Unival

Unival is a small, roughly-built square passage grave that lies on an elevated plateau on the hill of the same name. As Erskine Beveridge noted, it carries the Gaelic name ‘Leacach an Tigh Chloiche’ or ‘place of slabs of the stone house’. Excavated by Sir Lindsay Scott during the 1930s, it was found to house a small slab-built cist about 2ft high which contained the skeleton of a young woman, together with the rib-bones of a younger person who may have been buried earlier. Ian Armit noted that it appeared that burning charcoal had been tipped onto the skeleton a long time after its burial, suggesting visits to the tomb for ritual purposes other than burial. Amongst the numerous finds of local pottery discovered by Scott, the rarest was an almost complete Grooved Ware bowl and fragments of a beaker. These were common to later Neolithic finds across the mainland, suggesting the tomb continued to be used for burials well into the Bronze Age.