BILL McALLISTER: The mysteries of what went on at Druid Temple still remain today

Did Druids wander on an Inverness hillside, overseeing Bronze Age locals as they built a chambered cairn and stone circle?

The Druids left no records but Greek and Roman chroniclers – including Julius Caesar – maintain they were the priestly class of the Celtic tribes, acting as judges, seers and astronomers.

This year is the 70th anniversary of an excavation at Druid Temple, at Leys, high on Inverness’s north-west facing ridge, finding a few scraps of a cremated human bone, and evidence that rounded white quartz pebbles had been laid round the cairn’s chamber.

The passage grave, similar to the much larger Clava Cairns a few miles away, lies on what is now Druid Temple Farm. The grave has been extensively damaged by robbers over the centuries but a 22-metre circle of 10 stones, five of them still upright, remains surrounding the cairn.

Archaeologist Alexander Thom that asserted the circle’s tallest stone, nine feet six inches high, had been painstakingly positioned to align with the midwinter sunset.

Although denuded, Historic Environment Scotland says that Druid Temple “is of national importance because it represents a rare and regionally distinctive class of Early Bronze Age monuments that can help us understand burial and ritual practices in North East Scotland. It retains the field characteristics of its kind to a marked degree. The loss of, or damage to, the monument would seriously diminish the capacity to contribute to our understanding of prehistoric Scotland, as well as the landscape it sits in.”

In 1882, archaeologist David Cameron reported that a cist, or stone coffin, had been found within the circle, while he had seen another outside it.

It is seen as a good example of a Clava passage grave, a distinctive and rare type of cairn found mainly south and east of Inverness, along the Nairn and Spey valleys and on the Moray Firth foreshore.

It was antiquarians in the 1800s who named it Druid’s Temple. In 1847, the Scottish Journal of Topography reported that 20 years earlier “a very rare relic of the ancient priesthood was found at this place – an instrument of gold, supposed to be that with which the Arch-Druid cut the sacred mistletoe”. Druids revered the oak tree and mistletoe, and Druid Temple’s stones lie among several oaks.

Julius Caesar wrote: “They attend to divine worship, perform public and private sacrifices and expound matters of religion.” The Druids were the judges of any crimes and were exempt from military service. He added:”They think it an unhallowed thing to commit their lore to writing.”

The Druids were in seventh century Ireland, but had vanished from Scotland by then.

Diodorus of Sicily maintained Druids “could foretell the future by means of the flight or cries of birds, or the slaughter of sacred animals, and they have all the multitudes subservient to them.”

Emperor Claudius outlawed Druids from the Roman Empirein 60AD because of their fondness for human sacrifice. There is evidence that desperate injuries were inflicted during such rituals. But they were also the only ones who could unify Celtic tribes against Rome.

Saint Columba is said to have argued with King Brude’s Druids during his visit in 565AD when converting the king to Christianity.

The skeleton of a Pictish man killed 1400 years ago was found in a recess in a cave in Rosemarkie. Inverness

Forensic anthropologist Dame Sue Black carried out an examination in 2017 which found he had severe injuries.

He was placed in a cross-legged position with stones weighing down his limbs and one theory is ‘Rosemarkie Man’ had been sentenced and executed by Druids.

Was sacrifice carried out at Druid Temple? We shall never know.

The stones, there, however, are an enduring legacy, a window in to a much older Highlands, where ghostly leaders roamed.