Wag of Forse

The Wag of Forse is an Iron Age site in Caithness, Highland, near the A99 coast road 18 km south-west of Wick. It covers about fifty by eighty metres and has been partly excavated in three seasons: 1939, 1948 and 1964–65. James Curle led the first two digs, while A. Young and Euan MacKie worked later. The remains include standing stones, cists, a burnt mound and a series of low, flat-topped rectangular mounds called Wags. Archaeologists divide the site into six building phases from the first century BC to the end of the first millennium AD. Two early pits produced sherds of a cooking pot, slag and paving, plus an oval structure with an irregular pair of rooms. The Wags themselves are long, flat-topped mounds found only in Caithness and Sutherland; one has a line of standing stones down its centre. A surrounding field system of stone-walled plots was used throughout the same period. Visitors walk among grassy mounds and low stone walls that mark the oval enclosure. The remains of drystone buildings with doorways, chambers, stairs and tunnels show a transitional form between brochs and duns. The nearest parallels are the brochs at Keiss, a few kilometres away. The whole complex is protected as a scheduled monument.