About the model
Balnuaran of Clava, on a gravel terrace above the River Nairn east of Inverness, is the type-site of the Clava cairns: a row of three large cairns running north-east to south-west, a passage grave at each end and a ring cairn in the middle, each with a kerb of boulders, a low rubble platform and a ring of standing stones, with a small kerb cairn to the west. The passages of the two passage graves are in line, pointing south-west to the midwinter sunset; the kerbstones and the standing stones are graded in height, tallest to the south-west, and stones were chosen for colour (red sandstone to the south-west, paler stones to the north-east). The central ring cairn has an open interior with no entrance and three stone 'rays' joining its kerb to three of the standing stones. Bradley's excavations of 1994-97 showed each monument (cairn, kerb, platform and circle) was built in one operation around 2000 BC (Early Bronze Age); the small kerb cairn and other small cairns were added about 1000 years later, when the south-west cairn was reused, and a cremation was placed by the ring cairn in the 1st millennium AD. The chambers, probably once corbelled, are now open to the sky. Fallen stones were re-erected and the cairns 'restored' by the owner in 1870-81 (a road was moved, clipping the south-west cairn, and two of its stones were moved); after Guardianship in 1925 Kathleen Kennedy cleared and tidied the cairns in 1930-31, heaping cairn material higher and making the kerbs more prominent. Quotes are exact text of the cited pages (whitespace normalised; Fraser 1884 and Barclay 1990 as their OCR reads); feet are converted at 0.3048 m and marked derived.