[Illustration: Fig. 259.—Ground plan of Earth-house at Cairn Conan, near Arbroath, Forfarshire. (From a Plan by Andrew Jervise.)]]
I now proceed to notice a few examples which, by their associations or their contents, disclose indications of the period of the type.
In the spring of 1859 an underground structure of this type (Fig. 259) was discovered on the farm of West Grange of Conan, near Arbroath, Forfarshire. It occupies an elevated situation on the south-east slope of an eminence commanding an extensive view. The structure differs from all those that have been described, inasmuch as in addition to the long, low, narrow, and curved gallery widening and increasing in height from the entrance inwards, which is the typical form, it presents the additional feature of a circular chamber (A) attached to the long curved chamber near the narrow end, and also communicating with the surface by a passage (C C), thus giving to the composite structure a second entrance. The main chamber or gallery is 65 feet in length along the curvature of the central line of the floor. Its entrance is 2½ feet wide, and apparently little more than 18 inches high. It widens but slightly, till at a distance of 20 feet from the entrance there is an offset formed by a large stone set at right angles to the passage, beyond which it widens more rapidly to about 8½ feet across at the farther end. The walls are built of undressed stones, but in some places they are partially cut out of the soft rock, which, for a considerable portion of its length, also forms the floor of the chamber. The circular chamber (A) is about 10 feet in diameter and 7½ feet high. The floor is partly excavated in the underlying rock. The walls are rudely built of undressed boulders. They converge almost from the floor, and the covering stone was a large boulder resting on the circular apex of the vaulted roof which impeded the plough and thus led to the discovery of the structure.
About 20 feet to the north of the underground chamber there was a circular space from which the soil had been removed. It was rudely laid with a pavement of undressed flags forming a circular floor a few inches below the level of the surrounding soil, and about 20 feet in diameter. Among the flags of this paved space there were found a portion of a plain bronze ring about 3 inches diameter, the upper stone of a quern or hand-millstone, two whorls of lead, a number of rudely-hollowed stone vessels of various sizes, and fragments of implements in iron so greatly corroded as to be unrecognisable except as fragments of implements with cutting edges.