advance, was cleared and the bones of at least ten adults and five children were found in the chamber, corridor and four of the six niches. Outstanding are two specially shaped stone objects that correspond to those found in Skara Brae . The remaining finds consist of fragments of animal bones, broken ceramics and bone and flint tools and implements.
Mount Maesry is another maeshowe-type megalithic complex located south of the small, low-tide Start Island (or Start Point) at the eastern end of Sanday Island.
literature
- Anna Ritchie: Orkney and Shetland (= Exploring Scotland's Heritage. ). Published for Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland by HMSO, Edinburgh 1985, ISBN 0-11-492458-9 .