There is a path over the hill behind a great many Scottish villages that goes nowhere useful. It does not connect two settlements by the shortest route. It ignores the good ground and takes the high line. It is often boggy, often steep, and it usually ends at a burial ground that is no longer used by the community that built the path. That is a coffin road, and every stone cairn beside it was built by somebody carrying a body.

What they are

Before the eighteenth century, a great many Highland and Island communities had no consecrated burial ground of their own. The dead had to be carried, sometimes for ten or fifteen miles, over hill ground, to the nearest church or the ancestral ground of the clan.

The Gaelic terms include rathad nam marbh (RAH-ut nam MARV), the road of the dead, and the paths are variously called coffin roads, corpse roads, bier roads, kirk ways and lykeways across Britain.

The coffin was carried on a bier by relays of men. It was heavy, the ground was bad, and the party stopped regularly.

And at every stopping place, each bearer laid a stone.

That is the whole of it. Over generations, on a route used by a township for two or three hundred years, those stones accumulate into cairns. Some of them are substantial. Some have a flat slab set into them, a resting stone, on which the bier was set down so it did not touch the ground.

You can still walk these routes. The cairns are still there. Nobody maintains them and nobody needs to.

Why the stones

Several reasons operate at once, and they are not in competition.

  • The practical one. The stone marks the place. Over time the cairns become the route, which matters enormously in hill fog. A coffin road in bad weather is navigable by cairn.
  • The commemorative one. Each stone is a person who carried. The cairn is a physical count of everyone who ever helped bring someone over that hill.
  • The apotropaic one. The bier must not touch the ground. This is consistent across the tradition and it belongs to the same body of thinking as everything else on this site about thresholds: the body in transit is between states, and contact with the earth before the proper moment would settle it in the wrong place.
  • The one about not coming back. There is a widespread and slightly darker strand holding that the dead should be carried by a route other than the ordinary road, so that they do not learn the way home. Some accounts have the party returning by a different path, or crossing running water on the way back.

That last one puts coffin roads in exactly the same category as the fords in the saining article. Water and route are both used to make the passage one-way.

Where to find them

They are unmarked, unromantic and everywhere.

  • The Coffin Road on Harris, from Northton over to Luskentyre, is the best known and the most walked. The east side of Harris is rock with no soil deep enough to bury in, so the dead were carried across the spine of the island to the machair on the west.
  • Kilmartin Glen, Argyll, where a network of old routes converges on one of the densest concentrations of prehistoric monuments in Scotland.
  • Glen Lyon, Perthshire, which also holds the Cailleach's shrine.
  • Skye, Mull, Wester Ross, Sutherland and most of the western seaboard. If a community's burial ground is not in the community, there is a coffin road.
  • Canmore, Historic Environment Scotland's national record, is searchable by site and holds records for many of them, along with grid references. It is the place to start if you want to find the one nearest you.

The routes also survive as rights of way, which is a lovely piece of continuity: a legal path exists today because people carried their dead along it for three centuries.

Walking one

I do this and I recommend it, and there are a few things I would say about how.

  • Treat it as a route, not a destination. The point is the walk. Start where the community started and end at the burial ground, in that direction, not the reverse.
  • Add a stone. This is the living part of the tradition and it is still done. Pick it up on the path, carry it a while, and put it on the cairn. Do not bring a stone from elsewhere and do not take one from a wall or a dyke.
  • Do not take a stone off a cairn. Ever. For any reason.
  • Leave nothing else. No coins, no ribbons, no crystals, no offerings. This is the same request Forestry and Land Scotland make of the clootie wells and the same one that applies at Tigh nam Bodach. A cairn is made of stones because stones are what the land is made of.
  • Carry something. If you are walking a coffin road for somebody, carry something of theirs, or something heavy, and notice the weight. That is a considerable part of what the route is.
  • Go properly equipped. These are hill routes across genuinely rough ground, often boggy, often with no phone signal. Boots, map, compass, weather forecast, and tell somebody where you are going. People died on these paths carrying coffins and the ground has not improved.

The connection worth making

This site has now traced the same shape through the household and through the landscape.

Inside the house, protection is boundary work: the threshold, the hearth, the sill, the chimney. Iron at the door, salt at the sill, a mark where nobody looks.

Outside it, the death practices are route work: the dead and living ford where the saining water is drawn, the coffin road that must not be the ordinary road, the return by a different path, the crossing of running water, the cairn at each resting place.

Both are about managing a passage that must go one way and stay gone.

I do not think that is a coincidence. I think it is one idea, applied at two scales, by people who understood their houses and their hills as the same kind of thing.

A last note

These are working monuments made by ordinary people at the hardest moment of their lives, and almost nothing has been written about them.

If you walk one, and you find a cairn that is not on the Canmore record, report it. That is a genuinely useful thing to do and it costs an email.

Sources

  • Canmore — Historic Environment Scotland's national record. Searchable for coffin roads, cairns and burial grounds by parish, with grid references and photographs. The place to start.
  • Bennett, M. (1992). Scottish Customs from the Cradle to the Grave. Polygon. The essential book on Scottish death practice, built on field recordings, and the best source on the carrying of the coffin and the resting cairns.
  • Campbell, J. G. (1900, 1902). Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Via Internet Archive.
  • Black, R. (ed.) (2005). The Gaelic Otherworld. Birlinn.
  • Carmichael, A. (1900). Carmina Gadelica. Full text, for the death and soul-leading material. See the standing caveat in How to Read an Esoteric Claim.
  • Banks, M. M. (1937–1941). British Calendar Customs: Scotland. Folklore Society.
  • Scotways — the Scottish Rights of Way and Access Society, which holds records of many old routes including coffin roads.
  • Scottish Outdoor Access Code — on responsible access, and on leaving things where they are.
  • Walkhighlands — practical route descriptions for the Harris Coffin Road and others.

Related: [The Last Threshold: Death and the Scottish Wake]; [Saining]; [The Pictish Stones]; [Holy Wells and Clootie Trees]; [The Cailleach]