Culmaily Hut Circle

This hut circle stands on the hillside to the north of Culmaily farm and to the west of Golspie.

The hut circle is at bottom left of this picture, covered in dead bracken with a couple of small gorse bushes growing out of its walls.

The Bronze Age farmers who built and lived in it, like many of their contemporaries, enjoyed a good view. This one faces almost due south, looking across the post-Clearance fields to Loch Fleet.

It's a substantial building - the word 'hut' does not do it justice - measuring over 9m internal diameter with walls up to 1.5m thick.

This picture looks across the 'hut' from the rocks and earth of the western wall in the foreground to the rocks which line the interior of the far side.....

....seen in close-up here. These rocks are flat-faced and stood on end to give the wall an interior lining.

The conical roof was formed of poles which were supported on the wall to keep their ends relatively dry. A circle of interior posts also supported the roof and enabled an upper floor to be built, which is where the family may have slept, the 'ground floor' being partly for the animals and partly for living and storage.

If the bracken and shrubs were cleared it would be an impressive feature, the more so when it is remembered that it may be as much as 3,000 years old.

The hut is surrounded by narrow, elongated, terraced fields, the loose rocks and stones from which were piled into low walls and 'clearance cairns'. Conditions at the time must have been much better than today: the soil is waterlogged and miserably thin.