Barpa Langais

Barpa Langais is the best preserved and largest of the Neolithic, chambered, burial cairns on North Uist. Its massive size suggests, according to Erskine Beveridge, that it was the burial place of some great chief and intended as both a tomb and a monument. Its prominent outline and siting, midway up Beinn Langais, is remarkable for the labour which must have been involved in carrying from a great distance and placing so many large stones into its pyramid shape. it is now too dangerous to enter because of the collapsed stonework. Beveridge found remnants of 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.

Pobull Fhinn is the most conspicuous Megalithic stone circle on North Uist and, lying on a plateau, is situated an easy walk away from Barpa Langais, overlooking the sea. (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? For 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.