The excavation of a cairn at Pitcairn, Glenrothes, Fife

Abstract

A boulder strewn, overgrown enclosure, marked on early editions of the OS 1 : 10,560 map as a plantation, and situated on high ground to the E of Pitcairn House near Glenrothes in Fife (NGR NO 2732 0266) was tentatively identified as the site of a cairn reported to have been opened about 1770 (Statistical Account vi, 1793, 52; New Statistical Account ix, 1845, 116). The site was to be destroyed by the Glenrothes Development Corporation in the course of the construction of a housing estate and, as all the other small mounds in the area which might have been the remains of the cairn had been definitely identified as 19th-century mineshafts, the enclosure was excavated by the Central Excavation Unit of the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments in the spring of 1977.