Culduthel

A short Bronze-Age stone casket stands beside the farm at Culduthel, five kilometres south of Inverness where the River Ness curves. A farmer turned the soil in 1924 and uncovered the casket half a metre below the surface. The site lies just north of the B8082 road, on low ground that once held scattered Bronze-Age burials. Inside the casket archaeologists found a tightly flexed female skeleton, a necklace or belt of jet beads including a V-shaped toggle, a tiny flake of volcanic glass, a broken bronze awl and lumps of charcoal. The bones and artefacts were taken to the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland and to the Anatomy Museum at the University of Aberdeen for study and safe keeping. A few hundred metres south of the road, beside the same field, lies the Clava Cairn of Culduthel. The two monuments together show how Bronze-Age people used the gentle valley for burial and remembrance long before the modern road was built.