Upper Tote

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A Skye crofter who destroyed a Bronze Age cairn has been fined £18,000. More details in the comments on our page.. A grass-covered, circular mound of stone and earth some 36ft in diameter and 9ft in height, which is probably a burial cairn. The cairn was first excavated by archaeologists in 1920, revealing the remains of a stone cist at its base, as well as a later Viking burial chamber near the top. No bones were found in the rudimentary stone cist but a large number of flints as well as fragments of charcoal were discovered, with suggestions these could have mesolithic origins. Human remains - the end of a femur and fragments of charred bone - from a Viking cremation, interred thousands of years after the original cairn was built, were also revealed at Upper Tote.