sutherland-1911/02_014

Transcription

INTRODUCTION
TO
INVENTORY OF ANCIENT AND HISTORICAL
MONUMENTS AND CONSTRUCTIONS
IN THE COUNTY OF SUTHERLAND.

SUTHERLAND is a large county containing an area of upwards of
1880 square miles. As a field for archaeological research, it presents
many attractions; for not only do prehistoric remains exist in great
numbers, but the sparseness of the population and the relatively small
area of ground broken up by agriculture have left many of these in
a better state of preservation than elsewhere. These remains, how-
ever, are by no means equally distributed over the whole area of the
county. Its western half, from its mountainous and barren character,
is extremely unfavourable to the support of human life, and it need
occasion no surprise that comparatively few traces of the occupation
of the prehistoric people are to be found in these infertile districts.
Where man exists to-day man existed in former ages, and the majority
of the objects of antiquity must be sought in the eastern half of the
county, along the seashore, or by the margin of some productive loch
or kyle, on the sides of the principal straths, and by the main
arteries of communication. Occasionally in the heart of a deer
forest the site of some ancient settlement may be discovered, but this
is an exception which only gives prominence to the rule.
On the many problems as to the origin and affinities of the
Celtic races the ancient monuments of Sutherland throw little light.
Something, however, we learn of the earliest inhabitants of the
county from such memorials. The men who first penetrated into
this northern land through the pine forests whereof the blackened
stumps stand so thick in the peat cuttings, have left evidence
in their chambered cairns, their polished stone tools or weapons,
and pottery, that they belonged to a race that hailed from the
Mediterranean seaboard, and reached the north probably up the
western coasts of Britain. The round cairns containing cists,
the stone circles and rarer stone rows, as well as the cinerary vessels
from cisted interments, enable us to recognise their Bronze Age
successors. When, however, bronze for tools and weapons had given
place to iron, sepulchral customs are no longer an aid to racial
identification, and the ethnologist must turn to evidence derived
from ornament and habitable structures. The broch, the most
characteristic structure of the Iron Age, reveals a Celtic influence,
while numerous ornamented objects of this period found in the