Highland Archaeology Festival

Visitors enjoy a tour of Fearn Airfield as part of HAF

I was lucky enough to be brought up in the Highlands but the amount of archaeology even within a few miles of my parents’ house never ceases to amaze me. The Adopt a Monument teem (Cara, Phil and me) have just spent the last week up around the Moray Firth for the Highland Archaeology Festival. To be honest the acronym H.A.F. does not really fill me with excitement as it sounds a bit like a German bacon brand but the events more than make up for a boring name. The festival continues on from the end of Scottish Archaeology Month and the two week program is an extravaganza of site tours, lectures and workshops where you can try anything from Iron Age iron smelting at Applecross to a Landrover Safari of Glencoe. Cara was also running a survey of Rhicullen WWI practice Trenches near Tomich. We spent a day basking in the sunshine photographing, drawing and surveying these rather enigmatic remains.


Phil v’s EDM tripod at Rhicullen

There were also two groups to visit wile ‘up north’ the first near Strathpeffer is a group wishing to adopt the Fairy Stone. This is not a rock with fairs on but a heavy decorated cup marked stone which the Strathpeffer Initiative are making more assessable. The second adoption is a cairn complete with another cup marked stone overlooking the Cromarty firth on the Blackisle.

John (NOSAS) and Cara admiring the Cairn at Mulchaich Farm

The main interest here is defiantly the setting but the cairn is also associated close to some post medieval structures and a large ‘pond’. Rather than dwellings these are thought to form a distillery and one is known historically from the area. It was interesting for me to see what a legal site looks like as most of the sights in this part of the world, from this time, are illicit stills on a tiny scale. You may have to restrain yourself for a little wile but NOSAS (north of Scotland archaeology society) will have the site up and running with a new track soon.  

We also had one other important meeting on Saturday (apart from the HAF conference) and this was with Richard from For the Right Reasons. This is a charity working in Merkinch (a quite deprived area of Inverness). For the right reasons primarily helps thoughts who have suffered with drug and alcohol addiction (http://www.fortherightreasons.org.uk/) and we hope to get a whole cross section of the Merkinch population involved in some archaeology. Over the next few months we are going to try and update ‘Merkinch Revisited’ (a book) as well as teach residence some new skills and record some of the areas important buildings. This is a rather undervalued bit of Inverness with an interesting history, I’m not sure I agree with Merkinch Revisteds authors that it was the site of a Roman Fortress but who knows what other exiting things we shall find when we go hunting in the archive.

Just one of many exciting feature in the Merkinch