Grey Cairns of Camster

The Grey Cairns of Camster are two of the oldest stone monuments in Scotland, a pair of Neolithic tombs first built more than 5,000 years ago on a windswept moor in the Caithness Flow Country and rebuilt in the later 1900s. The long cairn is nearly 60 metres long and 20 wide; it began as two separate round cairns, each with its own chamber, later swallowed into one long mound. Two hundred metres away the round cairn, 18 metres across and four high, has a cramped passage leading to a spacious central chamber divided into three by upright slabs under a corbelled roof. Excavations in 1865 found burnt human remains, flint tools and pottery and two skeletons sitting in the round cairn's deliberately blocked passage. Visitors can crawl into both chambers; duckboard paths cross the bog between them. Reviewers say the single-track road from the A99 is narrow with few places to turn, the walkways are slippery when wet, and the information boards are worth reading.