The Knowe of Lairo – remodelled to emulate Maeshowe or something completely different?

By Sigurd Towrie

Please note: The Knowe of Lairo is on private land and, due to structural issues, access to its interior is no longer permitted without permission.

The Knowe of Lairo [1] is one of three large Neolithic chambered cairns clustered on a hillside on the south-western coast of Rousay, overlooking Eynhallow Sound.

Built on the edge of a hill terrace, the Lairo structure is the lowest, with the Knowe of Ramsay on higher ground c120m to the north-east and the Knowe of Yarso higher still, c550m to the east.

The knowe was partially excavated/consolidated in 1936, but a full report was not published, only a summary seven years later [2]. As you will see, many questions still surround the structure, which remains another of Orkney’s Neolithic enigmas.

Horned cairns

But before delving into the delights of the Lairo chamber we should first take a brief look at the phenomena of long horned cairns.

This type of monumental structure was long considered to be a rarity in the Orcadian Neolithic [3]. Following accepted typology, they were made up of a long, usually tapering, cairn with at least one internal chamber occupying a small part of the overall monument – usually towards the higher, wider end.

The architectural style takes its name from the “horns” that project from this end, creating a semi-enclosed forecourt space [4]. On occasions, hornwork is found on both ends, giving the monument plans the appearance of a stretched animal hide.

In the mid-19th century it was proposed that horned cairns were embellished earlier structures [5], something that appeared to be confirmed by excavation in the early 1960s [6]. But although many did enclose earlier Orkney-Cromarty cairns, we now know this is not always the case.

From the outside the Knowe of Lairo bears all the hallmarks of a long, horned cairn. But it is the situation inside that has led to decades of archaeological head-scratching!

Trapezoidal in shape, the knowe’s exterior cairn was over 45 metres long and widest (c17m) and highest (c3.2m) at its eastern end. At the western end it narrowed to around nine metres in width and survives to a height of around 1.5m.

The excavation found evidence of a “horn” on the northern side of the eastern end – “all but obliterated” by agricultural work. On the south side horns were noted at both ends, allowing the excavators to proclaim that Lairo was “the second long horned cairn to be recognised in Orkney, the first having been identified by J. M. Corrie at the Head of Work.” [2]

Lairo’s eastern hornworks framed a semi-circular forecourt around 27m wide. From here, access to the interior was by a curved, 5.8m long passage.

Height-wise, the entrance passage increased towards the inner end, due to a combination of the floor sloping downwards as the roof lintels rose. As a result, although the outer entrance was just 50cm high, it increased to an unusually expansive 1.2m at the inner end. [2]

At some point in its life, one of the lintels forming the passage roof partly collapsed, disturbing its neighbours.

To remedy this, its Neolithic users shored up the roof by inserting a stone slab, supplemented by masonry, against the northern wall – reducing the passage width to a mere 40cm! With the roof just 50cm high at this point, access to the interior was clearly a bit of a squeeze!

A unique chamber

And it is the inner chamber that makes the Knowe of Lairo really stand out from the crowd. It is, without doubt, unlike anything found in Orkney to date. Compared to the size of the exterior cairn, the area covered by the chamber is tiny. But what it lacks in area it makes up for in height, its roof soaring to a height of 4.1 metres!

The reason for this uniqueness was a series of secondary modifications that completely transformed the interior.

The original, roughly rectangular, stalled chamber measured 5.2m long by about 2.5m wide. At the eastern end, a pair of “unusually massive” portal stones flanked the entrance, while two pairs of dividers, projecting at right angles from the walls, created three compartments – four side cells and an end compartment – a layout typical of the Orkney-Cromarty stalled cairns.

But, according to the excavators, the builders’ goal to raise “the loftiest vault of its type in the north of Scotland” was not completed. [2]
 
Instead, it was proposed that there had been a change of plan before the construction of the stalled chamber reached roof height. This saw skins of masonry inserted into both sides of the first two stalled compartments, “finishing flush with the edges of the portal and divisional slabs”.

Another wall, this one curiously stepped, was built across the chamber’s western end, concealing the innermost orthostatic dividers and blocking off the end cell. [2]

The northern and southern secondary walling was simply a stone lining, built against the original interior walls and not tied into the structure. Instead, stone struts were incorporated into the upper sections to prevent the masonry shifting inwards.

The new masonry additions reduced the internal area by more than a quarter, leaving a cramped, corridor-like space measuring a mere 60cm wide (just enough room for a single person to stand, facing its length) and 3.3m long [2]. But what the remodelled chamber lacked in floor space it more than made up for in height, with a lofty, lintelled roof towering four metres overhead.

Recesses and inaccessible cells

Built into the new side walls were four cupboard-like recesses, arranged irregularly and at different heights. Two were two-storeyed (A-B and C-D) and three contained human remains – a skull and other bones in C; a “burial deposit” in the E and a skull and bones in F. [2]

Beyond the double-skinned western wall it seemed the base of the original end compartment had first been built up with masonry, creating another recess with a base 50cm higher than the “second step” outside.

The excavation team pondered whether the added stonework represented a false bottom and that another recess or cell might lie beneath but the condition of the chamber’s western end meant further investigation was impossible [2]. As such the situation remains unclear.

What is clear is that the completed end recess was subsequently sealed off by the outer skin of the western wall.

Here the excavators encountered curious feature – a “torn gap which had been left in the transverse walling” through which it was possible to see into the blocked end recess.

Again, the report details are brief but given the masonry around it was still in place and the “ragged breach or opening” spanned the full 80cm width of the west wall [2], this small “window” must surely have been a deliberate feature.

That said, it does not have an upper lintel and is not shown in the excavation plans.

Today, the most we can say about the western end’s alterations is that the Neolithic builders, for whatever reason, modified the stalled chamber’s end cell to create a raised recess that was both empty and unreachable.

Pondering the monumental back slabs found in the end compartments of Orkney-Cromarty stalled cairns, Professor Colin Richards proposed that they lay at the end of a series of “doorways” formed by the divisional orthostats and represented final doors “always closed to humanity”. [7]

This notion certainly brings to mind Lairo’s remodelled end recess. Lying at the end of a narrow, passage-like chamber, it could be seen but not entered. By mortals at least!

And that brings us back to the human remains.

The bone assemblage

While not uncommon elsewhere in Orkney, the paucity of human bone in the Lairo chamber is slightly at odds with some of Rousay’s other excavated cairns. From the brief excavation summary, all we can say is that there were three burials – or two if we only include the individual skulls. But, as we’ll see, at least one of these may have been a later, secondary deposition.

It could be argued that the Knowe of Lairo’s focus was on skulls, as encountered at the nearby  Knowe of Yarso, where they had been arranged along the base of inner walls. But the fact there were other remains in the recesses suggests something akin to the piles of disarticulated bone, topped by a skull, found at Midhowe. Unfortunately, the excavation summary does not provide details of the composition, or condition, of the Lairo “burial deposit” or the “other bones”. [2]

What we can say with some certainty is that, despite its gallery-like appearance, the human remains were not on display. The skull and bones in recess C were hidden when the cell was sealed with masonry after their deposition.

The “burial deposit” in recess E was presumably placed (or already in place?) before the secondary wall was built across the chamber’s western end. Why? Because its insertion almost completely blocked the recess, leaving only a gap of about 13cm at the top. [2]

Even with the aid of fire to push back the darkness, the skull and bone deposited in recess F could not have been seen from the chamber floor simply because that recess was over two metres above ground level!

That said, the excavators proposed the stepped nature of the western wall was specifically to provide access to this lofty “ambry”. [2]

3d model of the Knowe of Lairo’s interior. As you can see there’s not much room to maneouvre! (📷 Hugo Anderson-Whymark)

A persistent narrative with chambered “tombs” is that they were the repositories for the dead of entire groups or communities. In Orkney, where a chamber has been found to contain remains, the quantities involved are too small for this to be the case.

This is even more apparent at the Knowe of Lairo with its three deposits. In the remodelled phase at least, Lairo was clearly not the burial place of large numbers of people – unless it was cleared out regularly or prior to the chamber going out of use.

So, what was going on? What was the reason for the modifications? Those are the million-dollar questions. And with the limited nature of the excavation, not to mention its report, it is unlikely we will ever know with any degree of certainty.

Inspired by the Maeshowe style?

According to Davidson and Henshall, the only “tentative explanation” for the alterations was that they were an attempt to convert Lairo’s original stalled structure to a Maeshowe-type chambered cairn. [4]

Although this interpretation persists today, it rings of yet another attempt to crowbar an atypical structure into the rigid typology surrounding chambered cairns.

Lairo’s remodelled plan has no similarities to Orkney’s known Maeshowe-type cairns. It had no side cells, for example, although it could be argued the recesses were an attempt to represent these. On top of that, the other Maeshowe-type cairns are relatively spacious inside.

Instead, it seems this theory was based solely on the chamber’s height, which is on par to that recorded at Quoyness, Sanday.

With long horned cairns, it is now generally accepted that most were later embellishments of existing structures – usually one or more stalled chambers incorporated into a larger, more imposing and visually striking construction.

This not only brought an earlier building, and all it represented, back into use but monumentalised it – physically and perhaps symbolically.

Photographs from the 1936 excavation. Click for a larger version.

It has been proposed that the late Neolithic in Orkney was a volatile time, “competitive, fluid and unstable” [8] with “rivalries played out” as people focused on “monuments relating to deities, ancestors and origins that stretched well beyond the [islands’] shores…” [9]

Against this backdrop of intense competition, new monuments were built, and, towards the middle of the third millennium BC, earlier passage graves “re-appropriated and transformed” into massive long cairns. [8]

Focus had shifted from the interiors, which were often sealed up and “perhaps relegated to myth” [10], to superficial exteriors. This makes sense when applied to the Knowe of Lairo, its narrow, cramped chamber – which could accommodate two or three people at most –perhaps no longer the important element but instead the eastern forecourt.

That said, and unlike Rousay’s excavated stalled cairns, there was no evidence that Lairo’s entrance had been blocked, implying access to the chamber was still required. It is tempting to propose that a polished stone axe and round-bottomed pottery sherds at the end of the entrance passage, and between the two portal stones, was perhaps some form of closing deposit, but the excavation summary provides no details of the context (or contexts) in which they were found. [2]

Based on existing evidence, we cannot say whether remains were going in and out of the chamber during its second phase. The blocking of recess C was added after the insertion of the secondary walls, and not tied into them, because the excavators were able to remove it to gain access.

Photographs from the 1936 excavation. Click for a larger version.

A question of dates

Without complete excavation, it is impossible to know for sure but the Knowe of Lairo’s interior remodelling may relate to its transformation into a horned cairn – the towering chamber required to create and augment the high eastern end. This, however, would suggest a much later date for the alterations, which in turn leads to questions as to whether, and contrary to the excavators’ interpretation, the original stalled chamber was completed and used.

Perhaps suggestive that this was the case is the radiocarbon date from one of the skulls recovered during the 1936 dig. It dated to 3360-3100BC (narrowed down to 3360-3100BC by Bayesian statistical analysis [11]) placing the skull firmly in the same timeframe as human remains from Midhowe and the nearby Knowes of Rowiegar and Yarso stalled cairns [12]. The skull’s date also fits with the round-bottomed early pottery sherds found at the inner entrance.

Although there is no doubt the skull was placed after the internal modifications, it cannot date the remodelling. As always with chambered cairns we must careful when it comes to human remains, particularly a single skull, because it could have been relocated from another cairn or curated before deposition.

If, as has been suggested, the time of the horned cairns was around 2700-2600BC [8], and the modification of Lairo was part of that development, then the skull was at least 400 years old when deposited! Was it, and perhaps the other remains, linked to the original chamber’s use and redeposited after the modifications? Did they came from another structure entirely. Or, as the excavators believe, was the remodelling of the knowe’s interior much, much earlier?

One of the major problems surrounding Lairo is the fact that although the number of suspected horned cairns in Orkney has grown considerably over the years [3], only two have been excavated in modern times. Because of this they also remain something of a Neolithic enigma…

Notes

• [1] Simply meaning Lairo’s mound, Lairo being the name of the farm, which has been suggested derives from the Old Norse hlidar-haugr, ‘slope mound’. The hlidar element survives in local pronunciation as lee and lie and makes sense when we look at the earliest spellings of the name: Liaro (1627) and Lyaro (1665). Marwick, 1952. Orkney Farm Names.
• [2] Grant, W.G. and Wilson, D. (1943) The Knowe of Lairo, Rousay, Orkney. In Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Volume 77, 1942-3.
• [3] In 1989, Davidson and Henshall identified five long cairns in Orkney, adding that two others — Hacksness, Shapinsay (badly damaged) and Korkquoy, Westray (destroyed) — could not be confirmed. In their comprehensive catalogue of Orcadian chambered cairns, at least two were not recognised as long cairns, Vestrafiold, Sandwick, and Roseness, Holm.
  
  Since then, excavations at Hurnip’s Point, Deerness, and Vestrafiold have added to the confirmed number, with other suspects at the Bay of Stove, Sanday; Outer Holm, Stromness; Outertown, Stromness; and Roseness, Holm.
• [4] Henshall, A. (1985) The Chambered Cairns. In Renfrew, C. (ed) The Prehistory of Orkney. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• [5] Anderson, J. (1866–8) On the horned cairns of Caithness: their structural arrangement, contents of chambers &c. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 7: 480–512.
• [6] Corcoran, J.X.W.P. (1966) Excavation of three chambered cairns at Loch Calder, Caithness. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries Scotland 98, 1–75.
• [7] Richards, C. (1993) An Archaeological Study of Neolithic Orkney: Architecture, Order and Social Order.
• [8] Richards, C., Downes, J., Gee, C. and Carter, S. (2016) Materialising Neolithic House Societies in Orkney. In Richards, C. and Jones, R. (eds) The Development of Neolithic House Societies in Orkney: Investigations in the Bay of Firth, Mainland, Orkney (1994–2014). Oxford: Windgather Press, 224-253.
• [9] Bayliss, A., Marshall, P., Richards, C. and Whittle, A. (2017) Islands of history: the Late Neolithic timescape of Orkney. Antiquity, 91(359), 1171–1188.
• [10] Richards, C. (1993) An Archaeological Study of Neolithic Orkney: Architecture, Order and Social Order.
• [11] Hutchison, M., Curtis, N. and Kidd, R. (2015) The Knowe of Rowiegar, Rousay, Orkney: description and dating of the human remains and context relative to neighbouring cairns. In Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Volume 145.
• [12] Curtis, N. and Hutchinson, M. (2013) Radiocarbon dates for human remains from chambered cairns along the south and south-west coast of the island of Rousay, Orkney. Discovery and Excavation in Scotland 14, 212–13.