Vinquoy chambered cairn, Eday
By Sigurd Towrie
The archaeology of Eday, one of Orkney’s North Isles, is the topic of our next few posts, starting today with one of a cluster of three Neolithic chambered cairns around Vinquoy Hill. [1]
Of these the Vinquoy chambered cairn is the best preserved – the others being Braeside and Huntersquoy. It sits just below the highest point of the hill, meaning it was visible on the skyline from most parts of north Eday and parts of the neighbouring islands Westray and Sanday.
The elevated location also meant that from the structure it was “possible to see all the larger islands of the Orkney group.” [2]
The Maeshowe-type structure is accessible today, the chamber and passage covered by an oval cairn with a diameter of approximately 14 metres. Because Vinquoy was built using Eday’s red sandstone, rather than easily split flagstone, it has a rougher, more irregular, appearance than other Orcadian chambered cairns.
The structure was opened by Robert Hebden, a Londoner who had bought the island of Eday at an auction in 1848. He then set about exploring the mounds on his newly acquired land, often in the company of his friend, the MP James Farrer.
George Petrie’s 19th century plan and section drawings of the Vinquoy cairn.
In 1857, they set their sights on Vinquoy but, as regular readers will know, Farrer’s work is regarded as “scandalously casual” [2]. In this case, the only details of their “excavation” is a bullet list of dimensions published in an 1863 paper by the Orcadian antiquary George Petrie. [3]
The pair broke into the structure via its roof, confirming a polygonal main chamber, measuring c.2.2 metres by two metres, with four side cells arranged in pairs at either side of the entrance.
Access to the interior was by a 3.95-metre-long passage in the southern, downhill, side. Around 90 centimetres high, the passage width varies from c.60 centimetres at the outer end to 40 centimetres inside. [2]
Outside, a stone-lined “trench”, at least 2.5 metres long, led to the entrance. [4]
The entrance to Vinquoy, from the south west, and the passageway. (📷 Dan Lee/UHI Archaeology Institute)
Vinquoy is partly subterranean, the side cells and chamber cut through rock into the hillside. The layout of the side cells – two in the west wall and two in the eastern – was later suggested to have been to minimise rock cutting ahead of construction. [2]
Despite their typically low, narrow entrances (varying from 40-70 centimetres wide and 70-90 centimetres high), inside the side cells are comparatively high, measuring between 1.5 and 1.8 metres. That said, they were still fairly cramped spaces, the roughly rectangular cells between 0.9-1.5 metres long by 0.7-1 metre wide.
The entrances to the four side cells. (📷 Dan Lee/UHI Archaeology Institute)
In 1857, the central chamber’s walls survived to about three metres in height. It was, however, roofless and filled with rubble, thought to be the result of structural collapse. Strangely, however, Petrie’s section drawing (above) showed the roof to be intact!
There were no human remains and no recorded finds – at least nothing the excavators considered significant. No finds, means we have no dates, which makes it difficult to consider how the three Vinquoy cairns related to each other, if at all.
For a long time it was confidently said that Vinquoy must been the latest because it belonged to the Maeshowe-type category, which were thought to post-date the stalled cairns. [5]
Things are not as clear cut these days, with a 2017 re-analysis of radiocarbon and luminescence dates suggesting that both styles were first built in the middle of the fourth millennium BC — “although, with current evidence, it is not possible to state which came first”. [6]
Based on its architecture it seems likely that Vinquoy was raised in the centuries around 3000BC.
Dr Hugo Anderson-Whymark’s 3d model of the Vinquoy chambered cairn, produced for the UHI Archaeology Institute’s Tombs of the Isles project.
Given its position on the hill, it was presumably built to be seen – perhaps indicating connections, or competition, with the neighbouring islands. At the same time, and assuming Vinquoy was the latest of the three chambered cairns, it perhaps symbolically stood over its predecessors.
After Peterie and Hebden’s incursion the chambered cairn was left, causing Renfrew to lament, in 1979, that: “Detailed information about the construction of the body of the cairn is lacking for Vinquoy…”
Fortunately, the cairn was revisited a few years later, when, in 1985, the passage and chamber were cleared of rubble, consolidated for public access and a new plan and section drawings made by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS).
This confirmed the reasonably accuracy of Petrie’s plan but also highlighted a few more interesting features. Cut into the floor at the northern end of the central chamber, for example, was a shallow pit, similar to that encountered by Farrer at Quoyness, Sanday, ten years later, in 1867.
Another presumably deliberate feature was a flat, rounded stone left projecting from the wall 1.5 metres from the floor outside the south-eastern cell. This is unique to Vinquoy and been interpreted as a ledge for a lamp or perhaps even votive deposits.
1985 section drawings of Vinquoy. (📷 RCAHMS)
Notes
- [1] Old Norse vin meaning pasture and kvi, enclosure.
- [2] Davidson, J. L. & Henshall, A. S. (1989). The Chambered Cairns of Orkney. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- [3] Petrie, G. (1863) The Picts-Houses in the Orkneys. In Archaeological Journal, 20:1, 32-37
- [4] This is now only one metre long at the eastern side and 30 centimetres at the west.
- [5] Renfrew, C. (1979) Investigations in Orkney. Society of Antiquaries of London.
- [6] Bayliss, A., Marshall, P., Richards, C. and Whittle, A. (2017) Islands of history: the Late Neolithic timescape of Orkney. Antiquity, 91(359), 1171-1188.
