Thursday, July 20, 2006
SAND OF BEEMAN
Taking the farmtrack from the road continue until the left-hand wall near the coast, then instead of turning left for the Taing of Beeman carry on down to the shore. I could easily term this Taing of Beeman East, but cannot prove a relationship to that Bronze Age settlement. But the clearer features are along the short stretch of sandy beach between that taing [low-lying strata of rocky shore] and the one coming from the Hall of Tankerness. Only on my last visit did I observe the seam of homogenous(? )black earth that runs about a foot deep in the low cliff for quite a few meters (HY529091). Though it looks too deep for man's remains it does seem strange that the triangle of land behind lays outside the present fields still. Perhaps it shows where there was once another lochan - the settlements of Tankerness Loch and Beeman are similarly placed. A meter (say) below the present ground surface and just past the dark earth's right-hand end by a few feet is a passage ined with thickish slabs, rather large for how I remember the Barnhouse culvert and surely too small for a souterrain but nowhere abouthands the modern drains. Moving further along there is a place where a few stones on edge are visible at the cliff edge in a piece under a foot wide, the tops level with the present ground surface. At this point the cliff goes back slightly. And directly behind the former stones is an orthostatic wall, one course high as far as one can tell. There is a thicker slab across the wall at the back that looks to be another part. Certainly this is not the remains of a drystane wall, though I cannot tell which part of what structure I am unsure - a cell or a chamber is my guess. There is nothing like that wall beyond here but at intervals in the clifftop are several more sets of upright stones in the cliff face that indicate more lay still hidden. It all has the feel of something long lost. Perhaps it is a part of the Taing of Beeman settlement much reduced by being lower lying. On the other hand there is a short gully near the latter that may have been a demarcation before erosion set in.
Taking the farmtrack from the road continue until the left-hand wall near the coast, then instead of turning left for the Taing of Beeman carry on down to the shore. I could easily term this Taing of Beeman East, but cannot prove a relationship to that Bronze Age settlement. But the clearer features are along the short stretch of sandy beach between that taing [low-lying strata of rocky shore] and the one coming from the Hall of Tankerness. Only on my last visit did I observe the seam of homogenous(? )black earth that runs about a foot deep in the low cliff for quite a few meters (HY529091). Though it looks too deep for man's remains it does seem strange that the triangle of land behind lays outside the present fields still. Perhaps it shows where there was once another lochan - the settlements of Tankerness Loch and Beeman are similarly placed. A meter (say) below the present ground surface and just past the dark earth's right-hand end by a few feet is a passage ined with thickish slabs, rather large for how I remember the Barnhouse culvert and surely too small for a souterrain but nowhere abouthands the modern drains. Moving further along there is a place where a few stones on edge are visible at the cliff edge in a piece under a foot wide, the tops level with the present ground surface. At this point the cliff goes back slightly. And directly behind the former stones is an orthostatic wall, one course high as far as one can tell. There is a thicker slab across the wall at the back that looks to be another part. Certainly this is not the remains of a drystane wall, though I cannot tell which part of what structure I am unsure - a cell or a chamber is my guess. There is nothing like that wall beyond here but at intervals in the clifftop are several more sets of upright stones in the cliff face that indicate more lay still hidden. It all has the feel of something long lost. Perhaps it is a part of the Taing of Beeman settlement much reduced by being lower lying. On the other hand there is a short gully near the latter that may have been a demarcation before erosion set in.
