A clear stream runs through the small glen where I walk, singing a bright note on a chilly day. Afternoon sunshine has lured me out after a showery morning that dusted snow across nearby Conival and Ben More Assynt. Those mountains are a focal point for hillwalkers in this region, and few hikers venture over to the insignificant valley where I stroll. If they did, they might overlook the lumps swelling out of the earth next to the stream, just more bumps in a bumpy land. Yet, created by human hands thousands of years ago, these bronze age “burnt mounds” are more than just piles of dirt.
The mounds appear as pairs of crescent-shaped humps spaced a few feet apart, their earthy surface hiding a foundation of cracked stones. Millennia ago, people heated those rocks, tossed them in a stone-lined pit to warm the water it contained. The temperature change would have shattered the rocks, which were later thrown off to the edges, where they piled up in oblong heaps on either side of the trough.
Burnt mounds are spread across Britain and Ireland, dating from 2500BC to 700BC. They’re usually found next to a water source, and from where I stand I can see three pairs situated along this stream.
These structures were once part of people’s lives. A trough perhaps two metres wide full of heated water: why? A prehistoric sauna? Ceremonial cleansing? Cooking? For making beer, one theory goes. We can’t know.
Low rays play across the valley, the burnt mounds dark against the golden-brown surrounds. That colour difference is not a matter of shadow and light, but rather the mounds’ substrate shaping their overlying vegetation. Through the millennia, the rock piles acquired a coating of moss, stunted heather and spaced clumps of sedge and grass, contrasting with the grassier surrounds of less stony ground. At this time of year, their evergreen tint makes it easy to locate the mounds, but as spring progresses they will eventually fade into the lushness of summer.
Daylight dims and so I leave the quiet of this hidden swale, imagining bronze-age people slipping into the warmth of their hot tubs as evening approached, escaping the growing nip in the air.
