Langass

Barpa Langass is the largest and best preserved of the Neolithic chambered burial cairns on North Uist. According to Erskine Beveridge its massive size suggests that it was the burial place of some great chief and was intended as both a tomb and a monument. Its prominent outline and siting, midway up Ben Langass, is remarkable for the labour which must have been involved in carrying and placing so many large stones over a great distance in order to form its pyramid shape. Beveridge found remnants of burnt burials and fragments of Bronze Age urn pottery within the first chamber and he suggested that two further chambers may well lie beyond the entrance to the east. It is now too dangerous to enter because of the collapsed stonework. Pobull Fhinn is the most conspicuous Megalithic stone circle on North Uist and lies on a plateau overlooking the sea an easy walk away from Barpa Langass. It is interesting to speculate on the type of social relationships that might have existed between the two sites. The stones of Pobull Fhinn are shaped in an oval rather than a circle, their east-west axis being slightly longer than that to the north-south. The purposes of such circles are still open to considerable debate - were they placed to plot the celestial movements of the sun, the seasonal cycles or those of the dark, the moon and the stars? What community celebrations or rituals might these huge stones have been hewn and dragged so high up to denote? Certainly they represent considerable effort and confidence on the part of the early Neolithic farming communities who erected them.