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Remains of a short cist, discovered in August 1967 by a farm worker extracting gravel. The cist was excavated soon after its discovery by J. C. Greig. The long axis of the cist was orientated northeast-southwest. The capstone and sides were of sandstone. The base of the cist consisted of a carefully laid floor of beach pebbles and angular stones on which lay the skeleton of an adult male, aged 35-45, lying on its left side, pointing northeast and facing southeast. The skeleton had not been placed centrally in the cist, rather it lay in the eastern half. Behind the skeleton, between the shoulders and the pelvis, a complete beaker (Final Northern (N4) or Step 4 type) lay on its side. Staining inside the pot indicated that it had originally stood upright and had toppled over after burial. This beaker is a rather squat pot with a globular body and a very short, sharply everted neck. It is 168 mm tall, 152 mm in diameter at the belly and 148 mm in diameter at the rather squared-off rim. It is decorated in five zones of very unequal size. The most striking aspect of the decoration are the large triangles filled with criss-cross and ladder motifs on the upper and lower bellies of the pot. As a final act of ritual, once the capstone had been emplaced, five rim sherds and nine small body sherds of another beaker were laid on its upper surface before the remaining backfill was heaped up. It should be noted that the fractures on these sherds are fresh and unabraded, indicating that they are unlikely to represent accidental inclusion of residual material. The decorative scheme on the neck seems to have consisted of tall chevrons flanked by vertical filling. All the decoration has been executed with a comb with very fine, square teeth. This pot cannot be classified precisely, although the tall triangles on the neck suggest that it should be placed late in the sequence of Scottish beakers. At the end of the excavation the sides of the cist were collapsed in, the base and the sides of the excavation pit were left intact and the trench back-filled.
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Historic Environment Records (HER)