South Seatter Mound 220m NNE of, Yesnaby Sandwick, Scotland

Text courtesy of Historic Environment Scotland. © Crown Copyright, reprinted under the Open Government License.

The monument is of national importance because of its potential to make a significant addition to our understanding of funerary and burial practice in the Bronze Age. Burial mounds and earthen barrows form an important and relatively widespread element of Orkney's Bronze Age landscape, and provide evidence for the major social and economic changes which took place during this period. Although disturbed in antiquity, the mound at South Seatter retains its field characteristics to a marked degree and is a significant example of its type. It is of larger than average size and survives relatively intact. At least one cist has been recorded within the mound and a possible further cist lies 5m to the SE. Excavation of similar sites elsewhere in Orkney also demonstrates that this mound has the potential to contain one or more burials and associated features, such as the remains of funeral pyres or mortuary structures. Orkney's barrows are unusual in Scotland, and important within a British context, as the majority are earthen mounds as opposed to stone-built cairns. The significance of the South Seatter mound is enhanced by its association with a wider landscape of Bronze Age burial monuments located between the Loch of Skaill and the west coast of Orkney Mainland in the parish of Sandwick, which has one of the most important concentrations of such monuments in Orkney. Our understanding of the dating, form, function and distribution of Bronze Age barrows would be diminished if this monument was to be lost or damaged.