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SummaryThe bronze horse figurine found at Birkwood, Lanarkshire, Scotland, is described, and found to compare closely with horse figurines from Hallstatt, Upper Austria. These in turn relate to figurines decorating bronze vessels in Etruria, and in Greece, especially at Olympia in late Geometric contexts. Considerations bearing on horse-trading along the Adriatic, and the dissemination of ideas about racing trophies, are discussed. The occurrence of Hallstatt exotics in Scotland is summarized, but it cannot be established that the Birkwood figurine was an ancient import as it was a stray find.

The burial chamber of the Clyde-Carlingford cairn at Beacharra, Kintyre, Argyll, was excavated in 1892 by members of the Kintyre Scientific Association. The finds, consisting of six pots, a jet slider or belt-fastener and a utilized flint flake, were placed in Campbeltown Museum. A newspaper account of the excavation appeared at the time, and with the aid of this and of information from Mr A. Gray, who had been in charge of the excavation, T. H. Bryce was able to compile the first proper report upon the excavation. This he incorporated in the first of two papers on the cairns of Arran. A sketch plan of the burial chamber, prepared in 1892 by Mr P. Mackay and now in the records of the Kintyre Antiquarian Society, is reproduced (fig. 1).The importance of the pottery from Beacharra was fully recognized by Bryce, but it was not until 1929 that it was related by J. G. Callander to Scottish Neolithic pottery as a whole. Subsequently this evidence was analysed and placed in its British and European context by V. G. Childe and S. Piggott. In 1935 Childe introduced the term Beacharra to describe the pottery from sites of the Clyde-Carlingford culture in Scotland. The term was retained and the classification developed into Beacharra A, B and C by Piggott for the Clyde-Carlingford culture as a whole. More recently, and inadvisedly in the present state of knowledge, it has been suggested that the use of the term Beacharra, at least insofar as pottery from Ireland is concerned, should be discontinued.

In 1934 Professor V. Gordon Childe wrote an important paper entitled ‘Neolithic Settlement in the West of Scotland’ (Childe, 1934), in which he sought to correlate the distribution of what are now known as Clyde chambered cairns (Scott, 1969a) with the incidence of the comparatively scarce light and well drained soils of the predominantly mountainous region in which the cairns are found. He visualized such soils as restricted to raised beach platforms, apparently having the so-called 25-foot beach in mind, and to alluvial gravels (1934, 22). He considered that such soils would have been more easily cultivated by primitive methods than heavier soils, and would indeed for that reason have been deliberately sought by incoming Neolithic settlers (1934, 23). He assumed that tombs would have been erected on slopes immediately adjacent to settlements (1934, 23), and consequently that such tombs could today be taken as indicators of settlement in the absence of other evidence.

In 1960 there appeared two important studies devoted to the Neolithic gallery graves of Ireland, hitherto considered to be part of the Clyde–Carlingford culture, as defined by Childe and Piggott. The first, by Professor de Valera, is of unique importance: it records and discusses a mass of new evidence for the Irish gallery graves, and advances an entirely fresh theory for their origin and evolution. Dr Corcoran defines and isolates the elements of the Carlingford culture, and argues for its acceptance in its own right, as distinct from the Clyde-Solway culture.De Valera's paper contains an inventory of 269 sites. No fewer than 152 are planned, of which 97 are new surveys. All the plans are to a small but uniform scale of 3/1000, which greatly simplifies comparisons. Most of the hitherto unrecorded sites are in Connaught, Sligo and Mayo, where de Valera has worked as Archaeology Officer to the Ordnance Survey.