No. 12. Cairn at Garrywhin, with Cist and diverging rows of standing stones.

Scaleo

MEM. ANTHR. Soc. LOND. VOL. II. To face page 195.

while the green cairns, or Picts' houses (popularly so called), have been invariably used as habitations,-though sometimes also found to have been made places of sepulture, the grey, or Picts' cairns, have invariably been used as places of sepulture; and if ever they were used as habitations at all, they present no such abundant and unequivocal evidences of occupation by the living as the green cairns do.

PICT'S HOUSE AT KETTLEBURN, AND ITS CONTENTS.

Although a very large number of Picts' houses have been demolished in the course of modern agricultural improvements, only one or two have been at all investigated in Caithness. The only one systematically explored during its removal was that of Kettleburn, near Wick, described by the late Mr. A. H. Rhind (1853). Mr. Rhind appeared to have been most anxious to make out the structural plan of the building, but could not determine whether it had been a borg or a simple beehive-house. One of its chambers contained a well, with a good stair leading down to it. Although the superposed structure has long been removed, and its site ploughed over, this ancient well still supplies the cottagers who live close by, in dwellings constructed from the material quarried out of the original building. Underneath, it had a drain to dry the foundation; and Mr. John Cleghorn, who watched the excavations with attention, states, that the construction of the conduit showed a better appreciation of the suitability of the constructive means at their disposal to the end in view, on the part of these ancient drain makers, than is common at the present day. The farmer who makes stone drains now-a-days, shapes the conduit like an inverted V; but the builders of this ancient dwelling made theirs like a V with the small end downwards, and had thus a drain that would never silt up.

The floors and passages were covered with ashes and refuse of food, and a considerable shell-heap was accumulated about the building. The shell-heap contained numerous fragments of pottery, and broken and splintered bones of the Bos longifrons, the horse, deer, sheep, goat, swine, dog, seal, whale, and some small fishes, like the haddock or young cod. Mr. Rhind