Temple Wood & the Kilmartin Cairns: The Glen’s Circles and Its Line of the Dead

The entrance to Nether Largie South chambered cairn, Kilmartin. — The roadside sign for Temple Wood, off the Kilmartin Glen road.

Overview

The heart of Kilmartin Glen is its astonishing collection of ritual and burial monuments — a stone circle where people gathered for two thousand years, and a 2km line of great burial cairns marching down the valley floor. You can walk between them in an afternoon, and even climb inside a 5,000-year-old tomb.

Temple Wood Stone Circles

Temple Wood is one of the glen’s treasures: a stone circle (in fact the remains of two) first raised around 3000 BC and used, altered and added to for more than two thousand years. Set in a little grove of trees, its ring of stones once enclosed burials and a central cairn. It’s an atmospheric, shadowy spot — a place that clearly mattered enormously to the people who built it.

Temple Wood stone circle, Kilmartin Glen. — A waymark post on the path that links the glen’s monuments.

The standing stones of Temple Wood circle, Kilmartin Glen. — Walking and cycling waymarks along the glen path.

Temple Wood stone circle within its enclosure, Kilmartin Glen. — Following the waymarked path between the monuments.

The linear cemetery — a line of the dead

Running north to south down the glen is one of the most remarkable prehistoric sights in Britain: a “linear cemetery” of five massive burial cairns set in a line nearly two kilometres long — Glebe Cairn, the three Nether Largie cairns and Ri Cruin. They were raised over some 1,500 years, between about 3,500 and 5,000 years ago, from the Neolithic into the Bronze Age. Why they line up so precisely, no one knows.

A prehistoric burial cairn in the linear cemetery, Kilmartin Glen. — One of the great burial cairns of the linear cemetery.

At the cairns in Kilmartin Glen. — The Temple Wood signpost — the circle is a short walk from the road.

Inside a 5,000-year-old tomb

The finest of them for a visitor is Nether Largie South, a Neolithic chambered cairn — and you can crawl right inside it, into the stone chamber where the dead were laid five thousand years ago. The other cairns are Bronze Age, built around great stone cists (box-like graves), some with rare carvings of axe-heads and cup-and-ring marks on their slabs. It’s an extraordinary, humbling thing to stand among.

Inside the chamber of a Nether Largie cairn, Kilmartin Glen. — One of the great Kilmartin cairns on its mound, fenced in the glen.

A stone burial cist in Kilmartin Glen. — A stone cist — a Bronze Age grave — opened to the sky.

An exposed cist in a Kilmartin Glen cairn. — The great slabs of another cist.

Nearby — the rest of Kilmartin Glen

The Kilmartin Standing Stones — the great setting of Nether Largie stones, on the same cemetery line.
Kilmartin Church & the Carved Stones — the medieval crosses and grave-slabs.
Kilmartin Glen — the whole valley, the museum and the pub.

Sources

First-hand: Kevin & family, Kilmartin Glen, 2024 (own photos).
Historic Environment Scotland & Wikipedia (Temple Wood, the linear cemetery, Nether Largie cairns & cists).