Bone caves

The Bone Caves - Creag nan Uamh, are of critical importance for building up a picture of life between major glaciations in NW Scotland. Apart from a few peaks, during the Late Devensian (about 25 thousand years ago) the whole of NW Scotland was covered by ice. The glaciers stripped away the sedimentary and fossil record of earlier Quaternary environments. But the caves in Assynt provide a record further back, as well as preserving bones and remains from the end of the late major glaciation. These include human remains showing that man had populated NW Scotland very soon after the last ice sheets had melted, some ten thousand years ago.

The Bones Caves are actually a series of chambers and passages which have prominent entrances. They are developed within the limestones and dolomites of the Durness carbonates that crop out in the Inchnadamph area of Assynt. These entraces are part of a much larger system of passages, the biggest in northern Scotland, that continue at leat a kilometre south of the Uamh valley. Other, separate caves are found in the area, notably in the Traligill valley on the approach to Ben More. The Creag nan Uamh caves were excavated first by Peach and Horne in 1889 who made numerous finds of bones. The next main excavations by Callender and others followed in 1926. The nature of these finds gave rise not only to the general name of the site but also the designation of a Reindeer Cave and a Badger Cave (together with the main Bone Cave upon which Peach and Horne concentrated).

The whole cave system is at least 150 thousand years old. Flowstone from cave walls have yielded a bunch of radiometric ages of at least this age, indicating not only that the passages were cut but then but also that ice free conditions with flowing ground water existed at the time. The cave deposits themselves are rather harder to unravel. Part of the problem lies in the nature of the early excavations that stripped out almost all the material from the cave entrances, the most likely sites for the preservation of remains of large animals.

The youngest sediments on the floor of the Reindeer and Badger caves (so-called "Cave earth") was found to contain a range of animal remains. Apart from human bones, the site contains material from reindeer, Arctic fox, lynx, brown bear, wolf and a host of rodents. A reindeer antler yielded a radiocarbon age of just over ten thousand years old, indicating that these mammals were alive during the Loch Lomond glacial stage. In Assynt there were small glaciers in the north-facing corries and a larger valley glacier just over the hill from the caves in upper Glen Oykell. However, deeper into the cave stratigraphy, reindeer antler fragments in older strata have yielded ages of about 24 thousand years old. These pre-date the most recent (Late Devensian) glacial maximum.

Location:

The caves are situated about 2 km up the Uamh valley from the A837. Nowadays there is an interpretative panel at the car park erected by SNH which gives some background to the site.

Grid Reference: NC 268170; OS 1:25, 000 Explorer map sheet 442 (Assynt and Lochinver).

Warning: entering caves without appropriate equipment and experience can be extremely hazardous.

Find out more.

Material from the 1920s excavations are kept by the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. The site is described in the Quaternary of Scotland, GCR series no 6. (edited by J. Gordon & D. Sutherland), published in 1993 by Chapman & Hall, London.

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